IT is now nine months since the country was treated to the sight of farmers parading cattle in their local supermarkets before buying all the milk on sale and giving it away to bemused customers in protest at the low prices they were being paid.

The campaign of August 2015 seemed to finally bring home to the public just what a raw deal UK dairy farmers get.

There was a brief flurry of national media interest and several crisis summits involving industry leaders, supermarket bosses and politicians.

Various promises of action were made – including the quick introduction of the higher-priced Milk for Farmers brand by Morrisons which pledged extra money for struggling farmers (no matter that it actually went to direct to Denmark-based milk co-operative Arla, which then split it between farmers across Europe).

Since then, UK farmers have struggled through some of the worst flooding in living memory, and many are still awaiting vital subsidy payments which were due in December.

And all the while, the average farmgate milk price still sits at about 23p per litre. Average production costs remain around the 30p per litre mark – and the latest forecasts suggest the global market, crippled by oversupply, will not pick up until 2017 at the earliest.

Today’s revelation that Leyburn farmer David Metcalfe is now using slurry to cover the losses he makes on his milk will seem like a bitter irony to those scraping a living in the dairy industry.

He is clearly to be congratulated for coming up with such an innovative solution to support his business, but if nothing else, his story highlights just how serious the plight being facing by our dairy farmers is when the manure produced by cows is worth more than their milk.