England & Scotland Milk Supply balance sheet

AHDB Dairy calculate that during 2019/20 England was 88% self sufficient in milk with 56% of farm output going to liquid and 19% to Cheese.

Turning to Scotland during 2019/20 they calculate 18% of all Scottish on farm milk had to be transported to England for processing totalling 269 million litres. This equates to 9,440 x 28,500 litre loads a year or 26 loads every day of the year.

Around 190 million litres of this milk was trucked South by Muller with the rest by Yew Tree and First Milk.

This transport comes at a significant cost. If you take an average haulage cost of £500 from say Glasgow to say Manchester that calculates to 1.75ppl and added to the on farm collection charge will give circa total transport costs of 2.6/2.7ppl.

This can only be described as spare/surplus milk and at £500 a load is costing a tasty £4.7 million a year.