JUNE should be reserved for hibernating – it’s cold, 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 Dairy 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 to assist.
Kids love it, and I am very pleased they all have a passion for reading.
The chocolate may help 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 outdoors in winter on the South Island of 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, the milk separator is on its way 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 the milk has no use-by date sticker on it. Which is correct. But 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 per week.
The one and two litre milk 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 per cent 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).
Long term this will be a gamechanger 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 is not my natural environment to bargain, and to 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 which 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 colors, so we’re all a little bit proud!
I think I will stay more like a goanna in Lake Boga at the moment find a burrow in some red sand and enjoy hibernation.
Keep up the good work.
