Yet just as we got through that the Eastern Ukraine turned ugly. So tit-for-tat sanctions that had absolutely nothing to do with dairy has effectively put up to three billion more litres on to the international market place.That's why GDT is down.
Yes, the move towards more value will reduce this but it will never eliminate it.
Even Tatua, the value-add star of our industry, is forecasting a more circumspect $6.50 per kilogram of milksolids. That's down from the all-time record of $9 last season.
So here are a few facts to make us a little better. The 2014 Tetrapak Dairy Index says global milk volume has to grow 36 per cent within the next 10 years just to keep up with the 2.3 more mouths joining the human race each second over those leaving it.
But instead of going on about this, I want to talk about a new issue I suspect a number of farmers will nod in agreement when they read it. Especially those in Canterbury.
That issue is cellphone coverage, since smart phones are increasingly more important for farmers to do our day job. Being a farmer representative, I seem to have developed as close a relationship to my phone as I do with my wife.
Two years ago we had marginal coverage on my farm so, though I had a phone, really it was just for use when I went to town. That was until Federated Farmers' partner Vodafone got stuck in and suddenly I had coverage all over the farm. Bloody marvellous.
I could finally live the dream and even got on to Twitter.
A fully connected phone helps me to speak to the media as a Federated Farmers' representative while being on-farm with an Artificial Insemination Technician. I also wrote the draft of this column while getting the cows in, putting to bed the lie that blokes can't multitask. Smartphones are more and more important for straight up farming with many apps now available.
I have turned the small mountain of paperwork farmers are expected to fill-in into electronic forms instead. I can also record all the other information we're interested in like useful farm information online; if any of my staff need to know how to fix something then they can readily access written notes, photos or even the right YouTube video. Even Fonterra's smartphone app provides their farmer-shareholders with farm production and quality information. Not only do we bank online but Xero and MYOB offer financial dashboards so that you can use your phone to check your budgets.
With precision agriculture using apps to control irrigation and fertiliser mapping, it won't be long before remote control of your Skybox takes home automation out on-farm to report and even control fence voltage, water pressure, tank levels and vat temperatures. To help plan your day, you'll be able to use an app to fly a drone over your property whilst your cuppa cools. This all means that instead of spending time collecting data to make decisions, the data will come to you in a form that gives you more time to make better decisions.
People also say that you don't know what you've got until it's gone and I spent last week in the third-world while Vodafone upgraded 'my' tower as part of the Rural Broadband Initiative.
Scratch that, former Feds board member Jeanette Maxwell found coverage in the third world was way better than Canterbury.
When you put almost non-existent cellphone coverage together with power cuts, it has you doing a John McEnroe in that 'you cannot be serious'. New Zealand is so vulnerable to kinks in two bits of infrastructure.
Of course, Cantabrians will respond that at least I've mostly got 1G voice. I know when I go to Canterbury it's hard to drive or even be on-farm and have a conversation that doesn't drop or sound like it's two cans connected by a length of string.
While the RBI promises 'bigger, better and brighter' it overlooks that there's places in New Zealand that need reliable 1G, let alone 4G, and that's a question Federated Farmers needs to ask.
