Political colours
OPINION: Your old mate welcomes the proposed changes to local government but notes it drew responses that ranged from the reasonable…
FEDERATED FARMERS commends Environment Southland for listening to the concerns of hill and high country farmers, and delaying notification of the proposed Hill and High Country Development Plan Change.
HERD IMPROVEMENT company, Liberty Genetics, has released 10 years of breeding worth (BW) statistics on its Jersey, Friesian and Crossbred bull teams.
TEENAG PARTICIPANTS, Alisha Frost from Kamo High School and Deana Barfoote from Tauraroa Area School have been awarded a fully sponsored student exchange to Nambour State High School, on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, by the Whangarei A&P Society.
A BIOSECURITY dog has started her sniffing career in style – her detection work resulting in a Vietnamese air passenger being denied entry to New Zealand and later sent home.
AFTER A fierce day of competition Mitchel Hoare and Alex Reekers have earned top scores in the preliminary round of the World Young Shepherds Challenge.
SEVEN ORGANISATIONS have been to submit proposals to host the Food Safety Science and Research Centre.
DAVID KIDD of the organisation's Northern region is the 2014 ANZ Young Farmer Contest Champion.
FEDERATED FARMERS new president Dr William Rolleston says the organisation is a "broad church' which must represent the views of all its members.
HORTICULTURE NEW Zealand is looking forward to a time when all regional councils will manage their waterways in the same way, thanks to the release of the new National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management.
AUSTRALIAN RED meat farmers have a new market information tool – a smartphone app.
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UK SHEEP farmers are expecting a good season for domestically produced lamb, according to their industry-good organisation Eblex.
PRIMARY ITO has run its first shearing workshop, at Brownrigg Agriculture Farm, Hawke’s Bay, following its return to wool industry training.
ELDERS RURAL Services NZ is now 100% NZ-owned following its purchase by the Ashburton family-owned agribusiness company Carr Group, effective August 1.
BRUCE WILLS will shortly step down as Federated Farmers president after the normal three years in the job. Let’s be frank, he’s achieved a helluvva lot.
He was elected, with his board, to change the image of the federation. Many members had grown weary of the ‘out there’, somewhat confrontational style of his two predecessors. They wanted change and quite deliberately at Rotorua three years ago a group of them engineered this: Bruce Wills, William Rolleston and Anders Crofoot in particular were central to that movement for change.
Wills, the banker turned farmer and now farmer politician, was given a mandate to make Feds mainstream and win back credibility lost with the public, politicians and others in agribusiness. This was no easy task: Wills and his team had to walk a tightrope – being seen to advocate strongly on key issues for members, but not to get into unseemly public debates in the media with groups that didn’t share farmers vision for the future. Wills came across as a person of reason and willingness to listen and get sensible outcomes.
Wills has done all that was asked of him and more. In three years, Federated Farmers has again become recognised as a well led, credible lobby group capable of significant gains by reasoned argument. The task is far from complete: only in the last few weeks has the impact of the urban-rural gap been highlighted, and without Wills’ efforts it would have been much worse. There is a lot of ground to regain, but the effort is rightly directed and will likely carry on this way under Rolleston’s stewardship.
In 40 years Federated Farmers has not had a president better than Bruce Wills: he ranks with Sir Peter Elworthy, Brian Chamberlain and the late Alistair Polson. The Federation and New Zealand owe a lot to Wills, a leader worthy of significant recognition.
The Hound
True agenda
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