Milk processors match or exceed Fonterra’s record $10/kgMS opening forecast for 2025-26 season
Milk processors are either matching or beating Fonterra's record $10/kgMS opening forecast milk price as the 2025-26 season gets underway.
Taupo-based Maori dairy company Miraka took the top honours at this year’s Biosecurity Awards.
The company scooped both the industry award and the supreme award in the competition for its Te Ara Miraka programme, which boosted biosecurity awareness and culture change with its farmer suppliers.
Close to 200 people attended the awards ceremony held in Parliament’s banquet hall and hosted by the Minister of Agriculture Damien O’Connor.
The awards are designed to recognise organisations, volunteers, businesses, iwi, hapū and tamariki around the country who are contributing to biosecurity. In the case of Miraka it was Te Ara Miraka, their excellence programme which incentivises farmers by way of an increase in their annual milk pay-out to improve a whole range of practices on their farms. These include environmental, milk quality, food safety, animal welfare, health and safety and biosecurity.
Both the industry award and the supreme award recognised the fact that Miraka identified that biosecurity was missing from the programme and set about working with external parties to develop a special training course. Each farmer was trained in biosecurity risk assessment, risk mitigation and how to create and implement a biosecurity plan within their business.
It was a special night for Miraka milk supply manager, Grant Jackson who is responsible for the Te Ara Miraka programme.
He says the programme has been operating for about five years and says they are starting to see some significant behavioural changes back on farm, which benefits the individual businesses, the industry and the community.
Jackson says like any project of this nature there are always the early adopters and they bring along the others over time.
Boutique Waikato cheese producer Meyer Cheese is investing in a new $3.5 million facility, designed to boost capacity and enhance the company's sustainability credentials.
OPINION: The Government's decision to rule out changes to Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) that would cost every farmer thousands of dollars annually, is sensible.
Compensation assistance for farmers impacted by Mycoplama bovis is being wound up.
Selecting the reverse gear quicker than a lovestruck boyfriend who has met the in-laws for the first time, the Coalition Government has confirmed that the proposal to amend Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) charged against farm utes has been canned.
Holstein Friesian excellence was front and centre at the 2025 Holstein Friesian NZ (HFNZ) Awards, held recently in Invercargill.
The work Fonterra has done with Ballance Agri-Nutrients Ltd, LIC and Ravensdown to save farmers time through better data connections has been recognised with a national award.
OPINION: Years of floods and low food prices have driven a dairy farm in England's northeast to stop milking its…
OPINION: An animal activist organisation is calling for an investigation into the use of dairy cows in sexuallly explicit content…