Fewer dairy farmers are quitting the industry despite the high cost pressures producers have been under since last summer, AHDB's survey shows.
The levy board's most recent survey of major milk buyers suggests that in April 2022 there were an estimated 7,880 dairy producers in Britain.
This is a reduction of 160 producers - or 2 percent - compared with the survey the AHDB undertook this time last year.
Katherine Jack, senior analyst at AHDB dairy said: "This is a slower rate of exit than we have seen in the previous few years, despite the high cost pressures."
She explained: "AHDB’s estimate represents the number of producers actively contributing to GB milk production.
"It is based on the number of active producers and temporary inactive producers from the milk buyers that contribute to the Daily Milk Deliveries survey.
"This covers approximately 83% of volumes in GB, and so the estimate has been adjusted accordingly."
The latest figures suggest that the average volume per farm in Britain is 1.57 million litres, level with October 2021 and slightly up on April 2021.
Getting a true picture of the number of dairy producers in the country is often difficult due to the different reporting methods used.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) can be used to track producer numbers across England and Wales, based on the number of farmers registered to produce milk.
However, deregistering is voluntary, and therefore unlikely to be top of the “to do” list for a farmer leaving the industry.
Defra carry out a survey on the number of dairy holdings across the UK, which returns a figure considerably higher than the AHDB's estimate.
This is because it includes all farms with a dairy cow over two years old with offspring.
Around a third of those holdings had fewer than ten cows, meaning they are unlikely to be commercial dairy farms, and would be excluded from AHDB's estimate.
