Videos about investment projects

[A drone shot of a farm.]

[A shot of Dani Anthony Darke walking on a paddock where cows are grazing.]

Dani Darke, King Country farmer: We both believe that our life isn’t a practice run, so we do what we love to do, and living here on the farm…

[A shot of cows grazing.]

…well, I think it’s an honourable thing to do. We’re doing the right thing by our animals and by our land, and it’s great – it’s a great way to live.

[A shot of a famer herding cattle.]

Sam Spiers, farmer, alpine pasture: There’s nothing more exciting than seeing cattle doing well. It’s what we’re all trying to achieve and what’s good for the animals is good for us.

[A drone shot of a farm.]

Rick Burke, Bay of Plenty farmer: New Zealand farmers have got a great story to tell. And if we think about our free-range, grass-fed systems, antibiotic free and hormone free, we should be telling that story better around the world.

[A drone shot of a farm with grazing cattle.]

[A shot of cows grazing on lush green grass.]

Julie McDade, Business Development Manager, Greenlea Premier Meats: We’re the envy of other countries in the way that we produce our beef. So, you know, this is our moment to demonstrate to the rest of the world that our system is not only sustainable but it’s the way that Mother Nature intended animals to be raised.

Title: Sustainable Beef: A longterm future for New Zealand farmers

[A drone shot of a small seaside village.]

Richard Scholefield, General Manager, Whangara Farms: The benchmark where we all used to sit as farmers, you know, where we were supplying products to a consumer, well, that benchmark’s now lifted and we have to lift.

[A drone shot of a farm with cattle.]

Sam Bunny, farm business manager, Rangitiaki Station: The consumer now is far more aware and has far more interest in that link and where their food is coming from, and they love a positive story behind the product, and we’re seeing – especially in the younger generation – more and more interest in that. And that’s just gonna continue – there’s just no doubt about it.

[A shot of a paddock of cows with large hills in the background.]

Grant Bunting, General Manager Supply Chain & Livestock, ANZCO Foods: We’re getting a very clear message globally that there’s an expectation that we are going to have to demonstrate right through that chain that we are taking consideration and are aware of the impact we’re having on those things around us.

[A shot on a farm with cows and a truck in the foreground.]

Sam Spiers: I think the starting point for the public and for consumers at the moment is at least that we are as beef producers bad for the environment, we’re having a negative impact and I don’t believe that. So I’m looking to be part of some form of group that supports a different narrative, and once again to be proud of what we’re doing.

Text: In 2019 a group of farmers, meat companies and other stakeholders embarked on a proof of concept project to demonstrate how beef could be produced sustainably, at every step of the journey from the farm to the consumer.

[A shot of Rennie Davidson talking at a workshop.]

Rennie Davidson, Project Manager: There’s a group of people with a common interest of having a viable, flourishing future by doing something really well, and people sharing thoughts and sharing opinions.

[A shot of people in the crowd at the workshop.]

Tony Egan, Managing Director, Greenlea Premier Meats: This vehicle is a chance to bring processors and farmers together with one voice. This is an organisation that brings together ideas and people for better outcomes, and it encourages others to join us. Because when we get together on these issues we take New Zealand forward on the world stage.

Text: The New Zealand sustainable beef pilot is supported by global food giant McDonald’s.

[A shot of a McDonald’s meal being carried on a tray.]

Simon Kenny, Head of Communications, McDonald’s Restaurants NZ: So McDonald’s is the world’s most famous beef burger maker. We serve 1.6 million people in New Zealand every week and more and more they’re asking us about where our beef comes from, how it’s produced…

[A shot of raw beef patties on a grill.]

Simon Kenny: …and that’s really important to our customers – and for the future of our business we need to change and evolve…

[A shot of beef patties cooking, and being sprinkled with cheese.]

Simon Kenny: …with the times. And we also need to lead, and beef sustainability is one of those areas where we really feel like we can work with the industry to lead and progress the entire industry forward.

[A shot of raw beef patties being placed on a grill.]

Richard Scholefield: To do anything with McDonald’s you need to have everything analysed throughout your whole business – so all aspects.

[A shot of calves running around on a farm near a pond.]

Julie McDade: We’ve focused on the three main pillars of economic, environmental and social responsibility, in terms of defining sustainability across the value chain.

[A shot of a truck driving amongst a herd of cows.]

Genevieve Bennett, Senior Investment Advisor, Ministry for Primary Industries: It’s looking at the full farm system and how we’re farming, and making sure that we’re looking after not only the animal but also the environment – so the quality of the water on those farms…

[A tracking shot of cows in a paddock.]

Genevieve Bennett: …protecting biodiversity, looking at carbon footprint of that farm and really creating a food package that – it’s good for you and it’s good for the planet.

Text: Part of the pilot was an independent audit and verification of the supply chain’s sustainability, including on-farm, meat processing and patty production.

[A shot of a farm by the sea.]

Richard Scholefield: The auditing was fine for us and I think it’s something that most farmers will fly through. Some farmers will find it – probably, there’ll be some issues if you haven’t got a Land Environment Plan and things like that.

[A shot of a farmer on a quad bike, with cows in foreground running away.]

Richard Scholefield: For us it wasn’t too bad. I guess there were some issues that it did identify that our Land Environment Plan needs improvement. One of those was identifying biodiversity on our property. And also around the greenhouse gases, which is actually a big issue for farmers anyway. So we need to do a little bit of work on that.

[A shot of cows grazing.]

Dani Darke: To start with, I felt that the standards were being set really high, but as we worked through them I felt that if we could achieve it, it actually would set our business up for the future and future-proof us for any changes in terms of consumer perceptions or changes in terms of legislation.

[A shot of cows grazing, and calves frolicking.]

Justin Courtney, Head of Communications & Sustainability, Silver Fern Farms: So for us there will be change as processors. We’ve learnt a lot through this process just around how we look after the environment. We understand our waste management better than we did, we understand how we looked after wastewater better than we did. We will make progress, but we will want to do this with speed.

[A shot of Dani Darke walking on her farm in a paddock of cows.]

Dani Darke: The cool thing about a lot of sustainable… or sustainability practices that we do on the farm, they’re also often profitable as well. So it’s a win-win for our business and for the land and for the stock, to be more sustainable in how we farm.

Richard Scholefield: A lot of these regulations in compliance that are coming in… coming at farmers, you know, can actually have positive benefits for us.

[A shot of hilly farmland.]

Rick Burke: It’s seriously good, the outcomes, in terms of improving profitability and ticking all the boxes on the way.

[A shot of Rick Burke and a farm hand taking cows through a cattle race to be weighed.]

Julie McDade: You know, we’ve worked with a very small, select group and now we need to take it wider, you know, to be embraced by a bigger audience.

[A shot of cattle grazing.]

Simon Kenny: So what the proof of concept pilot told us was that we could get sustainable beef farming practices from a farm through the entire supply chain into a beef patty in a burger that we’re selling to a customer and for us that’s the perfect result and something that we hope we can scale for the future.

[A shot of cows running in a paddock with snowy hills in the background.]

[A shot of a farmer walking in a paddock with his dog.]

Genevieve Bennett: It would be wonderful for it to be able to be scaled up or for far more farmers to get involved with it, for more meat producers to get involved with it, and it becomes, um, it becomes something that’s not even novel, and in a couple of years’ time…

[A shot of cows close to camera, with snowy peak in background.]

Genevieve Bennett: …these will be just everyday practices that are standard and they’re accepted…

[Close-up and mid-range shots of cows grazing.]

Genevieve Bennett: …and it just gives us all that confidence moving forward.

Richard Scholefield: We just need to be striving to be constantly improving the way that we… the way that we look after our land, animals and our people.

[A shot of cows grazing.]

Tony Egan: My hope would be that this organisation provides a platform for the youth of this country to get involved as well. This is a great opportunity to shape the future of our industry.

[A close-up shot of cows walking.]

Sam Bunny: It is the future and it’s really really important. It’ll become the norm. It’s just the new expectation that’s required.

[A shot of a car driving, with a herd of cattle following.]

Nick Beeby, General Manager Market Development, Beef + Lamb New Zealand: I’ve never been so excited about the future as I am at the moment.

[A close-up shot of the herd of cows walking.]

Nick Beeby: The level of collaboration that exists within the processing companies, and which is now starting to extend to the farming side is… I believe will be transformational.

[A shot of cows in paddock, with wide open plains in background.]

Sam Spiers: I would encourage everyone to get on board and get ahead of it, and this is a way that we can do it together.

Text: The successful outcome of this project and its future extension will fall under the umbrella of the New Zealand Roundtable for Sustainable Beef.

[End of transcript]

[A shot of Pete Gifford walking away from dog kennels towards the camera.]

Pete Gifford, Owner/Dog Trainer, K9 Search Medical Detection: So I was approached by someone that keeps bees, that has a bit of an idea of my background with dogs and such. She heard that I was a land search and rescue dog handler and thought that…

[A panning shot of Pete’s work van with farmhouse in the background.]

Pete: …we might be able to train a dog to find AFB. So I was unaware what AFB actually was, so I looked at the project and thought that would be quite interesting. And then I was directed to our local honey expert, Jason Prior…

[A shot of Jason Prior in front of DownUnder sign by the roadside.]

Pete: … just down the road from me.

Jason Prior, owner, DownUnder Honey: So American Foulbrood, it’s a disease of the European honeybee. It’s been in New Zealand bees ever since they were brought in…

[A shot of bees flying around beehive.]

Jason: …in the 1840s. Why it’s a problem is infected colonies – they get weaker and weaker over time, and what happens is they eventually die out. Other hives in the area will come in and steal the honey out of those hives – and in doing so they spread the disease around. So it’s quite contagious once it takes hold.

[A shot of large shed with cartoon-style bee image on it.]

Jason: It affects honey yields, ultimately, and the only cure at the moment is basically destruction of the colony. So that involves burning the colony, which is… for anyone who’s had to do it, it’s quite a nasty sort of experience to have to kill your friends… they’re your pets. So what we want to do is actually…

[A close-up shot of fruit tree blossoms, with a bee on one of the blossoms.]

…eradicate it out of New Zealand. We’ve had dogs involved in the industry trying to…

[A shot of Jason Prior inspecting the fruit tree.]

Jason: …find AFB in the past. The issue’s always been that we’ve never gone through a clinical process to identify and isolate the volatiles, or the scents, in AFB that dogs need to be trained on.

So part of this project is going back to the basics and saying let’s…

[A shot of Pete Gifford training a black and white dog in a field, with beehives in the background.]

Jason: …train dogs on uncontaminated instances of the disease, where we know that the only thing the dog has been…

[A shot of Pete Gifford hiding a ball in a beehive.]

Jason: …trained on is the actual disease. And then, let’s produce a procedure for training dogs that we can reliably say ‘this dog knows how to detect the disease’.

Pete: So I decided to choose four dogs with inherent search and hunt patterns that would probably be good for this project. Then we devised a way to be able to…

[A shot of Pete Gifford turning the stainless steel carousel.]

 Pete: …imprint target odour in a sterile situation, so we built a clinical room with a stainless steel carousel so we can make it that the…

[A shot of the dog looking for the target odour in the carousel.]

Pete: …target odour is… you condense it with no other contaminants.

We have four dogs here at the moment that are up to the search level that’s required and now we’re going to bring that down to two dogs – take them into the trial. And then we’ll have Massey University run the trial, peer review it and then publish the results.

[A shot of Pete Gifford throwing a ball to the dog, and the dog fetching it.]

Pete: The way we teach our dogs… as long as we have the dogs that have inherent behaviours and want to play, that’s the most important side of that. The actual teaching them to find an odour and indicating such is quite simple.

[A close-shot of the dog watching intently, then sitting.]  

Bear in mind they can find a very small odour in an Olympic-sized swimming pool…

[A shot of Pete Gifford carrying a test wooden box and placing it in position in the training room.]

Pete: …full of water, so their capabilities are fantastic. Also, if you took an inspector to search an apiary with maybe 20 hives it may take…

[A shot of the dog running around sniffing all the wooden boxes in the training room and finally sitting in front of the one with the target odour.]

Pete: …as long as an hour. Dogs would simply search 20 hives in probably under a minute and give you a very high probability detection should the odour be present.

Jason: A beekeeper may go into an apiary and find one hive that’s got the disease. If a dog comes in afterwards and says ‘yes, that hive definitely has it’ and then also finds another two hives that we couldn’t see, that is the sort of success we’re looking for.

[End of transcript]

[A shot of spirulina being filtered in liquid form.]

Benoit Guiyesse, Co-owner Tahi Spirulina: So spirulina is a type of algae – it’s a cyanobacteria – and the reason we’re growing it – it’s because it’s an excellent food source. It has an especially high nutritional profile when it comes to iron, vitamin Bs, and it’s an excellent source of essential amino acids.

[A shot of raw, sticky spirulina coming out of a pipe.]

[A shot of a female worker scraping the sticky spirulina to the corner of a tray.]

Benoit: Through my research at Massey University I’ve done a lot of modelling on productivity, and New Zealand always comes as a very good location for growing algae. And it’s not very surprising because growing algae, it’s a bit like growing grass. And New Zealand as we know is a very good country for growing grass. So you’ve got the right balance between sun and water… nice environment, it’s not too hot which is important, good sun and good quality water.

[A shot of Benoit in the spirulina pond, with a broom.]

Benoit: The cultivation of spirulina is very environmentally sustainable for many reasons.

[A shot of Benoit using measuring equipment in the spirulina pond.]

Benoit: So as you can see it’s grown in a pond that’s lined. That means we feed the spirulina exactly what it needs, and there’s no leaching of nitrogen or phosphorus in the groundwater and surface water. The reason also we’re using a greenhouse here is to prevent contamination obviously, but another reason – it prevents evaporation. So we are very efficient when it comes to water usage. Another very interesting thing about growing an algae in a pond like that is that it doesn’t really matter what’s underneath, so we can grow it on very low productive, sandy soil – as long as we’ve got a bit of sun we’re fine.

[An aerial shot of the farm in the first year, with three greenhouses.]

Benoit: The first year, you know, we were virtually standing on sand and grass here, and within a year we had a product on the market and we had a brand, and the speed of that I think it was really quite an achievement and really good consumer feedback.

The second achievement I think was in the second year where we consolidated everything.

[A shot of female worker weighing the spirulina in a bucket]

[A shot of female worker extruding spirulina using special equipment]

Benoit: And we’re very thankful to the SFF Futures grant for this because that’s really enabled us to diversify our product.

[A shot of female worker carrying a tray of extruded spirulina to the drying machine]

Benoit: But also really improve all our processes here…

[A shot of female worker putting tray of spirulina in the drying machine.]

Benoit: …from the cultivation to the harvesting and all the way to the drying stage we’ve been able to improve every single step.

For us, spirulina is the first step and we picked spirulina because it’s the low hanging fruit. There’s already an established market and it’s relatively easy to produce. So in the short-term, what we need to do now is to…

[A shot of Benoit’s hands forming spirulina into a sticky ball.]

Benoit: …broaden our range of products and start to export because we really want to be…

[A shot of the filter running in the spirulina pond.]

Benoit: …an export-driven industry that generates profits for New Zealand.

But looking much further in the future we’re also really interested in growing other things, not only spirulina, and probably even growing – you know – algae that are very specific to New Zealand. And could be food but could be cosmetic, pharmaceuticals… it’s really a huge amount of possibilities out there.

The other very important dream is to be able to work together with the traditional farming sector.

[A shot of Benoit in front of a shipping container with the words ‘Tahi Artisan Spirulina’ painted on it.]

Benoit: Because we see ourselves as very complementary… we don’t see any opposition as plant-based versus animal. For us it’s just about working together.

[End of transcript]