Open Country opens butter plant
When American retail giant Cosco came to audit Open Country Dairy’s new butter plant at the Waharoa site and give the green light to supply their American stores, they allowed themselves a week for the exercise.
“The majority of farmers are okay, it’s the ones that were close to the rivers that ended up with silt on the pastures are going to have problems,” said Herdman.
“We really need another good rain to clean the pastures up.”
About 10 of the company’s supplying farmers had to shift stock to other farms.
“A lot of them along the rivers have lost their fences. So that’s a major cleanup and it’s a time-consuming clean up because you’ve got to pull all the wires out of the mud and in a lot of cases you’re just better to cut them.”
Herdman praised the way farmers turned out to help each other. One Open Country supplier had 30 people turn up on Sunday unexpectedly to spend the day picking debris out of his fences.
“It’s amazing just how much they do for each other when the chips are down.”
However, those who lost baleage, or whose winter crops went under “might not recover very well,” he said.
The company, whose sole South Island processing plant is at Awarua, near Bluff, picked up milk early from some farms when they knew the water was coming.
“We knew we wouldn’t be able to get back with the rivers rising so quickly,” said Herdman.
“So it was just just a big coordination job, with the transport and communicating with the farmers, knowing what milk was there and what wasn’t there.”
Herdman couldn’t give a precise figure but said “quite a bit” of milk had to be dumped but farmers’ milk losses would be covered by dairy company insurance.
“Anything outside spec... so if it goes 48 hours we have to dump it.”
