First Milk Home

We covered in the newsletter last month that our Chief Executive Peter Humphreys was a guest speaker at this year’s influential Dairy Industry Newsletter conference in London. While the recurring theme at the conference was UK volumes, the event also enabled delegates to hear views and perspectives from across the globe.

StraightTalk asked Farmer Director Robert Shearlaw to give us his synopsis of the key points from the session.

“German market analyst Erhard Richarts tried to model future world supply and demand in the dairy sector. His predictions were for a world dairy market that would continue to grow but with milk supply also growing, he was predicting a market in balance but with much volatility in world commodities like butter and powder.

“James Sullivan of US Ingredients Business talked about a huge demand for lactose as the developing world adopts the more productive pig production systems which rely on early weaning achieved through feeding lactose to weaned piglets.

“Glanbia’s John Moloney outlined his similar ingredients perspective to our own, with a drive for technical innovation to protect themselves from the more base commodity products.

“Phil Turner of Fonterra NZ predicted that Chinese production would largely keep up with demand and that the opportunity for Fonterra would largely be in partnering them on technical development which is clearly not what many analysts have predicted thus far.

“David Dobbin of United Dairy Farmers of Northern Ireland talked of a similar market exposure to Glanbia but with the benefit of a sterling based economy giving him a market advantage. He also predicted very volatile commodity markets.

“Australian Consultant Tony Brady gave a very good paper about driving more value from cheese and ingredient manufacturing processes through accurate formulating of fat and protein levels in cheese , whey and SMP. The extra fat and protein was then processed into high quality ingredients. He detailed the experiences of a major cheese plant in Australia, which gave very impressive results with a tripling of plant profitability for very little extra input. While not all of the technology is relevant in the Northern hemisphere, there was a lot in this paper for both our ingredients and cheese businesses to consider.”