MILK-PRODUCING farmers need to wake up and realise that how they treat their animals and how their farm looks to the general public are vital for the image of dairy products.

That was the strong message from dairy industry analyst Ian Potter, who this week warned that some anti-dairy vegan activists were 'bordering on thugs', and were hellbent on convincing as many people as possible that consuming milk and dairy products was unnecessary, unnatural, and cruel.

“These people are the equivalent of religious zealots who proclaim the virtues and health benefits of plant based milks, and vehemently hate dairy farmers and anyone who doesn’t condemn meat and dairy farming. Like all zealots they refuse to listen to any balanced arguments," said Mr Potter

"Almond, coconut, soy, cashew, rice and oat are all described as milks – the name of which I object to as misleading and deceitful, especially when vital ingredients are added during processing.

“Nevertheless, we are fighting to retain our market share and the competitors are marketing their products under the name of milk, or mylk, or m*lk and using celebrities to endorse them," he noted.

“We desperately need to promote the heap of positives real dairy products and milk provide because, if we don’t, more and more people will increasingly start to believe non-dairy alternatives are better all-round."

Mr Potter said that isolated 'cruelty cases' on farms fuelled the vegans’ publicity because their arguments rest on the conviction that dairy cows are routinely mistreated and abused, and actual proven cases result in more consumers making a move to ditch dairy on 'ill-informed and mistaken' morality grounds.

“Recently, here, Nuffield sponsored scholar Tom Levitt focussed attention on the calf culling issue in a controversial article for The Guardian, with the alarming headline 'Dairy’s dirty secret: it’s still cheaper to kill male calves than rear them'. He quotes AHDB statistics that 95,000 calves were killed on farm at birth.

“This comment won’t be popular, but we need to re-think the treatment of bull calves because headlines like this do nothing to promote sales of our valuable product," said Mr Potter. "It is almost inevitable that more retailers and processors will impose blanket bans on the culling of calves at birth."

It didn’t matter that the industry did not think there were ethical issues about killing bobby calves, or accept that the environmental cost of meat production was a growing concern – others did think that way, and were prepared to act upon it.

“Greenpeace, for example, is calling for a decrease in dairy production and consumption for a healthier planet and unless we do, they claim we are putting our health, our children’s health, and the health of our planet at risk," noted Mr Potter.

“That’s why I say some farmers need to wake up and smell the coffee and realise how they treat their animals. Some also need an intravenous drip of coffee, let alone a sniff.

“Remember, Brexit will hurt but it will come and go, in time," he added. "Anti-dairy groups and activists are unlikely to disappear into the sunset and could explode in numbers, so it requires a total industry buy-in, because if we ignore it we will simply get bitten more frequently, harder, and in more sensitive places."