Cream of the crop
One of New Zealand's largest dairy farmers won the 2024 'Food, Beverage and Fibre Producer' award at the NZ Primary Industries Awards.
Corporate farmer Southern Pastures has been named among a group of 15 fund managers who practice leading responsible investment.
In a report released recently by the Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA), Southern Pastures was the only agricultural investment fund to be included in the annual Responsible Investment Benchmark Report New Zealand.
The fund owns 19 dairy farms in Waikato and Canterbury and is a 50% shareholder in Lewis Road Creamery.
“We’re absolutely convinced that dairy farming should be a force for environmental, not just economic, good,” said chairman Prem Maan.
“Our long-term objective is to achieve carbon-neutral dairy.”
Inclusion in the report means that Southern Pastures is seen to demonstrate a leading approach to responsible investment that is contributing to real world outcomes.
The company owns over 16,400 acres of farmland and produces milk under its own 10 Star Certified Values program, which was designed to meet its founders’ – including Maan and former All Black captain Graham Mourie – expectations of what ethical dairy farming should mean.
The independently audited standard covers grass-fed, free-range, climate-change mitigation, human welfare, animal welfare, and sustainability requirements. Southern Pastures does not, for example, permit phosphate from Western Sahara to be used on its farms or allow any of its cattle to be exported live.
“We’ve always had a cast-iron policy of not participating in the live export trade. We’re hopeful that the recent tragic loss of cattle and crew en route to China will force authorities to reconsider the policy that allows this to continue,” Mann says.
Southern Pastures’ milk produced under the 10 Star standard has been pivotal to the success of the Lewis Road Creamery grass-fed butter now sold by Whole Foods and other stores across the United States, and by Woolworths across Australia.
“When we started Southern Pastures ten years ago, our target was consumers wanting ‘values-for-money’,” Maan said. “We’re now at the point where the work that begins deep in the soil of our New Zealand farms is paying off on the shelf in overseas markets.”
Some farmers in the Nelson region are facing up to five years of hard work to repair their damaged properties caused by the recent devastating floods.
Federated Farmers is joining major industry-good bodies in not advocating for the Government to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
Managing director of Woolover Ltd, David Brown, has put a lot of effort into verifying what seems intuitive, that keeping newborn stock's core temperature stable pays dividends by helping them realise their full genetic potential.
Within the next 10 years, New Zealand agriculture will need to manage its largest-ever intergenerational transfer of wealth, conservatively valued at $150 billion in farming assets.
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.
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…