With the modern world comes an increase in choices. Nowadays, there are a vast variety of options for pretty much anything you could hope to buy and that goes double for food and triple for dairy. The amount of brands for any given product is always astounding (do we really need 20 different milk brands). With this variety of choices, it really pays to shop around and think about what you are buying.

We truly believe that buying local dairy is the better option for a number of reasons. So let’s dive into the 4 advantages of buying local and how it can help to improve your life, the community, and the world.

Supporting Local Farmers

When you buy local produce, you are helping the local community and investing in local goods. When you buy local, you support local farmers. Buying directly from local farms helps keep them in business which is good for a variety of reasons :

Local farms employ a lot of people. A 2018 report suggested around 346,000 workers are tied to the agricultural sector.
Local farms provide typically higher-quality produce with fewer contaminants
You ensure a fair fee is given to the farmer for their work

We fully embrace working with local farmers as it is crucial to our community and our way of life. As the cost of living continues to rise, it’s more important than ever to support local farmers to ensure they can keep providing such a vital service for generations to come.

Buying local reduces the carbon footprint

Simply put, buying locally means less movement. Buying from local vendors means the product has less travel time from the farm to your table. National brands have to transport food via planes, trains, and trucks which only contributes to global warming and unhealthy air quality. This level of transport is only doing harm to our environment and with farming not being the cleanest resource anyway, anything we can do to reduce the carbon footprint of our dairy is beneficial. This is why we always aim to work with local farmers in Yorkshire.

Encourages Accountability

Something that the rise of supermarkets has done is really detach people from the food they are eating. Chances are you have no real idea how much of your fridge contents have been processed or where that produce ever came from. When food is grown locally, customers have a better understanding of where the food comes from and how it’s processed. It’s a far more transparent process that puts control back into the customers' hands and ensures a healthier way of life.

Organic produce

When food is closer to the consumer, they have a more direct influence on the food that is produced. Farmers that sell produce at local markets are likely to sell organic because they want to guarantee high standards to the customers they interact with. This means higher levels of animal welfare, lower levels of pesticides, no manufactured herbicides or artificial fertilisers, and more environmentally sustainable land management. Not every local farm is going to be able to produce completely organic milk as it is costly, however, the overall treatment will be far better. You’ll also be able to ask the farmer straight up at the market or at their farm and we always try to be open and transparent about where our milk comes from and what it contains.

Local produce can be more expensive but it is also worth searching out for when you are able as the benefits, as listed above, are things we really can’t continue to ignore. As mentioned, the cost of living crisis is starting to really hurt local farmers so if you can, please try and support their products by buying and then sharing with your friends and family, encouraging them to do the same. As a local community, we are all in this together.