THERE are times in life when equally laudable but opposing principles have to be weighed up and a judgement made. For example, everybody wants to see more open government, but the legitimate privacy of those receiving States services also has to be respected.

Sometimes that can lead to a conflict. And such conundrums also occur outside the States. In a small community, we are all occasionally caught between competing objectives and principles and have to come to a balanced value judgement.

One very practical example of such a dichotomy is being played out right now following the decision of a local retailer to import milk for sale. His simple argument is that buying local is a good thing, but the decision to do so should be one for the consumer. On the surface, it’s hard to argue against that freedom-of-choice philosophy. The problem is that the practical consequences may well be the coup de grace for our local dairy farming industry and, with it, our traditional countryside – and even the iconic Guernsey cow.

Does that all sound too doom-laden? Possibly, but I believe it’s absolutely accurate. Few islanders picking up a litre of ‘blue milk’ from their doorstep or the supermarket shelf will be aware of just how fragile the economics of dairy farming in Guernsey really are. Certainly, anybody who expects local milk production to compete successfully with cheap imports from the European milk lake is living in cloud cuckoo land.

In any free-for-all, we could quickly kiss goodbye to a way of life and a landscape that has helped to define Guernsey since time immemorial.

Why? Well, the reasons are legion. Much milk production in the UK and Europe takes place on farms where the fields are huge compared with Guernsey’s tiny patchwork of traditional pastures, which are segregated by protected and environmentally important hedgerows and earth banks. These enormous fields allow for industrial-style farming using massive machinery. Often the cows don’t even get to graze the fields at all but are kept indoors, with the grass cut and brought to them using a system called ‘zero-grazing’. This is something that is rightly not allowed under Guernsey’s dairy farm contracts. And, of course, the cost of agricultural land in the island – with its dense population and competing land uses – is out of all proportion to the UK.

It’s not just the nature of the farms themselves that makes open competition impractical. The economies of scale of a dairy processing just six to eight million litres of milk a year can never compare to huge creameries with a throughput 100 times as large. And then, of course, there is the Guernsey cow. We all love it and we know that it produces the best milk in the world. But as a pure milk-producing machine, where volume and cost are more important than quality, it can’t begin to compete with the Holstein-Friesian. And yet we insist that local farmers can only keep Guernseys – and would anyone really want that to change?

Why stress these issues? It’s not because I believe many islanders would choose to buy non-Guernsey milk, even if it was widely available. The problem is that if even 10% to 20% of milk consumption was imported, it could tip the precarious economics of dairy farming in Guernsey over the precipice. That in turn would lead to a smaller industry, which would push up the price of local milk further, thus encouraging more people to opt for imports. A small beginning could lead to a real vicious circle.

If that happened, then beyond doubt our landscape would change forever. Of course there are other uses for fields, such as keeping horses or growing vegetables, but it’s the dairy industry which – at relatively little cost to islanders – keeps the island looking so special. We only have to remember what happened to Alderney’s countryside before the current, excellent farmer set up in the island to understand the potential consequences.

I’m certainly not trying to dismiss the philosophical allure of the ‘freedom of choice’ mantra. What I am saying is that islanders should think long and hard before deciding how to exercise that choice. Saving a few pence today may be an attractive option, but what we all stand to lose goes to the very heart of Guernsey’s soul.

Just as with so many other things in life, when it comes to the island’s dairy industry and its countryside, it’s a question of either use it or lose it.