CHURCHHILL dairy farmer, Johnny Wilson, threw his milk down the drain on Tuesday this week in a one day protest against plummeting milk prices.

Warning that many more dairy farmers across the country could follow suit in a bid to have their voices heard, he told the Impartial Reporter: “We have sat back long enough. If we all dumped our milk for a week and there was no milk in the system, I think things would be very different. And that could happen -- it could come to that.” Far from liquid gold, Mr. Wilson said milk had become practically worthless due to the continual reduction in cost price.

“We would be better just handing our milk over to the consumer for free,” he says frankly, “We might as well give it to the public as give it to the supermarkets for them to make millions of profit on.” He joined up to 120 protesters at Tesco and Asda in Enniskillen on Monday night as they stripped the stores’ shelves of their dairy produce, abandoning filled trollies in the aisles or at the cashiers’ desks to make their point.

Their ‘shock-factor’ tactics saw a staff member at Tesco take the temperature of one of the cartons of milk that had been removed from the shelves and declare that, because of the temperature reading and the length of time the cartons had been left unrefridgerated, none of the milk could be sold.

Asked how he felt about the milk going to waste one protester, Tempo dairy farmer, Andrew Little replied: “Milk is taken off our yard for nothing every day and they are making millions of pounds of profit for it.”