Motivated for hibernation
Don’t be alarmed if there is no used by sticker on your milk bottle, we now have it printed directly on to the bottle!
June should be reserved for hibernating-it’s cold and it’s hard to get motivated. And while wet is wonderful for all farmers, right now it’s wet and cold.
Did you know in Iceland on Christmas Eve they have a tradition where everyone reads books and eats chocolate? We have a Bethune Lane version whereby on the shortest day of the year our family has an evening where there is no TV, screens or phones and everyone sits around the fire reading with some chocolate milk to assist.
Kids love it, and I am very pleased they all have a passion for reading. The chocolate may influence their joy, but bribery can be an underrated tool if used well.
Visitors often wonder if my cows are freezing in this miserable weather-and the answer is no. Cows are very durable; if they can milk them well in New Zealand, there is nothing cold temperature wise which will test them in Swan Hill.
We get in trouble with cow health when we get sudden large changes in temperature, but if it’s in winter and they have their winter coats on, it’s all good.
The MEC expansion is going along albeit slower than I would like. The external walls are mostly up, the lights are installed, and hopefully we will start polishing and sealing the concrete floor next week so we can start setting up the production line.
The bigger homogeniser is on its way, as is the milk separator and yes, I am still investigating pallet wrappers, carton tapers, bottle accumulators and diesel boilers.
I have had a couple of customers ring and say that the milk has no use-by date sticker on it which is now correct- finally our date coding machine is working and so the use-by date is sprayed in ink on the side of the bottle. Little changes but big ramifications-that’s 5000 milk bottles we do not need to individually date sticker each week.
The one and two litre bottles come prelabelled, but the chocolate milk bottles are labelled by us, so when the new automatic labeller comes in a couple of months it will knock out another five- or six-hour labelling shift. We need to keep working hard to cut our labour costs per unit by 50 percent to become sustainable.
The MEC expansion contains room for a laboratory so we can test product quality at different stages of the production process, and we can identify issues earlier and respond (obviously we never ever have any issues-but just to check on the off chance we might, it’s better to identify sooner rather than later!) Long term this will be a game changer for us.
For dairy farmers, June is now milk price negotiation and contract signing month. I am out of contract for the first time in three years and it’s not my natural environment to bargain, and tp try and play people off against each other, and I don’t like it.
The trouble is small changes in milk price can be the difference between surviving and thriving-or not. This year 3.3 per cent of our total milk has gone to Bethune Lane Dairy. The rest goes to Nuomi at Shepparton, a business that has been very good to us, as some milk companies do not allow split supply.
Quick shout out to my nephew Paddy who is representing the Australian goannas in ultimate frisbee in London and Spain, first time in Australian colours, so we’re all a little bit proud!
I think I will stay more like a goanna in Lake Boga in winter and find a burrow in some red sand and enjoy hibernation.