Friday, March 29, 2024

Record international demand for Kiwi dairy ingenuity

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September was the highest export revenue month on record for dairy technology company, Waikato Milking Systems. This is good news for a company established in the 1980s to manufacture herringbone farm dairies and components like milk meters and clusters, principally for the domestic market. Thirty years on and Waikato Milking Systems is one of the largest manufacturers of rotary dairy platforms and dairy components in the world. Just back from the World Dairy Expo in Wisconsin United States, chief executive Dean Bell said the company’s development of the unique Centrus composite dairy platforms has sealed Waikato Milking Systems’ position as one of the world’s leading dairy innovators.
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“We are known for our herringbones and rotary systems which meet the needs of most farmers around the world, but the composite decks have given us clear differentiation in the large-scale dairy environments of China and the United States where thousands of cows are milked through dairies which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“We are starting to get traction around our international growth plans. At the moment, two thirds of our business is domestic and one third export but through innovation and acquisition we plan to increase our international business to around 70% of our turnover.

“The 60 bail composite platform is 80% lighter and five times stronger than concrete and the largest, Centrus, the 84 bail, is 80% lighter and eight times stronger than a concrete equivalent," Bell said. 

“The difference in weight and its impact on wear, tear and maintenance are obvious when you consider that an 84 bail concrete rotary platform, without cows, weighs around 45t while a Centrus 84 weighs 8t. Add 67t of cows to both decks and you can appreciate that the extreme weight of concrete platforms exacts more wear and tear on the support and turning structures requiring a higher degree of maintenance than the composite alternative.

The rotary dairy platform was designed by a Kiwi farmer in the 1960s and Bell said that, until composite materials became available in the 1990s, steel and concrete was the structure of choice for most farmers.

“Several decades of building concrete platforms, and an appreciation of the emerging and special challenges of large-scale farmers, made us realise that we could harness new technology to design and build a platform which would answer two of the Achilles heels of rotary platforms.

“The biggest issue is weight. Everyone went to concrete because it was easy to fabricate on site, easy to use and less skilled resource was needed to construct compared to steel, so what you gained in weight was offset by the ease of building. But you lost precision in the final product.

“So long as everything is built perfectly it will handle the weight but building on site introduces a variability which, ultimately, accentuates the weight problem – especially with very large platforms.”

The second Achilles heel of traditional concrete platforms that Waikato Milking Systems set out to overcome concerned precision.

“New Zealand dairies operate on average for 4-6 hours a day. In America many farm dairies are in constant use, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In other words one year in a US dairy is equivalent to six years in New Zealand.

“Added to this is the fact that Northern Hemisphere cows are heavier than their Kiwi counterparts – sometimes by as much as twice the weight – giving you an idea of the extreme, unremitting pressure their dairies are under.

Bell said key markets for the company’s rotary systems and technology include New Zealand, the United States, China, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and Russia.

“We are excited by the growing level of enquiry and demand for our products but realise that, to lead the world with rotaries we have to clearly be better than anyone else and that means everyone involved in each aspect of the product has to be focussed on being the best in the world.

“All our design and manufacturing is done in New Zealand and our goal is to have staff, and warehouses of backup supplies, in all the countries of the world we supply to. We need to live and breathe the market with an intense and intimate knowledge of the demands farmers face so we can tailor our products and systems to meet and overcome those demands.

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