There are a lot of disgruntled milk suppliers in the Glanbia region this month with the announcement of a continuation of a base milk price that compares very poorly with all the other main milk processors in the country. The situation is exacerbated by the lack of communication from the top brass of the company down to the grunts at the coal face who depend on that milk price to make a living and re-invest in their farms.

We are getting tired of the mushroom treatment at this stage. Keeping us in the dark and feeding us manure, to use the polite term, is getting very annoying the longer it goes on. Quoting skewed KPMG/Irish Farmers Journal milk price audit figures when it suits and making excuses is getting old.

We were told after 2014 that the fixed milk price schemes had pulled down the average price across the milk pool and that was why we were down at the bottom of the league. When the 2016 figures were pulled up by the same fixed milk price schemes, the benefits of the scheme were ignored.

The monthly base price is what most of us judge the performance of the company by.

The fixed milk deal is done in advance, so it should make it somewhat easier to concentrate on selling the other 80% of milk pool left outside the scheme for a good price.

There may be extra costs associated with operating the fastest expanding milk pool in the country or it may have something to do with upgrading Belview to infant formula capability. Either way, nobody has deemed the farmers worthy of an explanation. Maybe we should just be glad to be paid at all for our milk.

An effective co-op should feel like a team effort with good communication from the top to the bottom.

Everyone should be singing from the same hymn sheet and know what the gameplan is. At the moment it’s very difficult to feel part of the Glanbia team. So far, the scale and value-add story that we were sold isn’t delivering for the farmers on the ground, and we’d like to know why.

We might be given another token gesture from the co-op of a flat rate of 1c/l at the end of the year to make up some of the difference. This rewards high-volume, low-constituent producers rather than the suppliers who have bred high fat and protein herds over the last few years and are often getting a 30% to 40% bonus over the base milk price at this time of year.

Home front

On the home front, we will start to dry off bigger numbers of cows from this week on as we move to within eight weeks of calving. We are due to start on 25 January, so we will dry off any cows due in January by the end of next week.

Cell count is holding up well on once-a-day milking with tests ranging from 93,000 to 160,000 over the last week. Lactose is 4.5% and fat and protein have lifted to 5.9% and 4.6%, respectively. Production is low enough at 12 litres but cow condition and health is excellent on 3kg of meal. We will dry the herd fully by the middle of December and switch our attention to getting ready for calving at that stage.