Sheep and beef farming is about love not meat business
Sheep and beef farmers are not in the meat business - they are in the love business.
Being in the love business brought a new perspective to farming, Beef + Lamb New Zealand director Melissa Clark-Reynolds at the organisation's Mid Northern North Island Farmer Council annual meeting near Mystery Creek.
"If we thought about being in the love business, we would think about making the highest quality best meat we could possibly make."
A closer focus was required on standards for animal welfare, the environment and workplace at a time when consumer habits and technology was rapidly changing.
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Overseas urban customers expected high standards. Farmers should not be afraid of how their business model and customer eating habits were changing, she said.
"What we should be up for is saying that we are going to carve out a place that is ours, we are going to commit to a place that is ours and we are going to absolutely run at it. We are in the food business and in the end, food is love."
Clark-Reynolds warned that it was easy for primary sector to get stuck in a bubble where like-minded people re-enforced existing views.
Companies such as Blockbuster Video, America Online and Kodak thought they were unstoppable but had business models that failed to adapt to change.
The farming sector cannot afford to take that attitude with veganism, Clark-Reynolds said.
Companies had three defense mechanisms when confronted by movements such as veganism that forced change. They pointed and laughed, look legal or regulatory action and bought them up.
Beef + Lamb New Zealand chairman James Parsons said there were turbulent times for farming with Waikato farmers facing the Healthy Rivers plan change, an election "new levels" of anti-farmer sentiment.
"It's inevitable that change is happening at an exponential rate."
But the red meat sector was nimble enough to adapt, he said.
"The attitude I see here in New Zealand amongst farmers is, 'how do we move with things', rather than being the Kodak."
It was a sentiment also supported by Landcorp chairwoman Traci Houpapa.
"I'm with Melissa. Farming is about love. I love being on a farm."
Houpapa said New Zealand needed to be smarter in how it farmed, marketed and communicated its primary products. The sector is now farming for a mainly female consumer base, which wanted grass-fed and "free from" food.
They want to know that the food they are eating has come from farms where people are well paid, have good working conditions and high animal welfare standards.
"People want to feed love to their families. People want to feed good food to their families and that's where we are heading as Pamu."
Houpapa said that Landcorp had gone through exponential strategic change over the past few years.
"We recognised that if we kept farming the way that we did, we would be out of touch with international markets and we recognised that our focus on being one of the best land conversion entities in the country was no longer acceptable."
Landcorp was successful at turning forestry into dairy farms, but its environmental impact meant they needed to change their operating model. This was why they scaled back the Wairakei Estate forestry to dairy farming project.
"It was probably always a dumb idea in the first place."
In the next three to four years, Houpapa said Landcorp would be shifting from volume to value and hitting premium niche markets with quality food.
"Equally and importantly, we want to make sure we are telling our story."