Ahuwhenua Trophy 2025: Northland winners take top Māori sheep & beef awards
Northlanders scooped the pool at this year's prestigious Ahuwhenua Trophy Awards - winning both the main competition and the young Maori farmer award.
A highlight of the launch of the Ruataki mo te Taurikura, Embracing Change for Prosperity strategy was seeing all three Ahuwhenua trophies on display.
It’s the first time all three have been displayed at once since the horticulture trophy was contested for the first time in 2020. The Ahuwhenua trophy competition is designed to recognise the top Māori farms in dairy, sheep and beef and horticulture and is rotated around these on a three year cycle.
About 70 people, including the Minister of Agriculture, the head of MPI, Māori and pakeha agribusiness leaders, past winners of the Ahuwhenua trophy and the Young Māori Farmer, attended the launch.
Past winner of the sheep and beef trophy in 2015 and Chair of the Ahuwhenua Trust Management Committee, which runs the competition, Nukuhia Hadfield, spoke about the significance of having all the trophies together for the first time.
She told the gathering that the Ahuwhenua competition gives Māori farmers a great platform to put themselves forward and to share their experiences. She says simply by entering the competition they get the benefit of benchmarking and feedback from a very experienced judging panel. Hadfield says such advice is invaluable in helping them set their future strategic direction.
She says becoming a finalists and winner allowed she and her husband Bart to grow professionally and validated a lot of what they were doing.
“It gave us confidences to grow and expand our business and at times took us out of our comfort zone but in the end we are all the more resilient for it,” she says.
NZPork has appointed Auckland-based Paul Bucknell as its new chair.
The Government claims to have delivered on its election promise to protect productive farmland from emissions trading scheme (ETS) but red meat farmers aren’t happy.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
OPINION: Sir Lockwood Smith has clearly and succinctly defined what academic freedom is all about, the boundaries around it and the responsibility that goes with this privilege.
OPINION: For years, the ironically named Dr Mike Joy has used his position at Victoria University to wage an activist-style…
OPINION: A mate of yours truly has had an absolute gutsful of the activist group SAFE.