Fonterra tackles 23,000 maintenance tasks during winter shutdown

Milking may have slowed down for the season, but Fonterra hasn't. Photo / Christine Cornege

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Winter is here, and milking has stopped at some dairy farms, but that doesn’t mean it’s all quiet at Fonterra.

It’s known as “winter shut” and it’s a rather busy time for the co-op’s manufacturing sites, Fonterra’s Chief Engineer, Aaron Goldsbury, said.

“It might be the off-season for production and the cows are not milking, but it’s the peak season for getting things done for maintenance and projects,” he told The Country Sport Breakfast’s Brian Kelly.

“All our plants are shut this time of the year, and we make the most of that opportunity to invest in maintenance and projects across our 22 sites.”

Fonterra’s teams will complete over 23,000 maintenance tasks, including deep cleaning, inspections and servicing for more than 165,000 assets.

Goldsbury said over 1600 Fonterra employees and more than 640 vendors, ranging from large firms to local specialists, will join forces to carry out the work.

Fonterra’s sites ran at full capacity for about 10 months a year and processed over 16 billion litres of milk.

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This doesn’t leave much time for maintenance, which is crucial to enable the co-op’s sites to run at maximum efficiency while ensuring product quality.

“It’s a pretty complex operation for us during the winter,” Goldsbury said.

He said it was a lot of work, but essential for the upcoming season.

“When it comes to the peak of the season, we haven’t got much capacity in our plants for things to go wrong, so we really need to make the most of that downtime to set those plants up for a successful season.”

Fonterra had major projects at some of its sites this year, including preparing to replace two coal-fired boilers with electrode boilers at Edendale.

The co-op’s Takaka site is also having several upgrades, including the installation of two new cream silos to enhance storage conditions and provide greater transport flexibility for its products.

And that’s not all.

“Another example, at Waitara and Eltham, we’re increasing the [production] capacity of our cheese and our cream plants there, which are two really important key growth categories at Fonterra,” Goldsbury said.