Celebrations in Order!
What are the chances that Sally and I made it to our 20th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago? How she put up with me for so long is remarkable. Trying to get major brownie points I went full hog mode. We abandoned our children and had a weekend away. If I have learned one thing over the journey it is the importance of recognising and celebrating the good stuff! Whilst we have our moments, as a team mostly, we rock! Given we are both boring wowsers, we toasted cups of grey earl tea to another 20 years.
I was watching Sally give a tour to a school group. There was two buses of them, hordes of children and I thought two things; 1- I am never/ could never do that (Sally does 20 or 30 school groups a year) and 2-what’s more she does it with great joy! She is such a great advocate for agriculture. Farming is fantastic and we should tell people more often.
The wet weather has created multiple problems on the farm and in the factory. Lots of sick cows, lots of mud. Brad, the manager has done an amazing job and he held a thank you BBQ for all the staff who have worked so hard in very difficult conditions over the last two months. Thank goodness the days are getting longer and spring is almost sprung.
Let’s not sugar coat it, we have had one of our worst periods in the factory for quality and shelf life (hopefully you have not noticed, if you have - feel free to give me heaps, I’m sure I deserve it). There is nothing that makes me want to curl up in a ball in a dark room more than when milk does not make its shelf life. The risk is if we lose the trust of our customers then we don’t have a business. I’m confident we now have it by the nuts! The really sustained wet period meant that our tolerances were less and on top of this we found a couple of small post pasteurisation hot spots that were causing problems.
Ultimately the long term play is we need to take total control of our own milk testing to deliver quicker feedback and response. We were taking the first bottles off the line for all our quality and shelf life testing, which was my mistake, in future we need to take samples at the start, in the middle and at the end. The bottle capping machine and in particular a loose screw on one of the capping heads appears to have been the main issue, which is why only some bottles where affected. We have improved our checking and cleaning protocols and I hope we are learning. We have also bought a teat scrubbing machine to make sure the cows are coming into the dairy clean in wet weather, the novelty of handwashing 1000 cows twice a day has worn off.
They say it always rains after a long dry spell, we have had a lot of rain and conversely I’m not asking for a long dry spell but three or four weeks would be nice!