Engaging better with Maori farmers

Its special advisor on Māori issues Clinton Hemana has been running a series of 'Kai and Korero' meetings around the country, but mainly in the North Island, to meet with Māori dairy farmers.

DairyNZ farm performance manager Sarah Speight told Dairy News that Māori are very important to the sector and the Kai and Korero sessions were developed to engage with Māori at the Trustee level to identify the key things that they wanted to know from DairyNZ.

She admits that in the past, DairyNZ probably hasn't engaged as well as it should with Māori and there are now several initiatives planned to change that.

Speight says the Kai and Korero sessions have been good because they enabled both parties to state their needs - DairyNZ to make Māori aware of the DairyNZ priorities and Māori to put their view forward, which Sarah Speight says was about getting more of their people into the dairy industry and back on the land.

"I have attended a few of the Kai and Korero sessions and the overall feedback is that Māori haven't felt that DairyNZ has been particularly applicable to them, but they are now pleasd that we want to engage with them. The thing I enjoy with Māori farmers is they are not afraid to say what they think, and they raise some really good points about how do we get our young people back on the land and what can DairyNZ do to help," she says.

Speight says the issue going forward is to make sure that DairyNZ engages with Māori in an authentic way and in a way that fits in with their culture and expectations. She says the starting point is for field staff to have the skills to do than and ultimately to recruit more Māori staff. She says they are very lucky having Hemana to assist them as he is a member of a number of trusts and is highly skilled in dealing with Māori.

The feedback DairyNZ is getting is that the Kai and Korero sessions are a good start - but what next?

Speight says the next phase of Clinton's work is to develop further plans to take this forward and this may include special field days for Māori farmers.

She says this will likely be done in conjunction with some key Māori farms, such as Pouarua Farms near Ngatea on the Hauraki Plains - a Māori trust which was a finalist in the Ahuwhenua Trophy for the top Māori farm.

"So, we can look at a Māori business in a more in-depth way and see how the DairyNZ programmes such as 'step change', which is our increasing profit - reducing footprint programme, can be applied and work in a Māori business," she says.

A key factor for DairyNZ is recognising that many of the Māori trusts that run dairy farms are very large and often have thousands of beneficial owners. For example, Wairarapa Moana in the central North Island runs 10,500 cows on its 12 farms while Parininihi ki Waitotara (PKW) in Taranaki runs 7,000 cows over 12 farms and has 11,000 shareholders.

There are many others on this scale.

But Speight says the scale of Māori farms is not that different to some of the other large levy payers to DairyNZ. The difference however is in the governance structure with trustees acting as board with a management team reporting to them.

"We have to work with their operations manager level staff to ensure that we understand the drivers of their business and how we might support them to have the best information at their fingertips to share with their teams," she says.

Speight says when running any courses, for example on condition scoring cows or calving smart, their job is to ensure they do that in an environment that makes those people on the farm feel included, feel supported and get the skills they need.