Which future for Meat & Fibre?

Federated Farmers Meat & Fibre industry group were treated to strikingly divergent views as idealism faced hard commercial reality. Silver Fern Farms Chief Executive, Keith Cooper put up a differing vision for the industry’s future to that proposed by Lincoln University’s, Professor Caroline Saunders.

“These two provocative sessions were poles apart about the direction of New Zealand and our industry,” says Bruce Wills, Federated Farmers Meat & Fibre chairperson.

“On one hand, Professor Saunders implored farmers to get with the clean-green programme and embrace premium markets. In this she put up the wine industry and Zespri as exemplars but her message was quality over quantity.

“She also pushed the need to embrace sustainability in order to retain market access. What concerned me was how she described the potential for governments to start editing what is placed on supermarket shelves. If it comes to fruition, it’s a scary view of the future and the role of choice.

“Professor Saunders said New Zealand needed to trumpet its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) to market just how good we were at low carbon farming. Needless to say it sparked considerable discussion, especially since earlier, Keith Cooper had put forward some hard commercial realities to us.

“Silver Fern Farms has raised the ETS with its overseas buyers and their response has eliminated any shred of hope I had that the ETS could add value to what we produce.

“Apparently the general response of these buyers was that they’d ‘never heard of it’ and didn’t really care. These buyers will not pay a premium for carbon neutral food.

“Don’t get me wrong, they’ll welcome it as a tick-box item but won’t pay more for our meat protein and that’s the rub for farmers. It means yet more erosion of our profitability as the ETS hits us doubly so.

“New Zealand has jumped every hoop, down to making a profit per lamb of just $9, if we’re lucky. Professor Saunders was unable to show how jumping more hoops will achieve greater profitability. That ‘P’ word is absolutely vital for our industry’s survival.

“Yet Keith Cooper told us that the T150 campaign, being $150 for a good mid-season lamb is achievable. Yet to get there farmers will have to invest into research as well as embracing genetic technologies.

“Moreover, Keith laid it on the line that aggregation was vital to T150. He added that New Zealand was ripe for the picking by overseas interests. It will start with the means of production, being our farms, followed by the means of processing that will be folded into existing distribution channels these interests control.

“Perhaps as a result, corporate New Zealand may be sparked into action, but clearly, distribution is the vital cog that our dairy colleagues have and we lack.

“These were two completely differing views of the near future, but it’s clear we have big decisions as to which future to follow,” Mr Wills concluded.