Another lift in milk price for November supplies

North Cork Creameries paid the top price again for November milk, but only after paying out 4.27c/l from its reserve fund. This was built up from milk price foregone in previous years, so the market return from North Cork is 46.41c/l, which would put it at the bottom of the league. North Cork is joined at the top of the league by the four west Cork co-ops. Within these four, Drinagh has paid out the highest cumulative payment so far at €234,857, which is the total sum paid out per kilo of milk solids based on the 2020 national average of 3.55% protein and 4.2% butterfat.

At the bottom of the league for this month is Lakeland Dairies, which is a place it hasn’t found itself in for quite some time.

It didn’t increase base price for November, but it did announce a 0.8c/l milk price top up for all of 2024, so that will be included after its paid in January.

The payment will be worth around €4,000 to the typical supplier, so it’ll push Lakeland well ahead of the rest in terms of cumulative payment.

For the first time in a long time Tipperary Co-op finds itself out of division three and at the top of division two. It decided to pay its suppliers 3c/l, excluding VAT milk price bonus for November.

The co-op has been struggling all year to pay a comparable milk price, and cynics will say it’s easy to pay a bonus in November when volumes are low anyway.

Dairygold increased its milk price by 1c/l for November and we made a few slight tweaks to the way we account for the milk quality or balanced scorecard payment, so the difference between last month is a bit more than 1c/l.

The co-op is getting full credit for its balanced scorecard payment, but conditional purchases are still excluded from the sustainability scheme payments. This change has been reflected in the cumulative column also.

At this stage there is almost €10,000 in the difference between the cumulative payment for Drinagh and the cumulative payment for Tipperary Co-op.

The difference between Drinagh and Kerry Group, the next lowest on the cumulative payment list, is just under €6,400. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the 13th payment will cover this differential.

Most of the top-ups or 13th payments will be made when December milk price is announced at the end of January. We saw a slew of top-ups announced in January 2023 only for milk price to crash over the subsequent months. To be fair, global dairy markets are in a much better place now than then.