11 minute read
In it for the long haul
LOOKING AHEAD: Southern Pastures executive chair Prem Maan says he would love to see how the 20 farms his company runs will fare in 20-100 years’ time.
Dairy company in for the long haul
Gerald Piddock gerald.piddock@globalhq.co.nz
PREM Maan is playing the longterm game when it comes to sustainable dairy farming.
The Southern Pastures executive chair and company co-founder wants not only to sustain the 20 farms the company owns in south Waikato and Canterbury, he wants them to improve them too.
“I would love to come back and visit these farms in 20-100 years’ time as I am convinced they will become more and more stunning – but I may need to do time travel for that,” Maan said.
Auckland-based Maan says his key ethos is that when he is gone, the company would have left behind a positive footprint on the whenua for future generations.
His connection to the dairy industry goes back before he, wife Lynette and a dozen others set up investment company Foundation Capital in 2004.
Prior to Fonterra’s creation, he helped raise capital from European investors for the NZ Dairy Group while working for Deutsche Bank.
“I was selling the NZ dairy industry story to European investors in 1997, I was already exposed back then in terms of trying to sell the NZ dairy industry story to overseas investors,” he said.
“So, I already had experience in my investment banking days of successfully selling the New Zealand dairy story.”
When the GFC hit in 2008, he says he saw a unique opportunity to establish Southern Pastures.
“We had always looked at the farming industry, but we were looking at buying a farm where we could show a cash return, and until the GFC came along you couldn’t show a cash return out of dairy farming because at that stage, dairy farming values relative to milk prices was too high,” he said.
“When the GFC came, farm values fell and simultaneously, milk prices started to go up, so that made it the right climate to set up the fund.”
Nineteen of Southern Pastures’ farms are dairy farms and there is one dairy support farm. Maan says they chose those areas based on long-term climate change modelling.
“We’re long-term investors and we looked at long-term forecasts for climate change and we feel those areas are reasonably safe. Those areas are able to potentially withstand climate volatility,” he said.
This was 10 years ago, and long before climate change was mainstream, popular thinking.
“We look at 50 years when we analyse things,” he said.
Buying the farms allowed the company to begin with a blank piece of paper because it allowed them to set up Southern Pastures with the right principles from the beginning.
Every farmer who has subsequently joined Southern Pastures has to buy into that philosophy, he says.
“If they don’t agree with what we are doing, then they won’t join us. People who do join us, buy into our ethos and that makes it easy for us to walk the talk,” he said.
When they first bought their farms, Maan says they were horrified at the high staff turnover on them. Staff were not even staying for the full season.
“Now, we have people who have stayed with us for 10 years and the average turnover at the staff level is about three years. We’re quite proud of the fact that we’ve created a culture that people want to stay with us,” he said.
The farms in south Waikato that were bought were all forestry conversion farms. He knew the soils could all be improved. Earthworms were introduced to the farms because the farms’ acidic soils contained none of these insects.
“We knew there was a lot we could do to those farms to improve them and improve the value,” he said.
He wants others in the industry to follow their farming philosophy. Farming is the country’s future and he is happy to share the company’s knowledge with others.
Maan is very optimistic about the industry’s future. There are few places in the world where cows can be fed outside and fed largely on grass and as a result, had superior milk quality to other dairy exporters who largely farmed their cows indoors.
“The NZ milk pool is never going to expand again. It is now a finite milk pool in the world,” he said.
Prem Maan Southern Pastures
“The world’s demand for milk was increasing, so we’ve now got this finite pool of milk and it’s going to become a rarer and rarer commodity, so the challenge for Fonterra and the other milk processors is to start demanding a premium for it.”
If these processors are smart and could leverage NZ’s grass-fed story and its nutritional qualities compared to other exporters from other countries and they could turn milk into a value-added product not a commodity.
He says it will also help buffer the industry from any potential threats from lab-grown or plantbased milks.
“Provided we stick to our free-range farming systems, we shouldn’t see that as a threat. But the intensive barn systems will see that as a threat,” he said.
Southern Pastures has taken this approach with its 10-star certified values rating, turning its products into ultra-premium products.
Pushing others in the industry down a more sustainable route came down to using a carrot rather than a stick. Maan suggests a solution is to pay farmers more for their product or give them carbon credits if they used fewer inputs and increased their soil carbon.
Rather than expand, the plan for Southern Pastures is to keep developing the existing farms and extract even more value from the milk by growing their export market.
Its recent purchase of Lewis Road Creamery will help it do that, he says.
“In Lewis Road, we saw a muchloved Kiwi brand that we felt we could take overseas,” Maan said.
“Lewis Road brand was a good fit because both of us want to take NZ dairy up the value chain – not chase the commodity race to the bottom.”
Rural health leadership recognised
Raised in a farming family on Pitt Island, Tania Kemp’s upbringing had a huge impact on her career path as a rural nurse practitioner. She talked with Annette Scott about bridging the rural health gap.
SOUTH Canterbury-based nurse practitioner Tania Kemp says rural health care needs to be promoted as a specialty area and not seen as the poor cousin to the glittering lights of urban medical practices.
Kemp has been recognised for her commitment and leadership in her drive to improve health care for rural communities.
The recipient of the New Zealand Rural General Practice Network 2020 Peter Snow Memorial Award says the inequities of the rural health statistics urgently need addressing.
The Peter Snow Memorial Award honours the life and work of Dr Peter Snow, a rural general practitioner who was an inspiring and active leader, who sought to improve the health and safety of rural communities.
The award celebrates an individual for their achievement in rural health research, projects, innovation and service.
Kemp’s recognition comes for her inspirational nursing leadership and for being a change agent for models of care in rural primary health.
A sixth-generation GregoryHunt family Pitt Islander, Kemp was immersed in rural life from an early age.
Exposed to the significant challenges in rural health, she knows what it is like for rural communities in an ongoing battle for adequate rural health care models.
“I have lived the epitome of rural life,” Kemp said.
“My aunty was the resident registered nurse on the island and dealt with all health care.
“The nearest medical care was a general practitioner (GP) on the main Chatham Island, so you only went if it was an emergency or something time could allow you to get there.”
Starting her registered nursing career in a rural practice in Greymouth, Kemp set up a variety of clinics that were much-needed at the time.
After moving back to the Chatham Islands, she worked as a Primary Response in Medical Emergencies (PRIME) trained rural nurse before moving to Waimate, where she finished her clinical master’s and registered as a nurse practitioner (NP).
In 2014, she and her husband Darcy purchased the Pleasant Point Health Centre in South Canterbury where she currently works as the lead clinician.
As both owner and lead practitioner, Kemp has been able to influence change and introduce different models of care.
Her work has enabled nurse practitioners to lead clinics and provide a significantly large part of primary care safely and effectively helping to bridge the gap in areas that struggle to recruit rural GPs.
With her deep understanding and expertise in rural practice, she has immersed herself in rural work across her whole career and is seen as an inspiration by the nursing profession as a vocal advocate for quality, accessible, local health care.
“Knowing what it meant to live and breathe rural was the foundation and became my ideal for the type of nursing I wanted to be a part of,” she said.
“After many years of working in rural communities I could see that services could be offered in a different way.”
Kemp believed there was room for increasing access to services using different models of care such as NP-led practices and/or clinics.
“In 2013 I set my goal to own and run a general practice with the patients registered with a NP rather than a GP as had been the previous model in NZ,” she said.
“The Ministry of Health allowed for this and then I had to meet the other contract requirements set by the local district health board.
“NPs are not doctors, nor do we profess to be, but there is a significant amount of health care that can be effectively and safely delivered by NPs as it can by GPs.
“This has been shown in both national and international research and in clinical practice, such as our general practice in Pleasant Point.
Tania Kemp NP
Kemp says there has been great satisfaction in seeing the Pleasant Point Health Centre not only survive but continue to grow.
“I felt relatively confident it could work, but being a first NPowned and run general practice in NZ, meant there were a few years of treading water to ensure its success was genuine,” she said.
HONOUR: Rural nurse practitioner Tania Kemp, with husband and Pleasant Point Health Centre co-owner Darcy, says receiving the 2020 Peter Snow Award gives her the opportunity to continue to promote the more contemporary model of primary health care for rural communities. Photo: Annette Scott
“We have doubled our patient numbers and staff numbers over six years, so I feel I can confidently say the model works.
“A huge part of my work satisfaction, and future goal, is to continue to grow our own nurses.
“We always have student nurses and NP interns to ensure they see how nursing can work differently than the more usual way.”
Working with an amazing team who all believe in what they do and strive to make a difference every day has been a key highlight in her career.
“Employing GPs who will work with us in this way and agree that it is working, is very satisfying,” she said.
Although, the journey has been challenging.
“I will not pretend this journey has been at all easy,” she said.
“There were financial, personal health and business issues that made the first few years extremely challenging.
“Initially there were battles with every organisation we dealt with that said you can’t do that, as you have to be a doctor, or we don’t have NP as an option in the system.
“So, we would send them the NZ Nursing Council description for NP to show I was legitimate and legally allowed to do what I was doing.
Kemp says her hope is that every barrier they came up against has been managed in a way that means other NPs will not come up against the same in future.
“However, we did understand that being first at something means people genuinely did not know about the role and that was understandable,” she said.
Kemp says the rural health care role needs to sell as a specialty area that brings incredible satisfaction to clinicians and is not the poor cousin to the glittering lights of urban practice.
“I have achieved huge job satisfaction in terms of an autonomous practice and need to work at the top of my scope in this role,” she said.
“There are aspects of health care my urban colleagues would never get the opportunity to do.”
Mental health services for rural people need to include educating communities about how to look out for their people, she says.
“Train the locals in first aid for mental health as we do for CPR,” she said.
Access to virtual services needs to be made accessible for all rural communities, so they do not miss out on specialist care, counselling, psychology and therapists.
“Having to travel, time away and financial restraints don’t have to be a barrier to good health care,” she said.
