Top wool advocate bales out
The conversion of productive farmland into trees has pretty much annihilated the wool industry.
A new NZ National Standard for Wool has been established, under the New Zealand Farm Assurance Programme (NZFAP).
Fifteen new wool companies have signed up to the NZFAP, which provides assurance to customers and consumers about the integrity, traceability, biosecurity, food safety, environmental sustainability and animal health and welfare of New Zealand's primary sector products.
The 15 wool companies join 17 red meat processors, one other wool company, a sheep milk company, Beef + Lamb NZ (B+LNZ) and Deer Industry NZ (DINZ) who are already in the programme.
It will enable the new wool industry members to adopt the NZFAP as a NZ National Standard for wool. There are currently around 8,000 NZFAP-certified sheep, beef, and deer farmers, with about 6,500 farming sheep. Membership of the NZFAP means that all wool companies that sign up will immediately have access to Farm Assured wool from these 6,500 properties. For farmers there is no change as the wool standards are already included in the NZFAP audits.
New Zealand Farm Assurance Incorporated (NZFAI), which owns the NZFAP, and the National Council of New Zealand Wool Interests (NCNZWI), have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which has paved the way for membership.
NZFAI chair Nick Beeby says extending the NZFAP certification to wool companies galvanises the primary industry collaborative power into a single and robust New Zealand assurance story.
“We’re all telling the same origin and assurance story, which the wool exporters can now share with their discerning manufacturers and retail brand owners. This initiative creates a single multi-sector assurance standard, eliminates duplication, and further reduces cost, which have been NZFAI priorities from the beginning.”
Beeby claims the adoption of the NZFAP as a national standard for wool will also help to drive consistency in grower standards and provide a platform for the standardisation of New Zealand wool and command a price premium for the benefit of growers.
NCNZWI Craig Smith says it’s a great opportunity for the wool industry to leverage off this foundation and establish a complementary National Standard for wool.
“The development of a unified New Zealand wool assurance standard will support increased differentiation and demand for New Zealand wool in the global marketplace,” he adds.
“This provides the value-chain assurances we need around land management, origin, traceability, animal health and welfare and gives us the ability to work with the red meat sector to make this happen.”
Smith concedes that the wool sector has been under-performing in a challenging consumer market, but believes this move creates a unique and compelling value proposition for New Zealand wool.
NZPork has appointed Auckland-based Paul Bucknell as its new chair.
The Government claims to have delivered on its election promise to protect productive farmland from emissions trading scheme (ETS) but red meat farmers aren’t happy.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
OPINION: Sir Lockwood Smith has clearly and succinctly defined what academic freedom is all about, the boundaries around it and the responsibility that goes with this privilege.
OPINION: For years, the ironically named Dr Mike Joy has used his position at Victoria University to wage an activist-style…
OPINION: A mate of yours truly has had an absolute gutsful of the activist group SAFE.