PKE-free milk: new craze or passing promotion?

Founder Peter Cullinane told Rural News he is talking to Landcorp to obtain the PKE-free milk, seeing it as a natural fit with Landcorp’s high-value Pamu brand.

Landcorp chief executive Steven Carden said in August the company would cease feeding PKE to its 78,000 cows, a move that would support its Pamu brand which is made by feeding animals grass. PKE use is not consistent with Pamu’s positioning as a high-value brand, Carden says.

Cullinane says when he heard Landcorp was looking at going PKE-free he contacted Carden and since April the two companies have been working out the details of a deal.

Cullinane says Lewis Road’s range of organic milk is naturally PKE-free, but it likes all its milk and dairy products to be PKE-free.

He describes Landcorp’s decision to go PKE-free as fabulous and courageous and he wishes Fonterra and others would take a similar stance.

He says PKE arrived on the dairy scene only about 20 years ago and the dairy industry had survived well before then.

The clamour to produce more commodity products has pushed New Zealand to being a massive user of PKE and Cullinane sees this contradicting how NZ promotes itself -- as a clean green country.

“I find it amazing that NZ’s great strength is that it could be seen as grass-fed, but as soon as you introduce just a handful of PKE into the system that claim vanishes,” Cullinane told Rural News. “It’s incredibly short-sighted of Fonterra or anyone else to encourage or allow PKE into the system.

“We came up against a roadblock when talking to Greenpeace because it had been talking to Fonterra for the last eight years and thought a partial ban on PKE was better than nothing. I don’t think the country is better off, because a little PKE is as bad as a lot of PKE,” he says.

Cullinane says NZ is obsessed with commodities and hasn’t moved on much from the days when the first mutton was shipped to the UK in 1882. NZ can’t seem to wean itself off commodities, he says.

Lewis Road Creamery is now looking to export. The UK, China and Australia are target markets.