I recently came across the Contract of Employment that my late father signed with International Harvester in 1934 when he was appointed a salesman/demonstrator for the IH McCormick-Deering range of milking machine equipment.

He covered an area from Cornwall to North Wales, was paid £3 a week (about £10,000 a year now) – but on his appointment had to sign a Surety in the sum of £200 (more than a year’s salary) that he would forfeit if he left suddenly. Oh, and the Notice period was seven days!  But he had indeed a very prized position.

In those days, milk was a highly valued and important commodity – and still is, or should be.

The plummeting price of milk has been much in the news this week as supermarkets use it as a pawn in their desperate attempts to appear competitive in the face of fierce competition.

Quite apart from the fact that the present price of milk totally undervalues the product in the eyes of the consumer, the average production cost of around 30p a litre when the farm gate price is nearer 20p today, can make no sense commercially.

Of course it’s a complex situation of international supply and demand.  And yet, despite there being 50% less dairy farmers in the UK than there were in 2001, we are producing more milk. DairyCo reported that milk production in the UK was 7.2% up for the two-week period to 3 January than the three-year average.

A letter to The Times put it succinctly this week. “Britain has had to feed an extra 14 million people over the last 70 years, but at the same time huge areas have been taken out of agriculture for development. Have shop shelves been bare? No, because British agriculture has risen to the challenge by embracing science while being mindful of welfare.”

The letter-writer might have added the word technology because science and technology go hand in hand.

Unless the shelves run dry of milk, there is unlikely to be a call for action. Nobody is going to stand up in Parliament and demand a Milk Regulator. The national media has done a good job of highlighting the issue this week, but as we have seen from the falling oil price, it’s all part of a constant ebb and flow of supply and demand.

This illustrates once again how ‘unsung’ industries like ours simply get on with the job, work towards constant efficiencies and new technology to make sure we can ride the ups and downs of our market.