The best present I got for my 50th birthday came from a friend who bought me two really large bags of Minties.
The reason this was so appropriate is for as long as I can remember, I have had a penchant for betting Minties, and the truth is in 6028 bets during the past decade or so, I have won about five times.
Few enough that I’m always shocked when I do win.
So the idea was that I could repay all the debts I had accumulated, and not honoured, over time, which is what I should have done.
We are sending cows all over the shop at the moment, north to Balranald and Ivanhoe, south to the Mallee, in the bush over the river, and in about two months we will send some to Warrnambool to get the best growth rates out of their spring.
We lost a full year of silage supply with the wet last year and we need to get cattle off farm so we can harvest as much as possible this year to catch up.
And as part of that progress, projects abound at the moment – which includes a 500m 450mm, irrigation supply going in the ground at present, as well as a three-inch stock water line, plus a new office being built in the dairy to house the computer for the cow manager program that’s being installed in September.
This touch of technology will help us identify sick cows and correctly identify cow days for insemination.
We are also resowing a small amount of crop at the Kerang block that was pre-watered and received 70mm of rain the day after sowing.
July should be a quiet month for us but it does not feel like it.
On the good news front, we are definitely getting back on top in the milk enhancement centre.
Our quality results are back to amazing so I apologise for any stuff-ups you might have noticed (and if you didn’t notice – well, nothing to see here).
Truthfully, early on we got fan emails saying “your products are the best ever” but in the past two months we have had a few saying “I bought your chocolate milk and it was off”.
Got one last week saying “I opened a yoghurt on its last best before date and it had mould on the top”.
And we had a shop in Bendigo say some milk didn’t even make the date.
Any time I get one of these I want to find a quiet corner and have a cry.
It really hurts.
I found what was going wrong in the MEC (milk enhancement centre) and the fault lay squarely on my shoulders.
I started looking for a single issue causing problems but it was an accumulation of one per centers not being executed correctly.
A milk processing business is not a set-and-forget enterprise.
I should have been monitoring the situation more often, particularly as the guys have been working super hard.
I think we will survive the fallout; my concern is that for every customer who writes in with a complaint, probably 10 more have also had a bad experience.
However, I’m taking it as a blessing that we had this experience when we are little and learning and the damage is fairly low-level and small (I hope).
Overall it feels like the farm is coming good, the factory is coming good and, given farmers’ egos are intrinsically tied to performance, then it follows I must be coming good.
But I am not going to bet a Mintie on it – just yet.
