increase font size
The Darfield Maintenance & Hapori Programme teams with the Christmas food boxes packed and ready to be delivered.
As the Christmas season in New Zealand was coming into full swing, employees at Fonterra’s manufacturing sites were dedicated to delivering dairy goodness to tables across the globe.
But it didn’t stop there for the team at Fonterra’s Darfield site, who were also hard at work giving back to their local community – picking up where they left off during Covid.
Last year after the Covid-19 lockdown lifted, Tim Toulson, Fonterra Darfield mechanical team lead, and the maintenance team were met with great appreciation when they delivered food boxes to elderly people living alone in Darfield. So they decided to do it again for Christmas.
“We knew a lot of people were doing it tough out there during Covid so I really wanted to encourage the team to start thinking about others and what they could do to help them,” says Toulson.
“The feedback from the community was amazing. There was a heap of posts on the local Facebook page, and we even received thank you letters from those we helped. And we thought Christmas would be the perfect time to start that initiative up again.”
In the lead up to Christmas, around 25 employees from the maintenance team packed 60 food boxes with items for an early Christmas meal, as well as some extra nonperishable food items.
After packing the boxes, the team went out in the community to distribute it themselves and connect with those elderly people.
Ronel Beukes, who leads the Fonterra regional Hapori programme for Canterbury, says that after Covid there was a real appetite from the team at the Darfield site to be personally involved in community work and events. And as 2022 started to come to an end, the food parcels weren’t the only thing the staff participated in.
Throughout December the Darfield Hapori team, alongside the Darfield Transport team, organised an educational milk tanker roadshow to connect with schools in the region. They visited seven schools, where the tanker operator (driver) shared what they do on a daily basis.
And in November, the Fonterra Darfield team spent their Saturday morning with the Oxford Land Search & Rescue team. The team stopped by their annual LandSAR Incident Management Team refresher training course, to provide the search teams with some food to take along when they departed on their search.
“We thought a lot of our contractors and staff would be part of initiatives like this one, and that’s why we thought it would be great to show our support. It was also just a fantastic way to connect with the community in general,” said Beukes.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has joined the debate around the proposed sale of Fonterra’s consumer and related businesses, demanding answers from the co-operative around its milk supply deal with the buyer, Lactalis.
OPINION: Farmer shareholders of two of New Zealand's largest co-operatives have an important decision to make this month and what they decide could change the landscape of the dairy and meat sectors in New Zealand.
OPINION: As CEO of the Dairy Board in the 1980s I was fortunate to work with a team of experienced and capable executives who made most of the brand investments that created the international consumer business Fonterra inherited. Soprole in Chile was the largest, but there were more than 20 countries where consumer marketing companies were established and Anchor and other brands were successfully launched.
Fonterra has delivered a fifth straight year of record organic milk price for farmer suppliers.
Fonterra says favourable weather conditions supporting pasture growth is boosting milk production.
Like many manufacturers around the world, European agricultural machinery and tractor manufacturers are currently operating in a difficult market environment. But they are heading to the world’s largest agricultural machinery event in Hanover next month with a degree of cautious optimism.
Established in 2021, the John Deere Technician of the Year Awards champion the important contribution parts and service technicians make to the Australian and New Zealand agriculture, construction and forestry industries.
Beef + Lamb New Zealand (B+LNZ) is calling on farmers from all regions to take part in the final season of the Sheep Poo Study aiming to build a clearer picture of how facial eczema (FE) affects farms across New Zealand.
New Zealand is closer to eradicating bovine TB than ever before, but possums remain a threat, says Beef + Lamb New Zealand.
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has joined the debate around the proposed sale of Fonterra’s consumer and related businesses, demanding answers from the co-operative around its milk supply deal with the buyer, Lactalis.
The ACT Party says media reports that global dairy giant Nestle has withdrawn from the Dairy Methane Action Alliance shows why New Zealand needs to rethink its approach to climate.
