TO bring their milk, yoghurt and cheese to market, Karl and Cathie Johnson are happy to pay dairy farmers more than they could get from Coles or Woolworths.
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The husband-and-wife dairy providores have begun promoting their jersey style milk at the Newcastle City Farmers Market by telling customers their Vacy dairy farmer suppliers are paid 70 cents a litre.
The couple’s stance has resulted in a surge in popularity for their boutique brand Over the Moon Milk.
“We go through four to five thousand litres a week, now,” Mr Johnson said.
“We can’t enough – last week we sold out of milk by 9am. The response has been incredible.”
Two litres of the Johnsons’ jersey milk costs $6, compared with $2 for the same amount of the major supermarkets’ own brand milk.
But in the current political climate of controversy over the dairy industry – in which Victorian and Tasmanian farmers faced ruin after processors Murray Goulburn and Fonterra recently slashed milk prices within a week of each other – Mr Johnson said some people were happy to pay more out of principle.
“If we don’t look after our small farmers, it’ll all just be taken over by the big guys,” Mr Johnson said.
“We’ve got to be able to sustain it. You can’t have milk being cheaper than water.”
It costs a farmer $5 to produce a kilogram of milk solid, and until recently most were paid $5.60 for the product.
When Murray Goulburn dropped its price to between $4.75 and $5 and Fonterra to $5, farmers faced being paid 37 cents a litre for milk that would cost them 38 cents to produce.
The Johnsons’ whole foods philosophy is not a hard sell at the weekly farmers’ market in Broadmeadow, where thousands of like-minded market-goers – some wearing “Farms, not coal” t-shirts – converged on Sunday.
But in the battlefield of the supermarket fridge, Coles and Woolworths have argued that the “milk wars” that broke out in 2011 have benefited consumers, and that their own brands of milk only make up 6.5 per cent of domestic production.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce threw the industry a half-billion-dollar lifeline last week, announcing $555 million in concessional loans for farmers affected by the Murray Goulburn cuts.
Lining up on Sunday to buy milk from the Johnsons, Ang Stig, of Mount Hutton, said she was mainly influenced in her purchasing decisions by the quality of the product.
“It’s so much better with what they put into it, none of the artificial stuff,” Ms Stig said.
“You like to support the little guys, too. You don’t want to see them go under.”