NI’s largest dairy co-op, Dale Farm, has announced two new initiatives for 2018 designed to increase its milk volume coming from existing suppliers, and encourage new entrants into the dairy industry.

According to the co-op, it requires an additional 40m litres of milk to fully service new customers and also ensure that existing processing capacity is operated efficiently. Rather than go out and actively poach producers from other co-ops (and risk a costly milk war over suppliers), the approach is mainly to grow from within its own milk pool.

The first initiative is a revamp of the milk production incentive, initially introduced in 2016. In 2017, it paid an extra 4p/l in October, November and December on every litre of milk above the volume supplied by a producer during the same months in 2015. In October 2017, the incentive effectively added an extra 0.35p/l to the Dale Farm milk price.