Friday, March 29, 2024

Life on the milk run

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A Fonterra Waitoa tanker driver has been on the job for 55 years, but has no plans to retire anytime soon as he enjoys his work too much.
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Bruce Cryer has been a tanker driver at the Waitoa Anchor site, as it was called back then, since September 20, 1967 and despite being on the job for 10-11 hours each day, loves it. He is one of the longest-serving drivers at the co-op but reckons there are a few guys older than him at other sites.

“I was lucky, I found something I liked doing and could do every day,” Cryer says.

“I sometimes get asked when I am planning to retire but at this stage, I have no plans to hang up my keys. And management is more than happy for me to keep going.

“It can be long hours but it doesn’t really feel like it. It’s really neat being in the tanker and watching the scenery go past and you see things you wouldn’t see from a car – it makes it interesting.”

He has seen a lot of changes over the years, including the tanker types. When he first started at Waitoa, he found himself behind the wheel of an S Model Bedford capable of carrying 7000 litres.

“It was a six-cylinder, 129hp 5-speed diesel that struggled to get into top gear,” he says.

“Depending on the size of the farm sheds, we could only pick up a couple of farms and often had to be aware of and work out if we had enough weight in the tanker to get up a hill but we don’t have that worry now.”

Now, the tankers are 540hp, automatic and can carry 28,000 litres. All Fonterra tankers across New Zealand are monitored and controlled from a central location in Hamilton.

The size of the tankers now means he may get to 3-4 farms before having to return to base.

“It depends on the size of the farm and time of year as to the volumes. Sometimes we would have to leave some milk in the vat and go back and pick up the rest or talk to other drivers and organise pick-up,” he explains.

“Now with everything computerised the control centre can see the state of play at a glance and organise pick-up.”

The tankers are fitted with GPS, reducing the chance of getting lost in the countryside while on a new or unfamiliar run.

“The whole truck is computerised and we can’t get lost now. We just follow the blue line on the screen on the dash,” he says.

“If we get delayed, say because of roadworks or traffic, we can put in a reason why and there are no issues.

“One year, I left Hautapu headed towards Tirau and was trucking along until I struck a long line of cars. I had never seen anything like it in the country before. It was the Christmas holidays and people were just moving around but it was incredibly slow going. Nowadays we strike that kind of traffic a lot more often.”

He describes the technology on board as “amazing”.

“It works really well and the control centre has refined the system so that no one is doing excessive hours. I think it is really neat that every supplier gets their milk collected. No one gets left behind or forgotten,” he says.

He does not mind the fact that Big Brother in the control centre is watching his tanker’s every move.

Bruce has seen a lot of changes over the years, including the tanker types. When he first started at Waitoa, he found himself behind the wheel of an S Model Bedford but now drives a fully computerised 540hp automatic tanker.

“It doesn’t bother me and in fact it actually benefits everyone, but sometimes I do feel guilty if I talk with the farmer a bit too long.

“In fact, in the control centre, they can see at a glance where we are and if there are issues at one factory, they can divert us straight away to another.”

It is quite different from the good old days when he would turn up to a farm and have a good yarn and catch up with the farmer.

“I would arrive on-farm at 7.30-8am and sometimes the farmer would still be milking, so I would wait until they finished,” he recalls.

“I would have a really good chat with them while they finished up so I got to know a lot of them quite well.”

It is something he actually misses now as farms have got bigger and farmers are busier and are often not at the shed when he pulls up.

“Farmers are nice people and some of them are real hard cases. It is neat to chat with them while I am pumping the milk as you learn stuff but mostly, they are not at the shed now,” he says.

Cryer would often spend two weeks on the same run before switching but that has also changed. Now, his run can change with every shift.

“I work four days on doing two days of day shifts and two days of night shifts, then have four days off. But some of the other drivers here do three days on three days of night shift then three days off. I guess it just works well and suits them or perhaps I am just a special case,” he says.

“I can go all night and see nobody but when I pull up in the mornings, if the farmer is around I always pop my head into the shed and say hello.

“We do not do the same run each shift either and can end up going anywhere really. I can pick up milk from farms and drop the load off at Tirau or pick up from farms at Te Puke and take it down to Edgecumbe and bring a load of something back to Waitoa.”

In the shoulders of the season he has been sent to Northland, Bay of Plenty and King Country and occasionally, met up with other tanker drivers from Pahiatua and Longburn and swapped trucks.

He estimates in any one shift, he would easily travel 400 kilometres locally and sometimes for example, if he gets diverted to another site or does a special pick-up from another area such as the one he did recently to Whangarei, the mileage can be a lot higher.

“I ended up going into the back hills of Whangarei and only picked up from two farms, one was 2000 litres and the rest of the tanker load came from the other farm,” he says.

“They were winter milk suppliers and I brought the load back to Waitoa.”

During the winter months he would often change hats and did a couple of seasons in the workshop where they would strip the truck down, check and clean everything such as the valves, vents, milk pumps and comms gear then fit it onto the new trucks.

“It was interesting learning that and then other odd jobs would pop up in the off-season so we kept busy,” he says.

Driving has been his passion since he was a youngster. He grew up on a dairy farm on the edge of Hauraki Plains and attended Kaihere Primary School and Hauraki Plains College in Ngatea.

He was a typical country lad that enjoyed doing odd jobs on the farm and catching eels in the creek.

He learnt, as most young country kids did, to drive the tractor at around the age of 10.

“Dad used to have to put blocks on the pedals so I could reach. I really enjoyed it and helped out with haymaking and that sort of thing.”

He says he wasn’t that great at school work so left and milked cows for a year. He then went to work for a contractor and drove bulldozers and diggers.

When he left school his reading and writing skills were not great, but he did get up to speed with his literacy skills through Fonterra when management decided that everyone needed to be at School Certificate standard.

”We had a teacher come in and made sure we were at that standard. I took that opportunity to get me going and I am really grateful for that opportunity,” he says.

Joining Waitoa Anchor in 1967, he spent the first week riding shotgun with other tanker drivers and learning what to do at the farm when picking up milk and what to do at the site when he came back with a load.

“Then they chucked us in a cab and sent us out,” he says.

“In those days, all the farms were within a 50km radius so it was a relatively small area. I never got lost as I had a pretty good sense of direction nor did I ever have any doubts about the job.”

This old photo is believed to have been taken around 1968 showing the team at Waitoa Anchor. Bruce Cryer is in the front row fourth from the left.

Pulling up at a farm he had to collect a sample bottle that had its own unique number on it and sometimes things would get a bit hectic in the mornings looking for bottles but he soon learnt and put a good system into place.

Returning to the site to offload, he would pull into the tanker bay, take the samples to the blue room where the tester would check them then go and pump the milk into the tanks.

“At Waitoa, we used to make milk powder, baby food and had the canning plant there. In the early days we had the butter factory too but now, we make UHT,” he says.

He is married to Marlene and between them they have four children and seven grandchildren. His son Steven works at the Waitoa plant as a lead driver and is his boss at times.

“My wife used to sometimes ask me when am I going to retire but she has given up asking now,” he says.

“I am 73 years old so never say never. I might just wake up one morning and decide that’s it but I do enjoy working and besides, what would I do?”

In his younger years, he did a lot of scuba diving with the Piako Dive Club, rode motorbikes with a group in Morrinsville, played rugby and basketball but retired from all of that.

He is the only one left from his original crew back from the early days as everyone else has either retired or passed away.

“We had a reunion at Waitoa recently and it was great to catch up with a lot of people I had worked with. There are still a few of the older guys around but none are still working with me – it’s just me still trucking along and loving it,” he says.

This article first appeared in the July 2022 issue of Dairy Farmer.

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