Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd. has today (Tuesday, January 11, 2022) revised the forecast for its 2021/22 New Zealand milk collections to 1,500 million kg of milk solids (ms), down from its opening forecast of 1,525 million kg of ms.
Fonterra chief executive, Miles Hurrell said varied weather and challenging growing conditions across many parts of the country earlier in the season, saw actual milk collections down on the same time last year.
“We were expecting conditions to improve over the Christmas / New Year period, but this has not eventuated,” he explained.
“As a result, we have revised our 2021/2022 forecast down 1.6% to 1,500 million kg of ms.”
In response to the lower milk supply, Hurrell said that at this stage no change is needed to the volume of product the co-op is offering on the Global Dairy Trade (GDT) platform.
“Due to the high demand for off-GDT sales, we had already reduced the volume we were offering on the GDT platform earlier in the season,” he stated.
“We will continue to monitor the situation and carefully manage our sales both on and off-GDT.”
Global Dairy Trade
Meanwhile, last week (January 4, 2022), the GDT returned to growth after a decrease in the index last time out, which was the first decrease since August.
In the latest auction – event 299 – the index increased by 0.3%, with an average product price of $4,247/MT and 30,685MT of product sold.
The event saw 112 winning bidders emerge from 156 participating, over two hours and 16 minutes which saw 15 bidding rounds altogether.
The GDT index figure now stands at 1,336, a marginal increase on the 1,333 recorded on December 21 – but a little way off the 1,354 figure seen on December 7, 2021.
The strongest performing product was cheddar, which increased by 4.9% to $5,487/MT.