It went right to the wire, but Centenary Thurles have agreed a milk supply agreement (MSA) with Glanbia, formally tying up their 100m litres for the next five years.

At one point last Friday, it seemed that Centenary Thurles would miss the 27 February deadline, passing up the opportunity for their members to share €1.5m of Glanbia co-op support payments for milk.

The main issue of contention surrounded the “Thurles milk”. Thurles co-op was subsumed into Centenary over a decade ago. The five million litres of Thurles milk continues to go to Tipperary co-op for processing. All other Centenary co-op milk has always gone to Glanbia.

With Glanbia’s Belview plant now open for business, the company was insisting that the Thurles milk be delivered to them.

The compromise, only agreed around 10pm on Friday night, will see the Thurles milk continue to go to Tipperary co-op, but all new milk will go to Glanbia.

Callan and Mullinahone co-ops also signed MSAs with Glanbia last week.

I also understand the necessary approval has been made for Wexford Milk Producers members who do not belong to Glanbia co-op to buy their way in. It’s even possible that the windfall payment WMP members are due could be turned into Glanbia co-op shares during the next share exchange.

Glanbia co-op is the place to be right now, given that its value went over the €2bn mark last week. Glanbia plc shares set an all-time high of €17.14 during trading on Tuesday. Over the past 12 months, the share price has risen by 50%.

This values Glanbia plc at just under €5bn and the co-op’s 41.2% holding in the plc at just under €2bn.

At the time of the last spin-out, each co-op share was worth the equivalent of 2.9 plc shares. Therefore, at a plc share price of €16.50, the full see-through value of each co-op share is €48.

When Glanbia reopened its internal share trading programme in 2014, 275,000 shares were traded at €2.85/share.

Across all members, the average number of co-op shares held is 2,600.

Active farmers hold, on average, 4,000 co-op shares. The number of plc shares held – and their value – is another story.