Export dairy products short

Press, 5 December 1986, Page 27

Export dairy products short

A shortage of export dairy products has been created by the milk limitation scheme and poor grass growth during wet, cold spring weather, the Dairy Board has revealed. “The supply position for all products is tight, and they are being shipped as fast as they are being made,” said the board public relations manager, Mr Neville Martin.

No “long-term, important customers” have been disappointed, Mr Martin said, but the board has delayed the search for new customers for milk powders and casein. With a quarter of the season gone, skim milk powder production is down 30,000 tonnes from last season’s 180,000 tonnes, and only 265,000 tonnes of butter has been produced compared to 280,000 tonnes last year. “At present, nationwide milk production is 7 per cent below the same time last year, but there is no evidence it will stay that low,” Mr Martin said. Production depends on the weather and some regions are worse than others.

The milk limitation scheme, which has to date reduced daily supply by 1.5 per cent, gives farmers the option to not supply a specified amount of milk. There 1220 farmers involved in the scheme throughout the country who are paid $1 for every kilogram of milkfat withheld instead of $2.55 a kg of milkfat supplied. Some farmers have contracted not to supply any milk this season, while others have reduced the amount they supply,

“This means less income to farmers from milk who choose this option, but it may suit those who have alternative use for their land.” The scheme was designed to avoid increasing butter surplus, 60,000 tonnes of which have been sold as anhydrous milkfat to Brazil at “bargain basement prices.”

The sale will clear butter stocks by the end of next year at a time when butter is being offered to a buyer’s market because of European Economic Community surpluses.