BUSINESS ZANDA MCDONALD AWARD WINNER
Now coach and mentor, Jack Raharuhi talks with Matt Cunneen (left) and Brodie Powell.
Winning Coaster champions staff training
From rebellious 15 year old to Operations Manager for three large dairies – Anne Hardie outlines the recruitment and training philosophy of a highly motivated young West Coaster.
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t would have been very easy for Jack Raharuhi to have followed a path that led to a life behind bars. Instead he has become a coach and mentor for the 21 staff he manages on Pamu Farm’s Buller dairy units as well as getting involved in the community to challenge the public perception of farming. At just 28 he has an impressive resumé considering that he was pulled out of school as a troublesome 15 year old and thrown into a job on a dairy farm. With the official title of Buller Dairy Group Operations Manager he oversees three dairy farms milking a combined 3,500 cows, the machinery business associated 36
with the dairy, sheep, beef and deer units at Cape Foulwind, plus the health and safety for all 10 Pamu West Coast dairy farms. He works with the local high school to coordinate the Gateway Programme to bring students on to the farm for work experience, plus the wider community to bring at-risk teenagers onto the farms. He’s also back at school talking with students about the agriculture industry, while in the wider industry he’s chairman of the West Coast Focus Farm Trust and a dairy IPG member with Primary ITO. Along the way he has entered awards to benchmark himself against others in the industry and fine tune his goals, winning
the Ahuwhenua Young Maori Farmer of the Year in 2016, the DIA Dairy Manager of the year for the West Coast-Top of the South in 2017, and the Zanda McDonald Award this year. The latter is awarded to a young Kiwi or Australian making a difference in agriculture. One of his latest projects has been talking with a sustainability class at the school where he has given them a virtual tour of the farms. That has led to plans to get them on to the Cape Foulwind farms to show them what has been done, from retiring steep terrain and planting unproductive land to fencing the 95km of waterways.
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | August 2020
