Warning: dairy farms face big milk levy
They said a combination of increased dairy cow numbers, favourable weather, and strong milk prices have left Irish dairy farmers facing their first superlevy bills since the 2011-12 milk year.
Within Dairygold, milk deliveries were 1.28% over quota at the end of August, following an 11% increase in August, compared to 2012.
The national milk quota position at the end of July was 1.44% under. But Ireland was only 0.36% under quota at the end of August (compared to 1.46% under in 2012). And the country as a whole may now already be running ahead of quota, if the Dairygold August milk surge continued nationally in September.
Dairygold suppliers have also been warned that they cannot rely as much on the flexi-milk pool as they did in the last year they had a superlevy bill, 2011. The flexi-milk pool is now substantially less — and the allocation of flexi-milk has been reduced from 90% to 85% for category one suppliers. There are also fewer milk suppliers now in Ireland to soak up a superlevy bill. When Ireland was over quota by 1.1% in 2011-12, and paid a super levy for that year of €16m, there were 19,140 active dairy farmers; but in 2012-13, there were only 18,470.
In 2012-13, they delivered 5,382,263 tonnes, according to provisional figures just released by the European Commission.
However, their milk fat content, at 3.943% was higher than the 3.851% at which Ireland’s milk quota was calculated, so the total delivery after adjustment for fat content was calculated at 5,554,854 tonnes.
This was 3% under the available quota of 5,725,059 — allowing Irish dairy farmers to escape the €27.83 per 100kg superlevy bill last April.
Not so lucky were Austria, Germany, Denmark, Poland and Cyprus, exceeding their milk quotas and incurring total superlevy bills of about €46 million.
But total EU deliveries remained well below (6%) total quota volumes, compared with a 4.7% shortfall in 2011/12. Of the 22 member states which were under quota, 13 fell at least 10% short of their quotas.
