The Southern plants in Stirling and Edendale hit peak processing late last week.

About 80 million litres of milk was processed a day in New Zealand in peak season, he said.

The Southern sites were processing more than 13.3million litres of milk a day.

“It’s quite a chunk of that [national] milk pool.”

The peak volumes were weather-dependent but were expected to continue in Edendale until the end of the year but Stirling would continue for longer.

“At Stirling we process 1.8million litres a day and we’ll be at that until the end of May — it doesn’t go away for us — it just keeps on coming.”

The Stirling plant operated 24/7 for nine months of the year and employed about 110 staff including tanker drivers.

More than 600 staff were employed at Edendale.

The staff were in their third season of taking Covid-19 procedures and precautions to continue operating and processing milk.

“We are doing pretty well — the cows don’t know there is Covid out there and they keep on processing.”

The Covid-19 measures went beyond what the Government mandated, he said.

“We are pretty cautious.”

Measures include staff wearing masks, allowing only essential workers on site including the closure of the shop on site selling cheese to the public.

“It hasn’t been opened for a couple of years now, which is a shame because it services the community but it is what it is, right?.”

Speaking to the Otago Daily Times on the day it was announced there were positive Covid-19 cases in Christchurch, he said it was too soon to tell how it might impact the plant but they were prepared.

“We will get to a point where we really knuckle down and step up our controls, which we’ve done before.”