Fonterra needs to perform – Miraka

Smiler has faith in the business model and strategy of Miraka, but wants Fonterra to improve its performance so that his company can pay more to its farmer suppliers. Traditionally Miraka has paid 10c/kgMS more than Fonterra.

Smiler’s comments came at a field day at Wairarapa Moana Incorporation (WMI) which he also chairs. It is a 27% shareholder in Miraka and the dairy company’s biggest single supplier.

WMI is located near Mangakino, central North Island, where it runs 10,000 cows on 12 farms plus three support blocks, producing 4 million kgMS annually.

The field day, run jointly with the Federation of Maori Authorities (FOMA) and DairyNZ, was intended to share WMI’s journey with Maori farmers in particular, and with other farmers.

“Our objective has always been to run a vertically integrated business and Miraka is part of the strategy we created five years ago,” Smiler explains. 

“The operation now aims to keep building on that and to make sure we have a resilient business that can manage the volatility in payout and the environment and all those challenges likely to come in future. We still expect to be running a resilient and profitable organisation through all those challenges.” 

Despite the incessant rain, the field day attracted at least 100 people who heard from FOMA, DairyNZ, WMI staff and WorkSafe NZ. Knowing the weather was going to be bad, WMI staff placed large hay bales inside the covered yards of the woolshed, and installed lighting and heating, comfortable for the morning presentations. In the afternoon, visitors were bussed to see new dairy sheds and other infrastructure on the 3900ha property. This included the huge pivot irrigators which, surprise surprise, weren’t running. 

At least a third of the farm is irrigated. New pasture species such as lucerne have been planted to deal with the dry summers on the porous pumice soils. 

“The success of WMI is having a clear strategy, a lot of discipline and the ability at the end of the day to train and retain good staff,” Smiler says. 

“That will be the fundamental challenge for us going forward, as it has been in the past. To build a resilient business we have to have the best people who are well-trained and we do a lot of work building that capability and capacity in our staff.” 

Field day attendees told Rural News they couldn’t help being impressed by the hard work that had made the farms as good as they are. “The land here wasn’t always like this,” one said.