FIRST MILK, the UK’s only major farmer-owned dairy company, has announced the appointment of Sir Jim Paice MP, formerly agriculture and food minister at Defra, as company chairman.
He will take up the position on October 31 when chairman Bill Mustoe steps down at the company’s annual meeting.
First Milk, which has its headquarters in Glasgow, generates annual revenues of £579 million and operates across eight sites around the UK.
Mr Paice’s appointment to lead this leading farmers’ co-operative certainly would not have been foreseen 14 months ago in the midst of the great milk price crisis.
He was roundly heckled during his speech to angry dairy farmers gathered en masse in London’s Westminster Hall for daring to suggest that dairy farmers had to pay attention to their costs of production as well as asking for a better price.
It was a rare moment of unpopularity for a minister who was generally regarded in Whitehall as a “farmer’s man”.
By September of last year, despite the odds being stacked against him, he had actually delivered the long-awaited Voluntary Dairy Code of Practice.
His moment of glory was, however, to be cruelly cut short.
During a press conference minutes after he had made the announcement he was summoned to the phone to speak to the Prime Minister.
Instead of being a call of congratulations Mr Paice in fact discovered that he was a victim of the re-shuffle and had effectively been sacked.
Since then he has been knighted but the experience of being dismissed clearly hurt.
He is to stand down as MP for South East Cambridgeshire in 2015 after 28 years in the role.
Sir Jim, who had a career in farm management before he became an MP, has recently become a non-executive director of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany and is a trustee of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust
He said: “I feel privileged to be invited to lead the largest dairy business owned by British farmers.
“Having worked for a farmer-owned business before I became an MP, and from being minister, I have always believed that farmers should work together to influence their own destiny.
“The dairy sector has gone through difficult times recently but I have long believed there is a good future for British dairy farmers and I look forward to helping to achieve it.”
NFU Scotland president Nigel Miller said: “This is a very positive announcement and comes at crucial time for the Scottish and UK dairy sector.
“Jim Paice will bring tremendous energy, farming knowledge and parliamentary experience and his recent engagement with the industry in drawing up the voluntary code of practice for milk contracts was invaluable in striking a deal between farmers and processors.
He continued: “It is important for the sector that we have strong farmer-owned businesses as key players and his future chairmanship will help build on the current momentum that surrounds First Milk’s development as a co-operative and a processor.”
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