From local catchment to national cooperative
King Country farmer Anna Nelson is one of the new farmer-elected directors on the Silver Fern Farms (SFF) Co-operative board.
She became a board-appointed farmer director on SFF in 2021. The former vet did the To The Core governance course and extension course – through SFF, LIC and Farmlands – in 2019 and 2020. She has also been a Beef + Lamb New Zealand associate director, had six years on her local school board of trustees, and coordinates her local catchment group, King Country River Care.
‘‘I’m grateful to shareholders across the country who supported me in the election and am looking forward to contributing positively to the future of SFF and our suppliers.’’
Anna and her husband Blair, known to most as Munta, have been farming a 1450-hectare breeding and finishing farm at Aria, alongside his parents, Jon and Kaye, since 2002. She says they also have the keen assistance of their three children – Jono is in his last year Hamilton Boys High School, and Gus and Molly are in their second and third years, respectively, of agriculture degrees at Lincoln University.
‘‘They’re a big driver of why I do what I do. They want to be farmers and to live rurally. That’s why I do King Country River Care, that’s why we do what we do on the farm, and why I’ve got stuck into this Silver Fern Farm role. It’s about the future of our rural communities and what farming looks like. It’s easier to get out of bed when you’re trying to figure all that out and doing it for them, as well as for ourselves.’’
About five years ago the farm started a moved from a high-performing Coopworth flock to Wiltshire and woolless genetics. It was a foreign move for Anna, who grew up surrounded by fine wool on a sheep and beef farm in Cheviot in North Canterbury, so she has kept a small, half-bred flock.
‘‘The problem with my off-farm roles – the more I’m off farm, or the longer I’m gone, the more chance the woollies will be on the truck and gone,’’ she says, laughing. But she says Blair has worked hard on his ‘‘baldies’’ and will likely market them in the future because of their facial eczema resistance and strong constitution.
They finish up to 1000 Friesian bulls, with numbers depending on the season, and run 250 angus cows and 4500 ewes extensively on the hill country.
One of Anna’s biggest projects off the farm has been as coordinator for King Country River Care. When she was asked to be coordinator, she was farming full time, missing the people contact and intellectual challenge of her former veterinary career, and had just finished the Kellogg Rural Leadership programme.
King Country River Care is coming to the end of its significant government funding – MPI extension services and the One Billion Trees policy that became Jobs for Nature – close to $2million of that funding has been spent on plants and fences on farms, as well as farm environment planning, water quality testing, and wellbeing events such as first aid courses and comedy nights and dinners with a more social lens.
‘‘It is kind of a crossroads for the governance committee, who are mostly originals, and who are still very keen to continue doing what we’ve been doing; that does require further funding and central government has indicated pretty strongly that it won’t be from them for too much longer. So after any transitional funding, our next decisions are mostly how we create a self-sustaining model to keep doing what we’ve been doing.’’
She’s proud of the farmers who have been proactive in funding and completing environmental work on their properties.
‘‘But I suspect there’s still that group of people who are waiting to be told they have to do what the regulations say. I’m a little disappointed, or frustrated maybe, that more of our farming businesses didn’t grab the opportunities we put in front of them. We thought we had made it pretty easy to apply and to do, but maybe we could have done it better. It would have been great to have spread it across more landowners. There’s always more.’’
But Anna admits the highlights are far greater than the regrets.
‘‘I think when you drive around the region now, you can definitely see the change; you can see fenced off waterways, planting around those areas, and retired steep hillsides. That’s definitely not all King Country River Care but we have played a part in that. You can just visually see a change in the landscape, and that’s really rewarding for everyone, knowing we have probably only funded half of it, at the most, but that people are changing and adapting and just understanding the need to do something a little bit differently. So that’s pretty exciting.’’
They’ve also been learning about better ways to establish natives including an ongoing pilot project involving 20,000 plants planted last winter.
‘‘We called them our forest-grade natives. They’ve just been popped out of root trainers into boxes of 100, which were carried around the hillsides and planted, just the same as seedling pine trees would be. It is too early to say how that’s gone. It’s definitely harder to get good results with cheaper, smaller plants, but we’ll keep working on that because we believe it’s important to try and reduce those establishment costs.’’
The next step is likely to include working with the Waikato Regional Council in the freshwater farm plan space.
‘‘…looking at that whole process of certification and what an audit might look like. We’re trying to do our best to make it a useful and outcome-focused process where farmers don’t feel like they’re just ticking boxes and not actually really making a difference. We are trying very hard to contribute positively to what that policy might look like. If we have good working relationships with our regional councils then hopefully we can support them to enact policy in a communityfriendly way that at least understands community needs and local issues. That’s quite challenging from high up, but with that grassroots feedback, hopefully we can do our best to influence what we get landed with over the next 10, 15 or 20 years.’’