Healthy Animals

Cows are at the heart of our business, making their welfare and happiness of paramount importance. By having a strong focus on healthy animals, the business thrives from the flow on benefits from strong animal performance and quality produce. It goes without saying, but this pillar focuses on our animals being treated with care and provided with adequate space, feed and water for their well-being.

Fonterra Co-operative Difference

For Dairy Holdings, the Fonterra Co-operative Group (Fonterra) is our largest customer where we supply in excess of 16M kilogrammes of milk solids annually. The Fonterra Co-operative Difference initiative aligns with our internal quality target of 75% of farms in the Group being grade free and achieving an average bulk somatic cell count (BSCC) of 110,000 by 2025.

Dairy Holdings performed well against Fonterra’s Co-operative Difference Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in 2021/22. We had 100% of our 55 farms achieve the Te Putake criteria and 50 farms met the Te Puku target of milk quality excellence for 30 days during the season. Three farms (Peebles, Terrace Top and Cantley) achieved Te Tihi which is 90% or above of milk quality excellence days. As a collective we achieved 8,070 excellence days (52%) and 7,925,000 KgMs (54%) of excellence milk, putting the Group above the Fonterra averages of 42% and 48% respectively. We look forward to seeing the future results as Dairy Holdings continues this trajectory towards achieving Te Tihi.

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Breeding Programme

A successful breeding programme is a cornerstone under the healthy animal’s pillar in order to future proof the herd targeting production and herd fertility improvements.

We track our success in breeding using two key performance indicators, the first of these being the six week in calf rate. We achieved our goal for this achieving 75%, compared to prior year of 74%. This highlights the continued improvement and is consistent with the trend over the last four years.

The second indicator is the in calf rates, where we aim to have 89% of our herd pregnant. Current year actuals of 88% when compared to prior year of 87% shows we are getting closer to our target and that our current practises are having the desired impact on improving this aspect of animal care and welfare.