Labour and enviro questions flow

After formal presentations from chairman John Luxton, chief executive Tim Mackle, and chief financial officer Jeremy Hood, the meeting was opened to the floor of 10-15 farmers dotted among the DairyNZ staff, directors and other interested parties who made the trip to Timaru.

“Staffing is the most serious issue,” said Brian Stratford, a large-scale crop farmer and, for the past three years, a large dairy farm owner from just north of the town.

DairyNZ had done well to get 500 people into diploma-level training programmes, but with 120 farms converted for this season alone, and an average six staff per farm, it is woefully short of what’s needed, as is the 2% of DairyNZ’s budget dedicated to staffing, he said.

“We had a young guy who was going to come on board with us this year but we lost him to another dairy farm locally that was offering a nine-to-five job…. Another left us last year to go to a 500 cow farm milking once-a-day.”

Other delegates picked up on the problem of migrants who want to stay to work not getting visas renewed. “There needs to be pressure put on Government because there are huge problems in Canterbury… Very good people are having to leave the industry and go home when they don’t want to.”

Mackle acknowledged the problem but defended DairyNZ’s efforts, saying the published 2% of budget figure is an understatement as in total the “people spend is $8m, so it’s about 10% of the budget if you add all the bits together”.

DairyNZ’s strategy and investment leader for people and business, Mark Paine, pointed out levy money is leveraged with other organisations and Government, for example its $2.5m on industry training primes a $10m programme. A lot of work also goes into informing early career decisions in schools from year 10, not to mention the primary school targeted Rosie programmes and Go Dairy for those already in the job market.

Chairman John Luxton chipped in saying he thinks progress is being made “but we have seen such growth in the industry I think the education system has fallen behind”.

Another local farmer, John Saywell, Geraldine, said the biggest challenge for the industry is public perception. “It’s probably more acute in this area of the country because we’ve not had decades
of dairying.”

He called for DairyNZ to “engage” with people such as Mike Joy, and when Luxton said DairyNZ has “perhaps the best water scientists in the country now,” Saywell retorted “How come there’s only one [ie Joy] we ever hear from?”

A farmer from North Otago echoed Saywell’s concerns.

“As an industry I don’t think we’ve done a great job explaining how we need to be part of the [environmental] process as farmers.”

DairyNZ strategy and investment leader for sustainability, Rick Pridmore, said 500 farmers had now been trained as “environmental leaders” so that they could participate effectively on committees on environmental issues.

“You’ve got to seperate the people who squawk from the people who get results. Mike Joy hasn’t overturned one of our results yet….