Prime Minister's 'global' challenge
Prime Minister’s ‘global’ challenge
The Government wants Fonterra to be a global champion, Prime
Minister John Key said at the opening of the world’s largest milkpowder dryer
at Edendale, Southland, in February.
The $212 million, 27t/hour super dryer was the showcase of how
the co-op is already acting on that message. Edendale is now this country’s, and the world’s,
biggest dairy processing site with a capacity of 15m litres of milk/day.
The dryer, dubbed ED4 because it’s the fourth powder dryer
on the site, has a daily capacity of 4m litres of milk/day.
Key said Fonterra contributed one in every four export
dollars earned by this country, giving a real sense of how important the
cooperative was to the economy. At a $6/kg milksolids (MS) payout, Fonterra
will return $7.3b to farmers and the country’s economy.
On its own, ED4 will provide $600-$700m/year worth of
revenue to Fonterra while Edendale as a site will provide $2b/year. Key said Fonterra was critically important to
the growth of New Zealand and its success as a country.
Fonterra and Southland dairy farmers in particular have been
doing their bit for the economy, increasing milk flow out of the region by 40
percent in the past five years. And Key was quick to indicate the Government intends to help break
down some of the roadblocks to further dairy expansion. Through storage and
irrigation, more needed to made of South Island water that now flows out to
sea.
Global demand
It was also intent on removing some the burdens of
compliance and regulatory costs from farmers. With a more facilitative
regulatory and development environment, the ability of the dairy industry to
grow and better meet the increasing global demand for dairy products would be
enhanced.
Chief executive Andrew Ferrier said ED4 will add 10 percent
to Fonterra’s national milkpowder processing capacity, boosting it to 1.1m t/year
and increase Fonterra’s overall capacity by five percent. In total Fonterra
produces 2.2m t of dairy products.
“In this plant, the stainless steel, the huge cyclone, the
kilometres of piping and the technological wizardry that sits behind it, we’ve
got something that no other dairy processor in the world can match right now,”
he said.
“We can turn our farmers’ milk into product more efficiently
than any of our competitors. That’s at top quality and a lower cost, using less
of our key inputs like energy, and faster than anyone else.
“Lowering the average cost of production while lifting the
quality of product allows us to put more money back into what we pay out
farmers through milk price.”
Immensely proud
Edendale hub manager Keith Mason is immensely proud of the
new dryer and the work of staff and contractors. Babbage Consultants have
overseen the project, with Tetra Pak supplying the dryer and Ebert Construction
putting up the building.
It was commissioned at the start of the season and contains
advanced technology proprietary to Fonterra, some of which has been developed at
Edendale.
The technology allows ED4 to be the most efficient plant in
the world and will reduce Fonterra’s average cost of manufacturing across all
its operations. The cooperative has its own dedicated group of engineers to
install the proprietary technology once contractors have left the site.
Mason said it will take close to 200,000 litres or eight
tankers of milk/hour to keep ED4 running around the clock. Milk from a morning
milking on a Southland farm can be processed through the plant and be in 25kg
bags within 3.5 hours of arriving on site.
Edendale also has three robotic packing lines with
automatically guided vehicles (AGVs) filling bags and moving full pallets into
storage.
Seventy percent of the site’s finished product goes by rail
to Mosgiel and on to Port Chalmers near Dunedin, the rest by road.
Chinese market
Over a year, ED4 will produce enough milkpowder to fill more
than 5m bags. It will produce both ultra heat treated (UHT) whole milkpowder
(WMP) and instant WMP, largely for the Chinese market.
The whole Edendale site will be able to produce close to
400,000t of product when full and is expected to produce around 311,000t this
season of milkpowders, cheese, casein, anhydrous milk fat (AMF) and lactose.
This year the Whareroa and Clandeboye sites will edge out
Edendale in the production league tables producing a forecast 373,000t and
360,000t respectively.
“I guess you could say that once Edendale is full, Whareroa
and Clandeboye will prop the scrum,” Fonterra’s general manager of New Zealand
manufacturing Brent Taylor said.
The South Island now makes up a third of Fonterra’s milk
supply with growth of around six percent this year. The cooperative is
expecting that growth to continue in the South Island at the same rate, depending on dairying’s profitability,
environmental considerations and payout.
Despite the new super dryer, capacity in the South Island is
likely to be reached within three years and Fonterra is considering where the
next should be built. Further building expansion at Edendale is limited, sited
on a dog-leg corner on State Highway 1.
Clandeboye, north of Timaru, has space but building on a new
greenfields site hasn’t been totally ruled out.
At 127 years, Edendale is New Zealand’s oldest working dairy
processing site but a far cry from its early years as the local cheese factory.
|
PRINTABLE
VERSION
TOP
