Jamie Mackay: The Country host on the possibility of near-record farm gate milk price this season

Growing global demand for dairy products and a flat milk supply could be setting the stage for a near-record farm gate milk price this season.

With nine months left in the 2024-2025 season, Jarden and ANZ have outlined their predictions ahead of the latest GDT austion.

The Country's Jamie Mackay explains further.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
With me.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Now is Jamie mckaye, host of the Country, A Jamie
good Heather.

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Interesting to hear you're talking to Miles Hurrell at the
top of the hour. Look, significant investment last week at Studham.
This week it's Edendale and Southland. Good news week or a
couple of weeks for the dairy industry. They've got a
GDT auction tonight, my Guy Jardin Mike mcintiree picking another
two to three percent rise. The milk futures are sitting

(00:27):
at eight eighty nine. That's getting up there. They and
Zed are leading the charge. Heather. They've raised their forecast
milk price to nine dollars a kilogram last week. Interestingly,
Rabobank went to sixty Fonterra still at eight fifty, but
you'd have to think on the present market sentiment that

(00:47):
maybe nine dollars is on the cards and that's a
good number.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
How good? What a turnaround from where it was not
long ago and everybody was so upset and desperate.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Aim, Well, you go back to August twenty twenty three,
so that's twelve months ago we had that terrible GDT auction.
Six dollars fifty was the number being bandied about and
that would have resulted in the loss for nearly every
dairy farmer in the country. Look, I mean, I can't
sugar coat the increase in production over the past few years.

(01:15):
It's been absolutely horrendous. But you know, I look at
dairy and I compare it the poor old sheep farmers
at the moment, and there's some green sheets they are
coming for them as well, which is good. But I
think theirry is in quite a good space at the moment.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, sounds like now, Jamie. I was skouting before about
how warm it's been in Auckland in the last few days,
and then I started getting all these texts about its
raining everywhere. Has been raining in Canterbury.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
No, and that's what they need. They desperately need some rain.
In Canterbury they had a couple of cold shifts coming through.
But look, North Canterbury is absolutely dire, the Hiiranui district
in particular. I saw a rainfall quotation from one farmer
in Scagore, which is in North Canterbury. Between December of

(01:58):
last year in August of this year, I've only had
two hundred and twenty millimeters of millimeters of rain now
to classify as a desert on an annual basis, you
need less than three hundred, so extrapolate that out. North
Canterbury is technically almost a desert. It was declared a
medium scale adverse event drought by Todd McLay, Minister of

(02:19):
Agriculture in March. But look, typically in Canterbury, you know
they'll have dry summers, they farm to those, the autumn
rains come, they get a bit of growth through the
winter and they're away. But they just haven't had the
autumn rains. They haven't even had the winter rains. They're
getting a wee bit of growth now off the warmth.
But as soon as those Northwesters start going as they
are at the moment, witness the fire that's happening at

(02:42):
the moment, and that place will burn to a frazzle.
They desperately need some good news from mother Nature in
the next two or three weeks. I'd suggest by the
end of September, or it could be game over.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
He is hoping, Jamie, thank you so much, appreciate it.
Jamie mackay hosts The Country of Talking in a couple
of days.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
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