Cracks appear between farmer groups

It hasn’t taken long for the cracks to appear in the ‘united farmers for change’ movement started by the Meat Industry Excellence group which held its first meeting in Gore a couple of weeks ago with a resoundingly successful response.

Debt is good under some circumstances

After my column last week about meat industry debt levels, Keith Cooper, CEO of Silver Fern Farms, took me to task for incorrectly reporting the situation with Silver Fern Farms’ debt facility.

Some big issues facing dairy and meat sectors

There are some major challenges confronting our agricultural sector at the moment which demand an intelligent response from the participants, whether farmers, processors or industry leaders.

Battle of employment philosophies spreading

The weekend’s announcement by AFFCO of a lockout at five of itsNorth Islandmeat plants comes hard on the heels of the three week strike by the Ports of Auckland stevedores, following several months of increasingly acrimonious negotiations.

Sheep and beef under threat from too much grass

This season’s excessive grass growth throughout the country except for Otago and Southland has generally been a cause for celebration among sheep and beef farmers, happy not to have to worry about drought and ecstatic about livestock prices.

Livestock prospects for 2012

Livestock processing volumes have been very low so far this season and the prices being paid to farmers are at historically high levels for both beef and lambs. This has got very little to do with the overseas markets

Meat companies likely to sustain profitability

It’s becoming harder to track meat industry performance with only two companies, Silver Fern Farms andAlliance, reporting annually within two months of the season’s end. ANZCO will continue to report to the Registrar of Companies at the end of March, while AFFCO is no longer required to publish its result. Therefore performance comparison is a matter of studying the available annual reports and gleaning scraps of information from farmer meetings and the grapevine.

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Union fees suffer from lack of disclosure

There’s a puzzling discrepancy in the annual accounts published by NZ Meat Workers and Related Trades Union Inc (NZMWU) because they apparently understate by a considerable margin the actual revenue and expenses of the different branches of the union, not to mention the balance sheet items held in each branch.

Quick wins important for sector strategy

It’s more than a month now since the release of the meat sector strategy, so I thought it was time to assess if any progress has been made since then.

International promotion is essential, whoever pays for it

The recent AGM at Te Kuiti was a watershed in more ways than one, not just because it symbolised Meat & Wool’s desire to connect more strongly with grassroots farmers, but also because Mike Petersen laid down a strong challenge to the meat industry.