Ryan:
I’ve been with Farm Source for three years, initially as Northlands Milk Quality Manager then Area Manager, before becoming Regional Manager.
I actually started my career project managing forestry to dairy farm conversions in the Central Plateau. Now it’s going the other way and we’re replanting trees on farm!
Prior to joining the Co-op I was with DairyNZ as a consulting officer and during my OE, worked in Ecuador, Indonesia, and Western Australia, in a range of roles including agriculture.
Northland is a long region and it’s split into two Farm Source areas. My team covers the northern end from Cape Reinga down to Kawakawa, and down the west coast to Dargaville and Ruawai through to Tangiteroria. My colleague Mike and his team covers Whangarei and surrounds down to the Auckland Harbour Bridge and our teams work really closely together.
There’s a fair bit of travel in the role. Often I will be in a different location each day but it’s just part of the job. We support around 400 farms in our area. A third of our farms are once-a-day milking all season, which is very different to the rest of the country. Our climate & topography is quite different too. We actually grow a lot of grass in winter and have a lot of winter milk contracts and autumn calving herds. Northland holds 25% of the country’s winter milk contracts.
Northland is a beautiful place to live but not an easy place to farm.
It’s had a lot of extreme weather events and we had widespread damage during Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. Tankers weren’t able to get in and pick up milk because the roads were flooded, and the power was out. A number of farms had to dispose of milk on farm. Some had to ship off their cows for a few weeks. We also had a lot of pastures die off. I’m involved in the Northland Agricultural Research Farm and we had 60% of our pastures die. There was also widespread damage to infrastructure across the region. These events have built a lot of resilience in our communities and our farmers just get on with the clean-up, with the recovery, planting new grass and just moving forward. We’ve seen the impact in our collections volumes for this season being 6.5% down. It has definitely been challenging on farm.
All our team members are local to Northland and have a strong attachment to the region and their communities. We’ve been on hand to support farmers through all these events.
Since 2014 we’ve run more than 200 rural community dinners where we connect and support each other after extreme weather events such as droughts or floods. We’ve had these going right across the north during 2023.
Our team is on hand to support our farmers with day-to-day issues on farm including queries with shares or milk quality. We also support farmers through working together on creating farm environment plans and best practice on farm in terms of environmental sustainability. Through our retail network we also have a lot of experience relating to advice on feed, cropping, nutrition and core dairy products.
Get in touch to find out more
Ryan is just one of the many experts in the network, so don’t hesitate to get in touch with your local store or contact the farmer support team to find your best point of contact: 0800 65 65 68.