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Rural Exchange’s Hamish McKay and Dominic George spoke to Murray Van Der Maas, Operations Manager at Organic Dairy Hub, about how Levno systems have helped alert their farmers to potential issues in real time.
Organic Dairy Hub are a co-operative of New Zealand organic dairy farmers. The only 100% farmer owned organic dairy co-op in the country, they supply liquid milk to a number of well-known brands, as well as their own brands within New Zealand, and they export products offshore. All of the Organic Dairy Hub’s farms are certified organic and all are fairly low in-put farming systems.
Rising costs are a significant factor for the co-op and so like many farmers they are looking at ways that they can manage costs. Their farmers are analysing at their inputs and their farm systems, and as a business, Organic Dairy Hub are looking at their logistics and freight costs, and optimising their operations.
Part of that optimisation has included ensuring that potential issues are addressed in real time and that wastage is minimised. “We have a big focus on-farm, in terms of milk quality and how that's managed and tracked. From a business compliance perspective, there's a big focus on milk quality and the traceability of milk from farm to customer and we use a few different tools to do that.”
“We use a Levno system on-farm. We pay for that for all of our suppliers and we do that so that it allows our suppliers and ourselves to manage milk quality on farm. It's quite a transparent process and it's in real time, which we've found to be really good. It’s saved our bacon and our supplier’s bacon on a few occasions when we've had power outages or say stirrers break down on vats or plate coolers not being turned on. If those sorts of things happen on-farm, then we can alert our farmers or our farmers are alerted and it averts dumping milk, which saves the farmer money but it also means as a company, we've got that milk to sell and do something with.”
Listen to the full interview above.