An attractive option for trainees
The perception of dairy as a career path is changing, according to a mid-Canterbury training provider.
Gina Reinhart, whose family has large mining interests, is the major shareholder in the A$500 million farming and processing venture planning to supply the Chinese market. Asian partners will take about 30% equity.
Hope Dairies will have majority Australian ownership via Reinhart’s Hancock Prospecting. equity. It plans to process 150m L and to have 480 full time staff.
The partners made their plans public when signing an understanding with the Queensland Government on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Brisbane last month.
The plant will make infant formula, UHT milk and other products. It will be located between the South Burnett and Mary Valley farming regions on 5000ha.
Milk will come from dairying hubs with 16,000 cows. The company says it will buy about 30% of its milk from the region’s dairy farmers.
Queensland Dairyfarmers president Brian Tessmann says the project will be a welcome boost, opening access to the Chinese market and bringing new buying competition into the state.
“We’ve lost a lot of our manufacturing capacity over the last decade and a half, simply because there has not been the milk supply.”
Queensland producers had been forced to compete with seasonal milking patterns in southern states, but the new facility would be looking for year round production and manufacturing to supply markets.
“This will be a good option for us if we can get a reasonably competitive price for our milk,” says Tessmann who farms at Kingaroy, close to the new plant.
Reinhart says her family’s longstanding business relationships in Queensland helped clinch the project ahead of interstate contenders.
“Why Queensland?” she said, answering rhetorically, “Why not?”
“We’ve been so welcomed in Queensland. The state government has supported our planning and helped make sure this project happened here.”
Reinhart says her family has long been in pastoral and farming industries. She is in a joint venture to export premium beef from Western Australia to Asia.
Reinhart says the project was first discussed at a Christmas lunch in Cambodia, attended by Dave Garcia, the new Hope Dairies managing director. “Dave is an old friend and when the topic came up we met again the following day and hatched the plan.”
Garcia is an American who has been working in China for the past 27 years.
He intends to relocate from Hong Kong to an office in Brisbane to begin overseeing the Hope Dairies project.
