Factory Farmed Milk? One British Group says, "Not in My Cuppa!"

What could be more British than a nice cup of tea? Small scale and family dairy farms, says one sustainable food organization. The World Society for the Protection of Animals has launched the "Not In My Cuppa" campaign to combat recent plans for the very first large-scale dairy farm in Great Britain. The campaign is asking folks to send in text messages, pictures, videos, letters, and more saying they won't put factory farmed milk in their tea. And for those who are not tea-inclined, you can pledge not to use factory farmed dairy in your coffee, latte, cereal, and more.

The average British dairy farm has just 100 cows that are milked twice a day and graze outdoors six months or more of the year. Nocton Dairies, however, proposed a farm with 8,100 cows that will be milked three times a day and could see sunlight as few as two months out of the year (if they are let out in the fields at all, that is). While Nocton Dairies recently dropped the number of cows to 3,800, the conditions animals will be kept in remain the same, and Nocton says it has every intention of gradually beefing up its number of milking cows. Each factory-farmed cow would produce thousands of gallons of milk each year, but live one year less on average than cows that reside on small farms.

The shorter lifespan is the result of factory farm conditions, where cows face a higher risk of disease, injury, filthy metal barns, and a slew of antibiotics and other drugs to keep them alive in unnatural, unsanitary conditions. These industrial-scale operations produce a ton of manure, water contamination, air pollution, environmental degradation, and more. But the most serious issue, according to Not In My Cuppa, is how this particular factory farm will affect the rest of the farms in Britain: "If the mega-farm is allowed to go ahead, it will open the floodgates to other such proposals. It will be only a matter of time before Britain’s already struggling small dairy farms simply disappear."

It would be a shame to see a system of small dairy farms be overrun by factory farms. So help support the Not In My Cuppa campaign. Head over to Not in My Cuppa's Action page to get more information, news, and to send a text, picture, or video to spread the word about the dangers of factory dairy farms.

Photo Credit: Eduardo Mueses via Flickr