Thursday 23 February 2012

Feb 19 - Riding the Dairy Wave

Visited Synlait - a large milk processing factory which converts raw milk to powder for export around the world.

Went to look at a traditional milking bale. Dairying in New Zealand is a high value industry with many traditional cropping businesses converting to dairy.

Robotic milking is a new innovation in milking where the principle is that the cows come to the milk shed at their discretion 2-3 times a day. The automatic robotic milker puts the cups on, extracts the milk, removes the cups, gives a grain ration and records data on each individual cow. This technology is likely to play a bigger role in the future of NZ dairying.

We met the Director of Fonterra, a large milking corporation. It was interesting to learn that dairy represents 25% of NZ Gross Domestic Product and all agricultural activities in NZ contribute approx 60% to the NZ GDP. The Australian agricultural sector contributes about 1.8% to Australia's GDP.

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