07. 09. 10. - 12:00

Support your local milkman

When buying milk make sure you look for the red and white packaging - as Michael Leidig explains - the extra ten cents it costs is money well spent.

As a journalist the day doesn't really start until the third cup of coffee and there never seems to be enough milk to service the needs of our office.

But this week I noticed an additional selection from the usual milk assortment in my local Spar - sold under the brand name a "Faire" milk - I wasn't sure if it was an attempt to use old English with the extra "e" on the end - or if they were misspelling and trying to sell fairy milk.

But in fact this striking new packaging is part of a country wide campaign to ensure direct support for Alpine farmers - and cut out the big dairies that have been squeezing down prices and forcing many traditional small farms out of business.

When I first started visiting Austria 40 years ago for holidays at St Michael in Lungau there used to be a milk lorry that would drive down the road - and outside every house it would stop and empty the contents of a churn - the result of milking a small "herd" of two or three cows that many locals seemed to own. Pastures were full of wild flowers - and you would often see farmers out scything fresh grass each day.

I wouldn't say that I oppose modern farming methods, which are after all the only way to ensure that there is really enough to eat, but it is a great shame that the result was that small farms across Europe were gradually swallowed up and destroyed. Farm animals from local cattle breeds to working animals like sheep dogs and cart horses vanished almost overnight - and a non intensive way of farming that promoted a plethora of often local flora and fauna was lost forever.

Not so here in Austria. Because of the nature of the terrain many of these small farms survived in the rugged terrain - even managing to afford to update to modern standards of hygiene and milking. It just was not in the interests of big farming corporations to try and modify a combine harvester or giant plough for sloping ground, and the giant milk producing cattle like the Fresian was completely unsuitable for the Alpine climate or terrain. Nor did it lend itself to the mass use of pesticides or fertilizers that quickly washed away and in many case were tightly controlled by Austrian officials that have always worried over water purity - with many local communities tapping streams for their water needs.

When I moved to Austria as the correspondent for the UK Telegraph in 1995 there was a survey that claimed 90 per cent of western Europe's organic farms were located in Austria - families that were continuing to live on the land - supplementing their incomes in some locations with tourism dollars.

But the trend towards the giant supermarkets has done for Austrian Alpine farmers what everything else has failed to do. There used to be a choice of dairies - but the economies of scale meant that eventually dairy farmers only had a choice of one - and the price was take it or leave it. Farmers ended up paying more for everything to run their operations - and earning far less.

Sadly there was little public support to stop this practice - the public anger at the abuse of agricultural subsidies at the time milk prices first started to be forced down left an attitude that farmers deserved what they got. It is only now - perhaps too late for many of the farmers - that this "faire milch" campaign is gathering pace.

What it does is make sure that farmers who are offering something not just in terms of the quality of the milk they produce -- which may well be no different to the other cartons -- but they are also offering something else as well. Protecting a part of this Alpine republic’s traditions that will mean hikers can continue to enjoy pastures filled with wild flowers, streams not blocked with pesticides or fertilisers and alpine cattle that do not look like tanks and cause a mini landslide every time they stroll down a slope.

Surely that is worth an extra 10 cents of anybody's money when they have their morning cup of coffee?