It would be nice to write a positive article about our milk purchaser Glanbia this week, with the announcement of a 1.05c/l, excluding VAT, top-up for all milk supplies for the second half of 2017.

This is a serious payment from our milk processor and, especially as cow numbers grow on the majority of supplier’s farms locally, the top-up payments are significant in a lot of yards.

It’s difficult to work out if the glass is half-full, completely full or half-empty after this payment, however.

On the negative side, the €25m-odd that the co-op has paid out in top-ups this year in both July and December has been resting in Glanbia’s account, rather in the suppliers’ accounts, for much of the year.

This is a situation that we are not that familiar with in this part of the world and is something that our mindset will have to adjust to as time goes on, if this type of payment structure is to become the new norm.

The other bugbear is that the top-up payment is paid on a flat rate, not on milk solids. This grates on the suppliers who have made significant progress on breeding and nutrition, and have been sending in milk with very high fat and protein content throughout the second half of the year.

Paying the bonus at a flat rate has a significant negative impact on the value of this payment to these suppliers.

The more accurate method of calculating the returns in future would be to divide the amount available out across the kilogrammes of milk solids produced, rather than the blunt instrument of litres.

Getting a payment at all is obviously always a lot better than not getting the payment or – as was the horrendous case with some Australian farmers last year – getting a letter to say that they’ve been overpaid and that the milk purchaser wants the balance refunded, puts it into perspective a bit more. Hopefully, we will never arrive in that situation when tallying up the end of year accounts.

The Irish Farmers Journal/KPMG milk price audit in a few months’ time will tell us where this payment puts us in relation to the other co-ops and their payments for 2017.

I suppose the cynical among us will look at this final payment as just enough to pull us into line with the average of the other co-ops.

Having said that, Glanbia Co-op is in the habit of playing it safe with the base milk price and even more so now, with a significant and ongoing investment in expansion underway to facilitate a rapidly growing dairy herd.

Glanbia has also been busy in the area of fixed milk and loyalty bonus schemes over the last few months.

A fixed scheme of 29.4c/l, excluding VAT, is on the table again for the next three years. This looks fair on the face of it, with the current market sentiment.

There is also a new loyalty scheme which gives bonuses to suppliers that do significant volumes of trade with the newly acquisitioned agri-trading side of the house.

This scheme, in particular, is geared around returning profits from the overall business to active shareholders, which looks like a very positive move from the co-op.

On the home front, we are up and running with calving 2018, with a healthy live heifer calf born this week.

The big rush will come next week, but we are reasonably well organised for it this year and, as the saying goes, a good start is half the battle, so hopefully it’s onwards and upwards from here.