The recent protest in Britain by dairy farmers have shown that they are paid less than the cost of production by the supermarkets and that this has put them at risk of bankruptcy.
It’s not just in Britain of course, and protests were made in Brussels while Agriculture Ministers met.
They are going to give aid, but the long term problems are going to remain.
How could you reduce your costs in this industry to make it profitable for you?
The protest involved throwing hay at policemen, water cannon and tear gas. that’s on the BBC but I can’t get an embed code for that one! See it here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34171946
Other things we can pick out from this coverage?
How about Trends and Time Series Analysis for predicting future sales?
I am not sure if there are seasonal sales for milk (more in the summer because it goes off quicker?, more in the winter because we have more hot drinks?) but that might be something dairy farmers factor into their production plans. Clearly there are overall business cycle factors, perhaps when the economy is down we drink more milk as we go out less and buy fewer more expensive drinks. there is also a clear trend revealed in the coverage, we are drinking less milk. the growth we saw in China imports seems to have been tailing off – are they drinking less milk or are they producing more of their own? the fourth element of our analysis for determining sales trends is the ‘random variation’, the unpredictable. here that is Russia banning imports – a huge loss of sales. You wouldn’t have been able to predict that three years ago when you were planning the investment in your dairy.