Amendments to Yo You Dairy's Kernot dairy proposal have done little to alleviate the local community's concerns.
At the second public meeting about the plan, consultant Jon McNaught, of professional services company GHD that is overseeing the planning and application process, announced the proposed bottling site would be a "boutique" rather than full-scale commercial operation.
Last Thursday he told the about 100 residents that the bottling plant would only be used one day a week, and the milk would be transported to a contract bottling plant closer to Melbourne on the other six days.
Mr McNaught said it would be a showpiece to help marketing "paddock to bottle" to Chinese consumers, to whom Yo You Dairy - a subsidiary of Chinese milk giant Ningbo Dairy - planned to export directly to take advantage of the enormous premiums in that market for imported fresh bottled milk.
Local residents including beef farmer Alan McDonald said the modifications heightened his concerns, not alleviated it.
"They have secured more land and now propose to milk 1300 cows, not the 1000 discussed at the beginning of the year," Mr McDonald said.
"And the proposal is still half-baked and lacking in transparency. They haven't got any of the expert reports needed, not on the environmental impacts, on the economic impacts on the local community nor on the traffic movements.
"The proposal will have significant consequences for the Bass Valley that relies on tourism - it will be a blight on the landscape and there will be enormous problems with trucks bringing in a lot of grainand tankers taking milk out."
In the new plan, the height of the free-stall barn has been reduced from 14 metres to 11.5m and set back further from the road. It would also be built in two stages - the first to house the existing 500 cows and the second stage to house an addition 500 cows, if there was adequate market demand.
But Mr McDonald said it was a poor attempt to appease the concerned residents, who wanted the company to call a spade a spade, or in this case the free-stall barn a feedlot.
He said the site wasn't suited to such intensive farming, and his 15-years of farming mostly Angus beef cattle on both the Bass River floodplains and higher country showed him that it was rich but delicate soil that needed to be managed carefully.
He also said the application and the company representatives at the public meeting, including Ningbo Dairy Company vice president Harry Wang, failed to address community concerns about water management, including possible pollution of the nearby Bass River.
Bass Coast Shire Council chief executive Paul Buckley said since the heated public meeting in February, the company had modified the project considerably since the original permit application for the 225-hectare property.
Other changes include a second farm access point about two kilometres from the Kernot township, which Mr McNaught said would help traffic flows.
But Mr McDonald said a second access point would not reduce the number of truck movements, which would cause traffic safety issues for local residents and tourists, including recreational bike riders, on whom the region depended.
He said a petition against the expansion now had more than 1000 signatures.
Mr Buckley said because of the significant alterations to the proposal, it would now be referred again to agencies including the Environment Protection Authority, Catchment Management Authorities, CFA and others.
The council has planned to consider Yo You Dairy's permit application for its Kernot farm at its June meeting and public submissions will be accepted until then.