On the home front, the grazing and milking season is starting to wind down this week and we will dry off a significant proportion of the herd by the end of November.

All youngstock have been housed over the last month and have moved across to a full winter diet and winter routine very easily.

We had to train a few heifers to lie up properly on cubicles, but most have adjusted well to the indoor facilities. We also have a few more cubicles to put together this week before the whole milking herd goes onto concrete for the winter.

The changeover from grass to concrete with all stock, and bringing in stock from out-farms makes the working day very busy for a period of time but the work will settle down now and it’s all about a good routine for the winter months and trying to free up some time for extra jobs that have been left on the long finger.

Milk production is also on the wind down, with cows down to an average of 11l per cow at 6.19% fat and 4.69% protein. Once-a-day milking has lifted solids, but lactose is also near the threshold, so we need to drop out about 30% of the herd this week to keep this right and to give an adequate dry period before calving starts on 20 January.

Production might be dropping off, but with solids up, we should see a very strong price for the litres of milk produced in November, despite the unrivalled ability of our milk processor to keep the base price on the floor.

Glanbia in the relegation zone

Glanbia are firmly entrenched in the relegation zone in both Irish and European milk leagues and recent comments from the chairman of the board indicate very little ambition to move away from this perennial scenario.

At time when farmers are feeling embattled from all sides, on climate, welfare and environment, the hope would be that at least we could turn around and see some support from our milk processors and expect them to have our back, and definitely not to add fuel to the fire.

Martin Keane’s comments in a recent interview with Dairy Global make very worrying reading, however. He speaks of introducing a two-tier milk pricing system where expansion milk is paid for at a lower rate than the existing milk supply. This lower price would be introduced as a barrier to further growth in the co-op.

This is a big move away in mindset from previous suggestions of maybe introducing a processing charge on new milk to facilitate expansion. Instead we are now looking on expansion as something very negative and looking at very negative ways to prevent it.

There were some more very strange comments regarding how we market our dairy products internationally and how we haven’t been using the “grass-fed” or “natural” characteristics of our production system in Ireland enough.

Obviously as farmers, producing the food, we assumed that this was a given and our natural, sustainable, grass fed production system was our main point of difference against our international competitors. Is this being used enough by our marketing team? The mind boggles.

The most worrying comments from the interview centred around milk price and Glanbia’s ability or ambition to pay a leading milk price in the future. Our model of 3.2% margin after tax is “far more challenging than on the continent and puts pressure on the milk price”. Still no desire to look at changing this model though.

Mr Keane also explained away our lower milk price than our European competitors by saying that “our farmers have lower costs due to the seasonal milk production system”. By this logic we must also have lower costs in the Glanbia region than those milk producers a few miles further west and north of us on our own little island.