The front page of a recent paper led with the story of a farmer who had been taken to court by a Regional Council with regard to the illegally discharging of waste.
However what caught my attention was not the court case, in which the farmer was fined $70,000, but rather the number of properties, in both the North and South Islands, this man and his wife have acquired. They have controlling interest of a company which oversees 58 farms with 44,000 cows and. employing about 450 staff.
Evidently it is now quite common in the dairy industry for people such as these to form companies, leveraging off what they already have, to hoover up dairy farms as they come on the market.
What future for those bright young share-milkers aiming to eventually own their own farm if a money bags can step in and outbid on potential farms as they come up? And yet it stands to reason that enthusiastic young farmers with a deeply vested interest in their own land will put more effort into both sustainable production and long term care of the farm than a person who simply manages it and can move on at any time.
It is also a given that any manager has to be overseen and when there are many farms under a single ownership this process becomes difficult, and even more so as the number of farms increase.
The court case being reported is a case in point. The farmer being prosecuted said that while he had a ‘brilliant’ manager he wasn’t actually present on the farm when the illegal discharge took place. Given his interest in the number of farms this is not surprising . Indeed there is no way that anybody could keep a good eye on that many.
While clearly with this one discharge, and an earlier abatement notice, this mismanagement is not in the same league as the mess the Crafar farms ended up as. However the base problem is the same – one person or company owning numerous farms dotted all over the country.
In Utopia once a person has acquired enough land or business to provide more income than he, or she, could possible use he is content to step aside to allow somebody else share in the wealth. If only!
Mike Beckett
