In 2016, the BBC Radio 4 Future Food Award went to Our Cow Molly for its fresh milk. This is a business based at a small farm in Dungworth, part of Sheffield’s rural–urban fringe (Figure 1). It is the only dairy farm in the area producing and bottling its own milk and the award was for innovation in the food industry that could make a difference to how food is produced and sold in the future.
The UK is the third-largest milk producer in the EU after Germany and France, and the tenth-largest producer in the world. The amount of milk produced in the UK has increased in recent years mainly because modern farming techniques mean that more milk is produced by each cow. In fact, the average milk yield per cow is now about 15% higher than 10 years ago. The most profitable dairy farms have large numbers of cows which are kept indoors in milking sheds, where computers regulate food, lighting, temperature and milking which happens three times a day.
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