October milk league: prices hold for another month

Almost all the milk processors held milk price for October. Aurivo was the only company to reduce October milk price. However, it remains towards the top of the league, just behind Drinagh, the west Cork co-op, for October.

Aurivo dropped the price 0.07c/kg MS (0.5c/litre). I have heard some negative comment on future milk prices but there is little concrete evidence just yet to back up a big price drop very quickly.

Issues

Yes, in the UK Arla dropped its price for December by 1p/l to 28 p/l, and Müller did drop January milk price (1.5p/l) to 29p/l. However, around now there are a couple of issues happening that very quickly will dictate the purchasing sentiment for coming months. The issues are:

GDT auction

It may be for some of these reasons the GDT auction lifted this week for the first time in a number of weeks.

The west Cork co-ops continue to set the pace on the rolling average for the year with another solid October milk price. Again this price excludes the milk quality bonus (0.5c/l) that is available for top-quality milk (milk under 200,000 SCC) which a lot of the west Cork suppliers will get.

On average, the price paid for October milk was €4.81/kg milk solids or approximately 34.35c/l ex-VAT at 3.3% protein and 3.6% fat.

In effect, this means that October milk is achieving a very good price when you take into account the seasonal milk solids and very good milk price.

Figure 1 and Figure 2 show the October milk cheque for each processor using the national average solids (4.10% fat and 3.45% protein) and the co-op solids for the month respectively.

As you can see depending on processor, there is a gap of €537 in the October milk cheque for Drinagh compared to Glanbia.