The competitive edge
Nigel Woodhead runs a sheep, beef and production forestry farm near Milton in Otago with his wife Leanne and children Sienna, six and Finn, four.
As a Silver Fern Farms shareholder, I attended their roadshow in Balclutha a few weeks back and have been watching with interest the public feedback to the messaging from their 2024 roadshows. 
I haven’t been farming for long in relative terms to some of my farming contemporaries, but even I can remember going to meat company roadshows and hearing comments to the effect of “Farmers need you (the meat companies) to go overseas, find out what our customers want, come home and tell us what they want and then help us produce it”. It seems to me we’ve been very good at producing big volumes of red meat over a four-to-five-month summer period, then storing it in massive, expensive freezers and spending the rest of the year doing our best to sell it to anyone with a cheque book.
It is my understanding (from the small amount of 6th Form economics I remember) that if you want to produce a product, then at the very minimum you must produce something that a customer wants. If you can produce something that a customer needs, even better. To take it a step further, if you produce something that solves a customer’s problem, then you’re winning!
We find ourselves in the position where the world’s big food companies are taking their environmental credentials seriously (whether you agree with that or not, and whether you think it will have an impact on the world is another discussion for another time) and they need us to pull our weight in their supply chain. They need our products and the environmental credentials they take with them. They are also expecting us to improve those environmental credentials over time.
I look at this as a massive opportunity. We already produce amazing quality food and fibre with fantastic environmental credentials (we produce what the world needs). We also have the potential to produce food and fibre products with even better environmental credentials (our products will solve customers’ problems). All other things being equal, we can’t lose! Our customers are looking for solutions to their environmental commitments and we already have the people, the land, the animals and the farming systems that give us a significant competitive edge over our competitors.
With continued investment in people, systems and technology, our products will keep developing and changing to meet ever-changing customer requirements, much like they have over the history of our industry.
“Our customers are looking for solutions to their environmental commitments and we already have the people, the land, the animals and the farming systems that give us a significant competitive edge over our competitors.”
Farming has been a tough game over the last few years (yes, I appreciate I’m not telling you all anything you don’t know), but what’s kept me going is knowing that the world wants what we produce and needs what we are going to produce in the future.
As I write this pre-Christmas 2024, I look out the window at rain falling on green grass and hope said rain and green grass continues into the new year, allowing us to make the most of good production numbers and improving product prices.
All the best for the season ahead and I can’t wait for what the future has in store for New Zealand’s food and fibre producers.
