Dairy Editing and Proofreading Services

The milk cheque is four hundred dollars lighter than the month before and the volume was the same. Somewhere in the statement is a somatic cell deduction, a bactoscan band, a butterfat adjustment and a levy — and the producer either understands which of those to act on this week, or concludes that the processor moves the numbers around and stops reading.

We edit what dairy processors, cooperatives and farms produce — milk payment schedules and producer statements, quality standards and penalty structures, supply agreements and volume commitments, farm assurance and animal welfare documentation, herd health plans and veterinary protocols, notices of price and schedule changes, field officer material for producers, and processing plant procedures. Our editors work on the documents that pass between the plant and the farm.

The milk payment schedule and its statement is where a processor's relationship with its suppliers is made or lost, and its failure is a deduction that appears without being explicable. A producer who cannot see which component cost them money cannot fix it, and will assume the worst. We work through these so each component of the payment is shown separately with the measured value, the band it fell into and the money attached, since a net figure conceals whether the problem was quality, composition or a levy; so the testing basis for each component is stated — the sampling frequency, the averaging period and whether it is a rolling or calendar measure — because a penalty triggered by a three-month rolling average behaves nothing like one triggered by a single result; so the threshold at which a payment changes is given as a number with the distance the producer currently sits from it, given that this is the only line that changes behaviour; so the appeal and retest route is described with the time limit and who pays; so any change to the schedule is notified with the effect on a typical supply rather than as a revised table; so bonuses are shown as achievable or not with what would be required; and so the statement is laid out so the largest movement since last month is visible first. Schedules written this way get read and acted on.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including payment schedules, producer data, supply agreements and unpublished price changes. We are editors rather than dairy specialists, veterinarians or accountants, and we offer no view on milk quality, pricing or herd management. What we can do is make the statement explicable at the kitchen table.