Every now and then activist groups that seek to influence community opinion and ultimately government policy get a free kick. Developments on a group of New Zealand farms have delivered just that. Horrific scenes from one of the highest profile NZ dairy farms reached households in the Shaky Isles in the past couple of weeks. That profile has been gained for all the wrong reasons as the Crafar family operation, reported to be worth NZ$200million, has long battled with local and national governments in the country over poor regard for management practices, which the owners seem to believe is their business within their farm boundaries.
Crafar Farms, which was built from a single family farm, has sometimes been held out as a success story of enterprise development in New Zealand agriculture. It has grown quickly over the past 15 years to a group of 22 farms reputed be worth NZ$200million – at least in asset value – although it carries a pile of debt of about the same value, lent to it by the cream of the NZ agrifinance sector.
But the owners are notoriously bad managers and are well-used to scrapes with officialdom. They were recently the losers in one of their many battles with NZ’s environmental regulators. That court loss resulted in a NZ$90,000 fine and no doubt some hefty court costs, prompting the head of the group to declare the group was up for sale and helped spread rumours that there were Chinese investors interested in the operation. This week the group was put into receivership by its lenders.
Years of running a large, entangled operation using heavy debts rapidly built on the back of rising farm values have resulted in a well-established culture of short-cuts. The Crafar roughhouse style of running a farm business was brought into living rooms after a newspaper columnist exposed its practices and posted a graphic video on his website showing poor treatment of calves. That quickly led to a current affairs profile of the issue and a camera walk into the operation. The ongoing nightmare for the Crafars got worse, and has dragged the government’s farm ministry (MAF), its customer Fonterra and its list of bankers into the issue, each implicated by association for letting Crafars grow so large so quickly yet so poorly. All good in hindsight.
While MAF officials now crawl over the operation, shutting down an operation with a 30,000-unit herd requires extreme care, else a larger scale disaster will follow.
There is a lot of coverage of the issue in NZ but the most interesting trawl I enjoyed was through the blog site of journalist Bernard Hickey who took on the issue. The blog comments from a range of people in the country shows, disturbingly, there is still some support for the luddite stance the Crafars take that the farm is the business of the owner, and cruel decisions are often necessary for the good of the business. There’s also an interesting debate about the fragility and future risks of the NZ rural economy that allows such business propositions and practices to flourish.
Unfortunately in this day and age, and moreso in the future, food production and land stewardship take on much deeper obligations to those well downstream from direct customers and community.
