BANNISTER Downs Dairy’s innovative Creamery, a commercial robotic dairy and milk processing plant doubling as a tourist facility soon to open near Northcliffe, is already winning awards.
The striking looking buildings and cattle yards complex, partly clad in ‘chilli red’ coloured anodised aluminium, garnered four awards at the recent 2018 WA Master Builders-Bankwest Excellence in Construction Awards.
The Creamery won the Best Industrial Building award in the $20-$50 million category.
The facade – completed from 1262 individual panels cut and folded to shapes to suit the intricate design, anodised in New South Wales by the only company in Australia able to match the required colour, trucked to Northcliffe in batches and installed over six months – led to two awards.
DENMAC, the contractor responsible for the cladding, won the overall Subcontractor Of The Year award, as well as Subcontractor Of The Year For Cladding in the roofing and curtain wall category, from its involvement in the Creamery project.
Richard Bell from Bunbury’s Perkins Builders, which was appointed overall construction contractor for the Creamery in 2016, won the Project Manager Of The Year award.
As previously reported in Farm Weekly, the Creamery, built on a green fields site away from the existing dairy and processing plant on Banister Downs’ Daubney family farm near Northcliffe, will include WA’s first robotic rotary dairy.
A voluntary De Laval automatic milking rotary (AMR) system capable of handling 540 cows three times a day, will supplement the existing dairy which is operating at capacity.
The Australian subsidiary of German manufacturer GEA Group has installed the low-temperature pasteurising and processing equipment and the production side of the building includes cool room storage and product dispatch facilities.
The other half of the creamery will include offices, a new Bannister Downs corporate headquarters, a café and function area, gallery space and a glass-walled second story viewing area from where visitors will be able to watch the whole process, from cows coming in to be milked to product on pallets being loaded into trucks.
Bannister Downs co-principal and farm and land manager Mat Daubney said the new processing plant was being trialled with milk from the existing dairy and installation of the AMR system and electronics was expected to be completed and tested next month.
“I think they’ll be a lot of interest in that (the AMR system),” Mr Daubney said.
The digital information stream from the system’s milk monitoring and its ability to identify rising heat or somatic cell counts in individual udder quarters on individual cows days before visible symptoms of problems like mastitis became apparent, would contribute further to Bannister Downs’ quality record, he said.
Mr Daubney said he was pleased with the building industry awards for the creamery.
“The new Perth (Optus) Stadium was in the same category, so the competition was pretty stiff,” he said.
Optus Stadium won the Best Project award and a number of other major awards.