Rural delivery: Unsung heroes hit their peak

By LIAM DANN PRIMARY industries editor

Spare a thought for the cows.

They certainly aren't going to get the kind of media attention that our glamorous and well-paid rugby heroes are doing their best to avoid in Australia.

But this week the nation's population of nearly six million dairy cows will put in a performance every bit as worthy of adulation.

The All Blacks only have to top 50 points in a game for the nation to sigh with satisfaction.

But as the peak producing day of the season approaches, the country's cows will start to churn out nearly 70 million litres of milk ... every day.

Trying to imagine that kind of volume can give you a headache.

Visualising a giant bowl of Weet-Bix won't help but the use of some slightly silly statistics might.

With 70 million litres you could give everybody in the United States a glass of milk each.

If you stacked 70 million one-litre milk cartons end on end, the resulting column would stretch for 14,000km - roughly the diameter of the earth.

That's also the length of all the railway tracks in Canada and the total coastline of China's 6500 islands. All of which proves not only how much milk the nation's cows produce, but how easy it is to get useless facts off the internet.

However you look at it, it's not bad for a day's work.

It's also a lot easier than trying to visualise the 14 billion litres of milk that will be processed over the whole season.

This represents more than 1.2 billion kilograms of milksolids being processed into milk products.

Of course, the real engineers of this milking miracle are the farmers and sharemilkers - the John Mitchells and Robbie Deans of the dairy herd, so to speak.

They go into overdrive at this time of year as peak milking coincides with calving to have them working almost around the clock.

It's also worth noting that northern dairy farmers and their cows have put in this record-breaking performance in appalling conditions.

In Northland the rain has turned paddocks into swamps and made life generally miserable for all concerned.

Things would have been much the same in the Waikato if it wasn't for the land being much drier than usual before the rain started.

Sadly, closing the stadium roof is not an option on these paddocks.

But come rain or shine, every year the volume produced on peak day is bigger.

That's good and bad news for Fonterra. Of course the more product it receives, the more it can sell and the more money it can make. But things aren't quite that simple.

The problem with peak days is that if you want to process all that milk you have to invest in more of the expensive stainless steel vats and equipment than you need for any other day of the year.

So peak days are quite expensive to deal with. To compensate, Fonterra has to devise complicated capital note schemes to reflect the value of milk produced at different times of the season.

Though at first glance the system appears to be designed primarily to confuse new Canadian chief executives, it isn't. It is actually designed to confuse everyone.

Except the cows of course. They don't care - they just keep their heads down and get on with the job.