DRY weather is bad for crops – but very good for calving cows.
We have had a bit of both lately so, effectively, by lying to myself I am always able to be convinced the glass is half full and we are winning.
Yes, our dryland crops might be stuffed, but isn’t it lovely cool weather in which to have a baby calf?
For the first time in my lifetime we are actually not growing our cow numbers.
I think in about 1991, when I finished school, we had about 140 milking cows (and they all had names and personalities).
Last year we got to about 1100 and when it got really wet we just couldn’t handle it – so we set a limit of 1000 cows until we could build a concrete feed pad.
It should be acknowledged here that I am unaccustomed to, and don’t do well with, discipline and boundaries.
What a limit should really do is to focus us on being more efficient with what we actually have – but as it turns out, production and efficiency are two vastly different, and poorly understood, beasts.
It’s easy to hide poor efficiency with continued growth – but now it seems as though, in the short term, the jig is up.
Our production is solid but medium to low by industry standards as we are sending away (on average) only 26,000 litres of milk a day – which goes to Noumi in Shepparton.
On top of that we probably keep 1000 litres a day to feed the calves and another 1000 litres which goes into the milk and chocolate which our loyal supporters buy to drink.
We don’t get paid on litres of milk that go to Noumi, we get paid by the kilogram of protein and butterfat we send away.
I was told by one of our product buyers in Sydney that our chocolate milk was posted on an Asian social media and sales have since exploded – and we also sent our first full pallet of chocolate milk product this week.
I think it was 140 boxes of 12, so nearly 1700 this week to that one customer.
Coles comes online with another 37 Victorian stores in early November so we need to get our act together.
I never envisaged the MEC (milk enhancement centre) as an artisan producer.
I did go to a local juice bottler a couple of years ago and I thought “That’s what I want”: nothing fancy, but a mostly automated system where the empty bottles go on the conveyor and come off two minutes later full of product, the bottle labelled with the date coded on it, ready for packing and shipping.
We are a mile away from that but I am going to keep lying to myself that it will be okay – at least until we get there.
