As one of our Environmental Programme Managers, Louise Cook is working to solve some of the Co-op’s trickiest challenges including achieving the emissions intensity target by 2030.
Growing up on a 50 acre farm in Clevedon, rural South Auckland, I was just a little country kid that loved animals. After school I went to Massey and completed three years of vet school before switching to an Agricultural Science degree, and then on to working in the dairy industry. I’m now living in North Canterbury with a fiancé, two cats, six chickens, and four cows.
I love the technical side of the dairy industry.
I worked for four years at DairyNZ as a Consulting Officer (back when it was Dexcel and Dairy Insight), then six years at Landcorp as a Business Manager. This role saw me working with farms all over the country and supporting the handover of the Crafar Farms into Chinese ownership. That was a real experience. From there I moved to Taranaki with Parininihi ki Waitotara, and Owl Farm in Cambridge before heading to the deep south and taking up the role of General Manager of the Southern Dairy Hub in Invercargill. Now, here at Farm Source.
I love farm systems, I love problem solving. What I’m enjoying most about what I do now at the Co-op is looking at some really wicked problems, like how do we help farmers find profitable solutions to sustainability issues and actually producing tools and information and support for farmers so that they can navigate that.
I have a weird brain for data, analytics, systems, general “Geekery”. I’ve been so privileged to work for amazing companies and to be part of once in a lifetime projects. I just love working with farmers and coming up with solutions for them. Especially taking 63 million rows of data and painting a picture for them that they can instantly see, and helping them to figure out how to solve it themselves.
I liken it to creating a Google Maps system for sustainability issues. We can tell farmers something is amazing: “you need to go to Hamilton, check out the beauty of the river and the gardens and the people and the opportunities and the farmland and the scenery”. People will want to go there, but if they’re currently in Wellington they need directions on how to get there. Take a wrong turn and they’ll end up somewhere completely different every step of the journey. We need to detail the road marks and milestones along the way, and alert them to watchouts – the analogy of running out of fuel because you didn't know you were at the last fuel station for 200kms!
To reach our emissions intensity target, we need to get better about laying out the pathway and painting the picture so farmers know what to expect and can be prepared. Then we won’t turn back at the first hurdle and stay where we’re comfortable. Farmers may want to stay on the road they’ve always driven but at some stage that road may close and they’ll have to find another pathway.
So that’s what I spend my time doing at Fonterra – working on the road to 2030. There’s some technical leadership for me in there and working on how we can directly support our farmers, but there’s also the development of tools: dashboards, a greenhouse gas scenario tool, working on practical solutions for farmers to, again, just support them in having the knowledge.
We've seen plenty of times that when farmers have got the knowledge and when they understand the problem and they know what types of things will fix it, they will figure it out and get it fixed faster on farm than any of us could come up with anything for them. We need to empower our farmers with information, their data and some tools, and they’ll get it sorted.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to your local field team or keep an eye on the monthly Co-op Update email for updates.