I recently came across a cracking little website that dairy farmers everywhere might like to take a look at.
For reasons best known to myself I was trying to work out how the price of milk in New Zealand, expressed in "NZ$/kg of milk solids", converted into a price that British milk producers could understand.
This involved trying to work out how many litres of milk a kilogram of solids equated to, what the exchange rate was and what co-efficient to use to convert from New Zealand milk to British milk.
My estimate that Kiwi milk producers were getting over 30p/litre seemed suspiciously high! But then I was directed to http://www.xcheque.com/ and its purpose-built Global Milk Price Calculator.
At the click of a few buttons I was able to establish that the latest price estimate for New Zealand farmers of NZ$5.70/kg milk solids equates to 18.5p/litre in UK terms, or 20.8 cents/litre if you farm in the Euro-zone, or 27.9 yen/litre if you're in Japan...
But there's far more to http://www.xcheque.com/than this calculator. The site is a fast-developing hub for all sorts of international dairy news, including market developments, policy changes, trade/price data and opinion. What's more, it has just started plugging this blog on its news pages - so it has to be good!
While on the subject of useful web services, I've also been having a look at the NFU's Milk Contract Health Check. Part of the organisation's new contracts campaign, it is designed to help farmers understand the content and effectiveness of their existing milk contracts.
It asks a series of questions about what is important in a milk contract, how a farmer's existing contract deals with those issues, and how the NFU's new draft contract could improve the situation.
Whether you think your contract is the best thing since sliced bread, or the worst document you've ever signed, the Milk Contract Health Check is certainly a useful starting point to weigh up the various elements.
And to prove that good things come in threes, here is another plug - this time for DairyCo's Interactive Milk Price Calculator. This has been around for a while, but is still a really useful tool for anyone considering changing milk buyer.
Simply by entering details of your milk constituents, hygiene scores and monthly volumes, it is possible to find out exactly how much each of a long list of buyers would be willing to pay for your milk. Give it a go. It could get you thinking!
* For more blog postings, click here. And why not sign up for regular e-mail alerts.
We are paid per kilo of milk solids in NZ because most (around 95%) of the milk we produce is turned into cheese, butter and milk powder for export, not sold as fresh milk on the local market.
What farmers receive is only part of the equation - how much it costs to produce is equally important.
A news story last year saying it cost German farmers 38 Euro cents to produce a litre of milk sent me on a search for the costs in NZ.
The latest data was for the 06/07 season and it was 38 NZ cents - which would be about 18 Euro cents - ie our costs of production were about half those in Germany.
That was an average and there are a lot of variables such as whether or not irrigation is needed, and costs have risen steeply since then. However, our production costs will still be much lower than those in Europe because our dairy cows are pasture grazed all year round.
Ele Ludemann