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Bigger not better for milk suppliers
HOW much more can Irish milk producers take before irreparable damage is done to the whole agricultural sector?
With milk prices now well below the cost of production, and with little hope of an improvement in the short term, the head of Teagasc, Professor Gerry Boyle picked what seemed like an inopportune time this week to look eagerly to the golden era of post quota dairying and the further expansion of milk production.
Most dairy farmers feel right now that they have already been badly burnt by the expansionary vision of their processors, and are now in no mood to sacrifice themselves any further in order to fulfil Professor Boyle's dream of "reinvigorating the economy".
Dairy farming, the backbone of the rural Limerick economy, is in the throes of one of the worst crises it has known since Horace Plunkett set it on the road to co-operative economic success well over a century ago. Battered on all sides by turbulent international market forces, the industry is in desperate need of a survival plan.
Plunkett must be turning in his grave at the sight of his proud movement transmogrifying itself into a self serving, profit protecting colossus, with little apparent thought for the pain of its farmer producers.
As far as Limerick's 550 Dairygold milk suppliers are concerned, bigger has certainly not proved better, due to what could euphemistically be described as an unfortunate combination of events.
The giant co-op, once the country's leading milk processor, with cheese brands famous throughout Europe and now part of our very race memory, finds itself struggling in an undercurrent of uncertainty, right in the middle of what ICMSA leader, Jackie Cahill describes as "the worst dairy crisis in living memory".
Nobody could have foreseen five years ago, when Dairygold was on the crest of a wave, that it would become the first milk processor in the country to lead prices down to the current dismal level, where farmers are receiving 20c a litre - the price they got for their milk in a low cost economy over a quarter of a century ago.
But who would have believed that the shareholders who gathered in Mallow just a few years ago to vote overwhelmingly to transfer their shares to a brand new offshoot of Dairygold, might indeed have been like turkeys voting for Christmas?
Dairygold, it appears, may well have become a victim of its own success - to an extent.
For while the bright vision of those heady times has been dimmed somewhat, Dairygold will survive.
It has to survive, not just for the sake of its thousands of suppliers and its huge workforce, but for the very future of Irish dairying. It's one of the last of the big milk co-ops, still owned by the farmers themselves.
Its current woes were, without doubt, exacerbated by the international downturn in the dairy markets. But there are hopeful signs of an upturn, and the co-op, which has served a large proportion of the farmers of this region for 90 years, could do worse now than look to its past for the inspiration it needs to help lead the dairy industry into a new era of milk production.
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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