Ready to take milk

The milk season rolls out over about a month from the top of the North Island to Southland.

Fonterra director New Zealand operations Brent Taylor says the maintenance window this year on its 80 individual plants at 26 sites was smaller than usual because of the big season last season.

“Everything gets the once over – everything gets looked and checked so we start out reliable and keep being reliable for the season,” he told Dairy News.

The Kauri site had a new boiler installed and major work on the water chiller. Fonterra Kauri maintenance engineering manager Rob Woodgates says the team had about five weeks to get the Northland site humming again.

 “We had some pretty ambitious targets to meet but we got there. We’ve done the regular compliance maintenance testing, upgrading parts of our manufacturing equipment, and also done some major work on our drains after the flooding earlier this year. It’s now all hands on deck to process the milk that is coming in.”

Taylor says the annual once over would be New Zealand’s largest maintenance operation, involving precise planning and heavy engineering. 

“It’s no easy feat. We have to get an army of local contractors, as well as our own maintenance and operations teams to replace thousands of bearings, valve kits and flush all of our vats.

“This year our maintenance spend has included everything from major overhauls of equipment, replacing obsolete parts in plants, to putting in the latest technology to improve overall efficiencies and productivity.”

Taylor says he is as keenly interested as anyone in how big the next season will be but is not making any predictions.  But talking to Dairy News from Christchurch where it was 18C and warm like a summer day, he was hopeful.

“We are having a pretty kind winter. Last season was one out of the box because we had a good autumn followed by a good winter, good spring, summer and autumn.

“If we have a good spring we’ll have a good season but it only takes 10 days of bad weather especially in the spring and you are back to a normal season or a bad season. 

“The reality is you can’t really see past the next 10 days – we do our best to get all the forecasts but the reality is, it is largely climate driven,” says Taylor.