An €86 million state-of-the-art Nutritionals Campus has been opened by Dairygold in Mallow.

The opening, which took place on Friday, was attended by European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Phil Hogan; Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Michael Creed, and an Tánaiste and Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Frances Fitzgerald.

Importance of investment and expansion

The investment comes as Dairygold continues to expand its operations post abolition of quotas.

In 2012, members forecast to increase their milk production by over 60% by 2020. This forecast has become a reality.

Almost three years ahead of schedule, milk volumes from Dairygold’s 2,900 milk suppliers are expected to exceed 1.3 billion litres this year, a 55% increase on the baseline milk supply volume. Milk supplies in 2017 are forecasted to be up 105 million litres on 2016.

This increase alone is worth an additional €39 million for the Society’s dairy farmers.

The Mallow facility

The milk processing facility is capable of producing the full range of nutritional dairy ingredient powders, in volumes of up to 1,750 tonnes/week.

The €86 million regeneration of the Mallow facility saw over 800 people employed through direct and indirect jobs linked to the project.

Post-quota dairy expansion has seen the creation of 112 full-time jobs across the Dairygold organisation.

Jim Woulfe

Dairygold chief executive Jim Woulfe further emphasised the importance of the plant for expansion purposes.

“The Mallow investment delivers on the twin objectives of our dairy expansion plan. This world-class Nutritionals Campus not only caters for our members’ expanding milk production, but it also puts in place the processing technology to expand our range of higher-value ingredients for the adult and infant nutritionals sector.”

“This in turn creates more value add for our increasing milk volumes. The Nutritionals Campus will be at the forefront of our Nutritionals growth agenda, with further investment planned in the near future,” he continued.

Michael Creed and Phil Hogan both praised the facility and the ambition showed by Dairygold undertaking such an expansion.

Read more

Watch: the Irish Farmers Journal’s livestock demo at Ploughing 2017

Dairy management notes: animal health