Farmers still in the throes of calving their herds were left with the prospect of missing several milkings unless they had access to generators. But tales of marathon milkings soon emerged as neighbours took on cows for others, some not only milking them but finding overnight accommodation in precious spring paddocks.
One such farm was a 1000-cow farm at Hinds in mid-Canterbury where the milking plant kept on for 22 hours non-stop from 6.30am Wednesday until 4am on Thursday before starting up again at 7.30am and continuing through until 11pm.
At the helm and unwilling to leave their posts throughout the ordeal were farm manager Shaun Kelly and farm owner Vernon Whyte. About 4500 cows came through the 60-bail rotary farm dairy in the first 22-hour period with two neighbouring farms needing help. Kelly said one herd stayed the night rather than go through the logistical nightmare of walking them down the road and back again while the other had direct access to the farm through a boundary fence and went back home.
Staff from the other farms were on hand so everyone mucked in where needed but pushing cows up onto the platform when it goes the opposite way to what they were used to took extra time. Whyte said the Milfos plant didn’t skip a beat throughout the event and everyone coped well with the different mobs of cows including colostrums from each of the three farms.
Fast action
Read Industrial farm dairy builders came to the rescue with the generator right at the start of the crisis.
“They had one sitting back at their workshop and offered it to us so we didn’t muck around, we bought it off them right there and they came over and mounted it for us straight away,” Whyte said.
Local electricians were quickly on the job hooking it up to the farm dairy that had been pre-wired when it was built just a year ago. A generator had been on the cards for the new conversion last year but got put on hold.
Driven by the tractor power take-off the generator could pump out 65 kilowatts of power and kept the milking operation on the 1000-cow farm running until the following Saturday at 5pm.
“Every time something stopped that was drawing off the generator we had to ramp down the tractor so we didn’t fry anything. All that added to the time it took,” Kelly said.
Fonterra was outstanding.
“On those first few days I just needed to ring them and there’d be a tanker here in 20 minutes,” Whyte said.
The tanker came up the drive seven times in the first 24 hours.
The farm has one 21,000 litre milk vat, another 19,000l milk vat and a 21,000l colostrum vat. As soon as one milk vat was full the tanker got called in.
Fonterra was also accommodating over grades as one of the neighbouring herds hadn’t been milked for 48 hours. Generator power was enough to run the plant and cool the milk as well as run one of the two hot water cylinders. Solar panels on the roof of the farm dairy heated the other.
Milking was stopped briefly during the first day to run a hot wash through the plant and then it was back into it, Whyte said.
Somatic cell counts (SCC) for the Whytes’ cows milkflows had settled back down and had only spiked at 180,000 SCC/ml but it had taken a bit longer for cows’ milkflows to come back up, Kelly said. Having extra cows on the farm at such a critical time for pasture growth had also thrown the spring rotation planner well out of kilter as had the need to cut fences to allow cows to get at stock water races.
“The tractors were busy and we just had to open cows up and make sure they were well fed and watered,” he said.
“You just have to do what you have to at the time but we’ve got to deal with that now.”
Both are philosophical and typically understated about the legendary efforts they went to looking after their own cows as well as their neighbours’.
“It’s just what you do.”
