Glanbia's state of the art Belview facility will reach 95% capacity this spring, CEO of Glanbia Ingredients Ireland (GII) Jim Bergin told an IFA meeting on Thursday night.

In what was perhaps a bigger surprise, Bergin alluded to further processing developments in 2017 to meet the forecast expansion.

Bergin dimissed rumours that Glanbia was scrambling for milk to process at Belview but, given current supply and forecasts, he is confident milk supply would almost reach plant capacity.

Almost 100 farmers listened to Jim Bergin, GII, Pat O’Meara, AIB and Tom O’Dwyer of Teagasc discuss a framework for growth for the dairy industry. The meeting was chaired by IFA Leinster chairman James Murphy.

Murphy opened the conference suggesting that milk output volatility was fine for big companies but not good for family farms.

Jim Bergin described how Glanbia has recently invested €235m in four nutritional platforms with some brand new facilities such as Belview.

“We have converted processing facilities in Virginia, we have developed both the butter making capacity and the whey protein isolate plant at Ballyraggett and we have built Belview on a new greenfield site,” Bergin said.

Bergin explained that this investment had created an additional 19m litres of processing capacity per week and he stated that Belview will be running at 95% capacity this year at peak.

Bergin said: “We had 17% of our supply farmed out to other processors for processing so that alone coming back in house is a lot of milk. Effectively we will have to go to our board later this year with proposals for further investment in 2017.”

Glanbia regional meetings to explain the recently announced share spin-out option will start next week. There were some questions from the floor in Kilkenny about how the newly established fund that supplements base milk price would be distributed.