Glanbia, Dairygold, Lakeland and LacPatrick have all either been granted planning permission, officially opened or talked about further investments in milk processing.

Planning permission has been granted for a new dryer at Glanbia’s Belview site in Co Kilkenny. The new dryer will be as big as the existing two, effectively doubling the plant’s capacity. It will allow Glanbia to process the milk from an extra 128,000 cows.

The new dryer is expected to be running for spring 2019. It will be needed to cope with the increased milk (30% expected) coming between 2016 and 2020. It is estimated to cost between €200m and €250m.

Two of the largest co-ops in the North recently unveiled large-scale investments. Lakeland Dairies and LacPatrick have officially opened their respective new milk powder dryer facilities, valued at €40m each.

Lakeland opened its latest dryer at Baileborough, Co Cavan. This is the third dyer at the site, making it one of the largest powder processing sites in Europe.

The 7t/hour dryer will grow the co-op’s annual powder production to 160,000t and 50,000t of butter.

Lakeland has over 2,400 suppliers, with an annual milk pool of 1.2bn litres and it has customers in 80 countries.

LacPatrick officially opened its new £30m (€40m at the time of investment) Dairy Technology Centre facility in Artigarvan, Co Tyrone. Central to the facility is a 7t/hour dryer capable of processing up to 1.5m litres of milk per day. It sits alongside two existing dryers, which collectively could process around 1m litres of milk per day. It takes the total capacity at the site to 2.5m litres per day.

With 990 suppliers and a total milk pool of 600m litres, 500m litres of which is collected in NI, the investment means LacPatrick now has 35% extra capacity. In terms of the products coming from the new dryer, there are seven new products identified, four of which are up and running, with repeat orders.

Down south, Dairygold recently unveiled the Mallow Nutritionals Campus as a key pillar of its expansion plan, set up to support the growth ambitions of its 2,900 suppliers across the Munster region. The €86m state-of-the-art campus investment comes as Dairygold continues to expand its operations post-quotas.

Almost three years ahead of schedule, milk volumes from Dairygold’s 2,900 milk suppliers are expected to exceed 1.3bn litres this year, a 55% increase on the baseline milk supply volume. Milk supplies in 2017 are forecasted to be up 105m litres on 2016.

The milk processing facility is capable of producing the full range of nutritional dairy ingredient powders, in volumes of up to 1,750 tonnes/week.

Dairy Day 2017

The Irish Farmers Journal will host National Dairy Day on Thursday 23 November 2017 in Punchestown Event Centre, Co. Kildare. The event promises to offer solutions for a growing sector. The day aims to showcase all that is good about the dairy industry and find solutions for farmers to emerging challenges and trends. To get a FREE ticket for Dairy Day, simply collect 3 tokens from the Irish Farmers Journal and bring them along with you on the day or BUY YOUR TICKET HERE