Around 550 suppliers attended a meeting in the Firgrove Hotel in Mitchelstown on Thursday to vent their anger at Dairygold’s recent 2.85c/l, excluding VAT, milk price cut.
An east Cork-based farmer told the Irish Farmers Journal after coming out of the meeting on Thursday that it was a “very boisterous kind of a meeting” with a lot of “very angry” farmers.
The meeting was organised by Dairygold on the back of calls from suppliers for the board to resign at a protest of over 200 suppliers outside the co-op’s head office in Mitchelstown last Friday.
The general view from farmers leaving the meeting, which the media was not permitted to attend, was that milk price was not going to recover. Farmers said they were told to expect a milk price in the low forties by the start of next year.
“We didn’t get very far in there; milk price is the big issue. We were told that we’re just slightly below Tirlán but we’re down the bottom of the league for as long as we can remember. It’s not going to change I’d say; it’s only going to get worse. They’re talking of [milk price] dropping to the low forties in the early part of next year. It’s disappointing all round; to my business it means that there’s a big margin knocked off. There’s a big communication problem there with Dairygold and farmers too. Farmers are very angry in there,” the east Cork farmer said.
Higher costs
This farmer explained how he experienced a very dry and difficult summer this year with a lot of higher costs as a result of drought conditions.
This sentiment was echoed by a farmer from Ballylooby in south Tipperary, who said he has also suffered the brunt of a very dry summer and has been feeding silage and increased meal since June.
He came out of the meeting with similar views that milk price was going to take a severe drop between now and Christmas.
“It wasn’t a great year for us, especially where we’re living. We suffered a severe drought since the end of June, July and August. We were feeding cows as if it was winter time and we’re still feeding heavy. We’re feeding around 7kg/day, which is serious feeding all those months – the last thing we needed was this slap in the face."
He explained how there was a corridor of the country that was very dry from Roschestown to Mallow, Mitchesltown, onto south Tipperary, Clonmel, Carrick-on-Suir and into Waterford.
“Met Éireann said at the Ploughing that it was a great year for farmers. If they came down here they wouldn’t be saying that,” he said.
Waffle
Another farmer from Dripsey in Cork after coming out of the meeting early said that “there was a lot of waffle going on in there”.
He said that his biggest issue with the cut to milk price was the communication around it, arguing that farmers need time to adjust their costs when such a reduction is coming down the tracks.
“For three weeks when they [Dairygold] knew the price was going down, we were all driving on with milk so we increased our cost of production and most of our money was going to them. On 2 September they told us that milk price was going to be brilliant until the end of the year and on 22 September they dropped it by 3c/l. And now they’re telling us that we’ll be lucky if we’re at 40c/l by the end of the year. What we’re hearing is that it could be another 10c/l drop which is down to 35c/l,” he said.
The impact of 1c/l drop on this farmers business, he said, equated to €16,000 per year.
“This month, for August supplies, it was €7,000 of a drop. They’ll go down 3c/l no problem but they’ll never go up 3c/l. The biggest issue, he added, is the lack of confidence farmers have with Dairygold and their lack of communication.
Milk League: August milk prices slashed