Goat farmers to vote on future of industry levy

Goat farmers have won the chance to say yes or no to the proposal that Meat & Wool New Zealand continues to collect levies and fund programmes to further the interests of their industry.

Meat & Wool's Goat Advisory Group interim chairman Richard Wakelin said the process Meat & Wool had been through in recent months had "galvanised thinking" and "really got people on board".

Initially the organisation was planning to drop the goat levy and cease activity on behalf of goat farmers in April, 2010.

However, goat farmers made representations to the board of Meat & Wool that any decision of this nature should be made by goat farmers and so the question would be put to the industry in a referendum, Mr Wakelin said.

Meat & Wool is required by the Commodity Levies Act (1990) to seek renewed support from farmers every five years to collect sheepmeat, beef, goatmeat and wool levies to fund its work.

This is the first time a referendum has been undertaken since Meat & Wool began collecting levies in 2004.

A successful outcome would see Meat & Wool seek new levy orders from the Minister of Agriculture which would come into force when present levy orders expire on April 10, 2010, and would see the work outlined in its referendum document take place.

The Goat Advisory Group, which is made up of goat farmers, advises the board of Meat &Wool how the goat levy should best be spent.

Mr Wakelin, who is also Meat & Wool's farm services general manager, said at present the industry was concerned with "getting more goats on farms".

One of the challenges for Meat & Wool had been that the goat levy did not net a great deal of money, he said.

So it was a matter of trying to identify the best projects to fund.

"There are lots of good ideas but we can only invest in those ones that we can afford."

In the referendum document, Meat & Wool states that because of the small size of the goatmeat levy, its activities will be directed at distributing technical information, communication, and specific market activities.

It does not propose to change the rate of levy which will remain at 55 cents per head slaughtered until the 2014-2015 year.

Estimated goat slaughter numbers for both the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 years ending September 30 are expected to be 105,000 (generating $57,750).

The majority of levy collected from goats in New Zealand comes from extensively farmed goats.

In the past, Meat & Wool helped to fund the National Goat Monitoring project which ran for four years and involved 16 farms at an overall cost of $680,000.

The results from the project were criticised by some because of the methodology used.

Mr Wakelin said it was the first such study which had been carried out and things had been learnt which might not otherwise have been realised if not for this study. There were a lot of challenges to running a monitoring project and some issues only become clear with hindsight.

"We should have done it differently," Mr Wakelin said.

Because of the nature of goat farming in New Zealand, there was value in implementing focused case studies in areas where it was deemed relevant, rather than taking a broad approach, he said.

Mr Wakelin was optimistic about the future because of the large numbers of consumers of goatmeat in the world, but future growth would be determined by the passion and enthusiasm of people for farming goats.

People had to want to farm the animal and it had to be profitable, Mr Wakelin said.

Gibbston Valley farmer David Aitken, who is also a member of the Goat Advisory Group and on the executive committee of New Zealand Boer Goat Breeders' Association, said the goat farming industry was quite diverse and there was a need for a more unified approach.

The New Zealand Boer Goat Society supported the proposal to continue the levy, he said.

Work needed to be done to improve the status of the goat advisory group, he said.

"The issue is, are we going to be backward-looking or forward-looking?"Without the marketing and promotion we're not going to get goats out on farms.

"We want farmers to look at goat farming as a serious option."

Goat farming fitted well with New Zealand's environmental objectives, especially as the animal provided a viable, environmentally friendly option for weed control, Mr Aitken said.

This should be leverage to get additional funds from other quarters for research, he said.

Mr Aitken was part of the goat-monitoring project and said issues arose because of the small number of participants and the wide spectrum it was trying to address.

Mr Aitken would like to see levy funding put into smaller case studies which produced representative data, but which was relevant to a specific need.

Last month Meat & Wool completed its consultation with farmers and produced its final proposal.

Farmers should receive the proposal document and their voting papers this week and the voting period runs until 2pm, August 28.

The results of the referendum are expected in the first week of September.