I’ve spent this week reading 25 years of government reports on the NSW dairy industry. A Senate inquiry, two NSW parliamentary inquiries, three ACCC reports and the Department of Primary Industries’ latest industry overview.
I now know an extraordinary amount about structural adjustment, processing rationalisation, labour constraints and climate variability. I’ve also developed considerable sympathy for anyone whose job involves writing these reports.
The numbers are extraordinary. In 2000, NSW had 1,725 dairy farms. By 2025, that number had fallen to 443. Over the same period, the average herd more than doubled, from 155 to 343 cows, while annual milk production per cow increased by almost 50 per cent, from 4,827 to 7,013 litres.
The average herd has more than doubled, while each cow is producing nearly half as much milk again.
Apparently, the solution to having fewer farmers is to give the remaining ones twice as many cows and expect each cow to produce half as much milk again.
My family has been milking cows in this district since 1831, so I have some idea what happens behind those impressive statistics.
The reports list labour constraints. That’s the relief milker ringing at 3.30am to announce that his car has broken down. The cows, unfortunately, have not received the memo.
Input costs include the hay you bought in March for twice what you paid last year because the rain stopped in January. Land values are the neighbour selling to a developer, while your children calculate whether they could ever afford to come home and take over the farm.
Processing rationalisation is the letter announcing the closure of the dairy factory your grandfather helped build. Your milk will now travel another two hours to be processed somewhere else. The report calls this improved industry efficiency. Your grandfather might have had another description.
And then there’s the weather. The official terminology includes “climate variability, rainfall and irrigation reliability, heat and humidity, and natural disasters”. My friend Kate calls these things headwinds.
Dairy farmers have been dealing with them for generations. In a 1976 paper I found among the Nowra Dairy Co-operative records, Bega farmers said it like it is
“Come fire, flood or drought the milk must be produced.”
I came across a submission from Jackie Norman to the NSW parliamentary dairy inquiry. Jackie started dairying at 19. Looking back on what she called the industry’s golden era, she recalled that the hours were so long and the demands so intense that there wasn’t even time to prepare proper meals.
The golden era! I’d hate to see what she put down for the difficult years.
Of course, you could replace the dairy farm with almost any small business. The government reports would list compliance costs, energy prices, wages and productivity.
The café owner would tell you about doing the BAS at the kitchen table at 10pm. The plumber would mention the invoice that’s been overdue for 90 days, from a customer big enough to make chasing payment uncomfortable. The shopkeeper could describe the summer storm that flooded the premises the week before Christmas, after all the stock had been paid for.
And every small business owner knows the experience of covering for an employee whose family has had an emergency. Policy researchers have a term for this: lived experience.
I’ve been thinking about those 1,282 dairy farms that disappeared from NSW over 25 years. Some farmers retired. Some sold. Some changed direction. Others fought for years to keep going before finally deciding they’d had enough.
The government reports record the closures, the increase in herd size, the improvement in production per cow and the economic consequences of industry restructuring.
What I’d like to know is how many of those farmers remember the morning they milked their cows for the last time. And whether, after a lifetime of getting up at 4am, they managed to sleep in the following morning.