Strategic Priority 2 - Grow ahuwhenua performance

Objective

Lift farm and apiary performance.

Why this is a priority

Better productivity will drive greater prosperity for our people and support excellence in all we do.

Key highlights

Farms

Good systems and infrastructure established over a number of years have come to fruition in a number of production records for Ātihau. The key has been getting the right people in the right places.

Milk production for the season was 267,430 kilograms of milk solids (kgMS) – a new record for the dairy farm. A record lambing percentage of 134% was achieved, 94,236 lambs were born, some 4151 ahead of last year. In addition, the highest number of calves for the past eight years were produced. The total of 3798 calves was 191 calves ahead of budget. These results are a testament to the efforts of the teams on the breeding farms, where the focus has been on improving reproductive performance.

Driving this has been two good growing seasons, efficient pasture management and the combined efforts of all the farming teams. Dairy production has been boosted by the team’s stock and dairying knowledge, leading to improvements in the quality of the herd.

It has been a tough year financially with a 25% decrease in sheep and lamb prices, and with inflationary costs putting pressure on everything the farms use and buy. We have had to work hard to find shortterm savings. Again, our people have collaborated to find efficiency savings, including using our own teams for crutching and rearing extra calves despite the extra work required. Some planned development has been started but other projects have been put on hold.

Although stock performed well, achieving a number of performance goals, returns have been low because of poor prices. Lamb and beef sales were also behind on last year because good farm conditions allowed more animals to be wintered, allowing additional weight to be added. A total of 8500 winter lambs have been carried through the end of financial year along with 400 extra head of trading cattle. Wool production was 416,826 kg. This was 72,000 kg behind last year due to a change in shearing policy on farms to 8 month shearing and later shearing of trade lambs.

An independent farm review is underway on all farms to fine-tune farm systems. These reviews will support us to lift farm performance, this includes the increase in revenue required to improve farm profitability whilst we remain focused on maintaining costs during the current period of low product prices.

Apiary

Excellent beekeeping has driven a record production of 44kg a hive, outperforming all our third-party beekeepers. The apiary team has focused on producing more honey from healthier hives at less cost.

This year we brought queen rearing in house to provide a more reliable source of healthy queens to support hive strength lifting performance.

We also introduced a new organic treatment to reduce the impact of varroa mite and improve hive strength heading into 2024/25. We will continue to target the placement of stronger hives on the flow to lift overall per hive production.

The apiary team is two years into a three-year programme of funded research into three areas: how we manage mānuka resource, mātauranga Māori in beekeeping, and creating a honey landscape model.

The first strand of the Sustainable Farming Fund research has focused on the long-term management of mānuka along Matahiwi Track and at Papahaua. Ātihau has thousands of hectares of mānuka but as a pioneer plant (a forerunner for native bush), it has a life span of 15 to 25 years. The research aims to establish a renewable supply of mānuka to support honey production.

The second strand aims to capture and transfer Indigenous knowledge and practices affecting honey production to help beekeepers gain better understanding of how bees interact with te taiao and whenua.

The honey landscape model is being built on Papahaua by mapping species that can support beekeeping and identifying any gaps for future planting. We are essentially investigating ways to make better use of the whenua. For example, we are changing riparian and wetland planting programmes to include trees and plants such as kāmahi, rewarewa and puahou, which are more beneficial for bees. This aims to improve biodiversity and bee health, and provide more natural feed for bees foraging, decreasing the need for costly supplementary feed.

Our relationship with mānuka honey brand Manukora has been key to carrying the apiary business through tough times in the bee industry. A guaranteed buyer for a large part of our honey is a game-changer and, in turn, Manukora relies on Ātihau as a major supplier of mid- to highgrade honey. For more information on this key partnership, see page 44.

There are some signs of improvement in the honey market following a drop in the number of New Zealand beehives from nearly a million to about 500,000. The resulting drop in honey production will, over time, soak up the honey sitting in storage. Ātihau is now in a stronger position having only 143 tonnes of mature honey in store – about one and a half year’s production.

Outlook

Whilst we celebrate progress that has been made over the last twelve months to improve ahuwhenua productivity and quality, further work is required over the next twelve months to lift our financial returns. This will involve selling more honey, developing additional revenue streams and maintaining our cost structures in line with the ahuwhenua independent reviews.