MEATING A NEED
An innovative new charity launched during the pandemic is supplying New Zealand families in need with nutritious, high-quality meat from big-hearted Kiwi farmers.
An innovative new charity is supplying meat to Kiwi families in need.
While we all endeavour to live life to the fullest, Wayne Langford makes sure of it. The dairy farmer from Golden Bay is known as the YOLO Farmer (‘You Only Live Once’). He challenges himself to do something each day that can let him say he has lived for that day. The activities can be as adrenaline-pumping as skydiving, or as simple as a backyard game of footy. Each act is posted on social media for tens of thousands of followers.
A mental health battle inspired Langford to embark on this new way of life. Where once he would wake dreading the day; now he wakes planning his next adventure. More than 1100 days into his journey, Langford has launched an initiative to ensure hungry New Zealanders don’t wake dreading the day either. He and friend Siobhan O’Malley have created Meat the Need, a charity to supply much-needed meat to city missions and foodbanks by allowing farmers to donate livestock. Meat the Need and founding meat partner Silver Fern Farms arrange the collection and processing of the livestock, and organise regular delivery of donated meat to the community organisations feeding vulnerable New Zealanders.
It was on day 546 of Langford’s YOLO journey that the idea for Meat the Need started to form. Langford and his sons took a couple of shopping bags full of meat to their local foodbank. “We asked how long that would last, thinking they would say ‘two or three days or a week’, and they said it would last a couple of months,” says Langford. “I thought, if I donate a whole beast then it might last all year, and effectively no one in Golden Bay would go hungry. And then I thought, ‘Well, if we’ve got a hundred-odd farms in Golden Bay, if I only donate one in my lifetime, and everyone else does the same then we should really never have anyone go hungry again’.”
The idea continued to grow to consider how the rest of New Zealand could be factored in, and soon Langford would be sharing his thoughts with his friend and fellow farmer, Siobhan O’Malley.
“As soon as we sat down and started thrashing it out, straight away I really liked the idea of it and I could bring some of my own ideas to that,” says O’Malley. “So it really quickly became the one idea that we thought, ‘Hey, we should do that together’.” Langford says the pair have a great working relationship, and both bring their own strengths to the table.
“I’m quite a big-picture kind of guy and Siobhan’s more detailed and good with the structures, so we worked really well as a team and it kind of grew from there,” he says. After their initial meeting, O’Malley was able to break the process down into the next steps they needed to take. “I think I can keep up with his big-picture thinking but I also have the ability to turn that into the steps that need to happen to get it done,” she says. “I suppose every ideas person needs someone to help them actually put their ideas into action.”
A HELPING HAND
Originally, they considered homekill and using local butchers and young farmers to process the meat to be donated, but Langford says they “soon found that the idea was probably bigger than that and it was going to need a bit more structure”.
A solution presented itself when Langford was doing a speaking appearance related to his YOLO Farmer platform. During the event, he was approached by Silver Fern Farms about how they could help with the initiative and they’ve since come on board as the primary red meat partner. Silver Fern Farms processes the livestock, turning it into mince and distributing it to the charity groups. “It’s easy to have these big ideas but it takes someone else to believe in them as well and Silver Fern Farms certainly did that,” says Langford.
With their experience in farming, Langford and O’Malley were well placed to get farmers on board. Langford is a sixth-generation dairy farmer – he and his wife milk 250 cows a day at his Golden Bay farm. O’Malley has been dairy farming in the South Island with her husband since 2011, aside from 18 months when they worked with hop growing and beef farming. But as Langford explains, figuring out a way to get the meat to the rest of New Zealand was a challenge they had to overcome.
“Farmers actually donate quite a lot to their local communities, but it’s a lot harder for us to get it into the urban centres,” says Langford. “So for it to work it had to be simple, and so that’s the benefit of having Silver Fern Farms come on board.” O’Malley agrees that Silver Fern Farms’ involvement means they were instantly able to have a nationwide reach. “It meant that we weren’t having to tell farmers who put their hand up in a different part of New
“IF I DONATE A WHOLE BEAST, IT MIGHT LAST ALL YEAR.” WAYNE LANGFORD
Zealand that we couldn’t take their animal – that would have been really tragic and really limiting to the whole programme,” she says. “So being able to have nationwide reach, and being able to accept deer and sheep and cattle from the outset is also huge, because it widened the group of farmers that could be involved and their supply chain partners.”
Silver Fern Farms’ partnership means farmers can send their donation away at the same time they send livestock to be processed. Then, using Silver Fern Farms’ existing distribution chain they’re able to get the meat from the donated animal out to the city missions and foodbanks. It also allows farmers to donate at seasonal times that suit them, and lets Meat the Need send out the donations according to when the community organisations need them, so that the organisations don’t have to take large volumes of meat all at once.
“What we’ve put together is a charitable supply chain that allows us to smooth out the supply for the foodbanks so that they can have a regular amount of meat that’s delivered to them on a schedule that they can anticipate, they can plan around,” says O’Malley. “We have really tried to take the time to understand the needs of the foodbanks and then the needs of the farmers and marry it up and make sure that it’s going to work for everyone.”
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
The Meat the Need team says there’s been a need for a charity such as this, but until now there hasn’t been a way to bridge the gap between a willing farmer with the livestock and the community organisation with the demand for a regular and reliable supply. “You really need a processor to come on board, and that’s why we’re so thankful for Silver Fern Farms – without them you’re missing a very important cog in the chain,” explains Langford. “It’s taken a bit of funding and a few connections to tie it all together, so we’re pretty thankful to our industry body DairyNZ, Federated Farmers and Beef + Lamb New Zealand helping us out with a bit of seed money to get us up and going.”
O’Malley and Langford had planned to launch Meat the Need in June, but their plans changed when COVID-19 struck. “Upon COVID hitting, talking to [city missions and foodbanks] and seeing their numbers
quadruple highlighted that we had to get it going,” says Langford. “We wanted to make a difference now, when the country needed it.” They quickly worked to get everything up and running and launched on 19 April.
“It focussed everyone, and everyone was on the same page about the speed at which it needed to get done. There are a lot of partners involved in terms of the supply chain, in terms of our industry partners, and so having everyone understand that we needed to be working at pace got it done,” says O’Malley. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, Langford says there had been plenty of farmers asking how they could help those in need. With the structures for Meat the Need very nearly in place, O’Malley and Langford felt they could speed up the process and get going.
“Farmers were asking for it, we effectively had the platform, so we just had to bring it forward,” says Langford. “It may not have been perfect on day one, but the platform’s there and now our farmers are buying in, so it’s fantastic.”
Langford and O’Malley say they’ve already received an overwhelming response since the launch. “I was reading through some emails and messages from farmers last night and, wow, it’s so positive,” says O’Malley. “Within 36 hours we had a good number of animals – people had already seen the idea, loved it and straight away put their hand up and said, ‘I’d love to donate an animal to this programme’, and that’s huge. That’s a huge amount of trust and belief that I don’t take lightly.”
With such positive feedback so soon after launch, there are plans on the horizon to expand. “We’ve already been approached around how we could supply milk,” says Langford. “I think we’ll see it grow in time which will be really cool.”
Farmers with cows, sheep or deer to donate can either contact their local Silver Fern Farms Livestock Rep to say they want to give to Meat the Need, or they can visit the Meat the Need website. But while farmers are a major part of Meat the Need, anyone is welcome to donate. There’s the option to specify your own amount of money to donate, or you can give the monetary value of an animal by pledging a virtual cow or virtual sheep.
At a time when taking care of our own is more important than ever, Meat the Need acts as a platform for farmers and the wider community to make a real difference in enhancing food security in New Zealand.
“If we all chip in, we can achieve some pretty awesome results,” says Langford. “That’s the kind of ethos and mentality we’re trying to instil in our farmers, our processors and our communities. It just takes a little bit to make sure everyone gets fed here in New Zealand. meattheneed.org silverfernfarms.com
“WITHIN 36 HOURS WE HAD PEOPLE SAYING, ‘I’D LOVE TO DONATE TO THE PROGRAMME’.” SIOBHAN O’MALLEY