It seemed so promising. Momentum driven by farmer disillusionment at the perilous state of the meat industry had in 2007-08 created an unprecedented swell of opinion and support for the meat industry to change.
But it came to nothing.
Two years later it is business as usual, and farmers are once again in survival mode due to low lamb prices, selling their prime stock to the company offering the most money, but not necessarily with the brightest long-term future for the industry.
But, as so often happens with our second-largest export earner, a one-year meat price boom is followed by several years of unsatisfactory prices - as has happened this season with prices up to 30% lower.
Accompanying that anxiety and pressure is a return of talk that the industry must change, highlighted by an open letter by a group of farmers to Agriculture Minister David Carter calling for industry restructuring.
But will it? The reality is that farmers hold all the cards.
They own the raw material and can dictate company behaviour by choosing whom they supply.
There appears little mood from within many of the companies for change, and Agriculture Minister David Carter said he had met the heads of the two largest meat companies, Alliance Group and Silver Fern Farms, who he said were "fiercely independent".
"I have spoken to both and they both argue that their first responsibility is to serve their shareholders," Mr Carter said in an interview.
Mr Carter said his concerns remained of excess processing capacity and anecdotal evidence of New Zealand companies undercutting each other in markets.
With the Fonterra milk price increasing, he said pressure would return to change land use from meat to more profitable dairying.
Add to that the growing industry of farming trees for carbon credits, and sheep farming faces a new risk of being squeezed off the fertile downlands by dairy cows and the hill country by forestry.
Changing the behaviour of the sheep meat farmer was one challenge, but while questions have been asked about why the meat industry cannot replicate what is happening in dairy, the reality was the meat industry was designed to be competitive.
Farmers have criticised as against their interests having 20 New Zealand meat exporters knocking on the doors of customers in the United Kingdom, which drove down prices, but sources say that is the competitive model in which the industry legally has to work.
The export dairy and kiwifruit industries have legislative protection for their single desk or restricted selling status, and even with the formation of Fonterra, it was given sole access to quota markets in Europe, albeit with a sunset clause.
There was little likelihood of industry aggregation, unless by commercial necessity, and that included the two large southern co-ops, Alliance and Silver Fern Farms, which accounted for slightly more than 50% of the industry and were seen as central to any restructuring.
Aside from their competitive spirit, local patriotism and personalities, meat companies have all embarked on their own business strategies.
Alliance chairman Owen Poole said that while he still saw merit in a single entity processing and marketing the bulk of New Zealand meat exports, as he promoted in 2008, there was no indication of a resurrection in merger talks.
"I'm not sure how we would put it together now, because companies have moved on with their own strategies."
Mr Poole said export lamb prices remained at record levels but farmer returns were being slashed by an export-unfriendly exchange rate.
The other issue impacting on sheep meat returns was the low value of co-products, especially wool.
"Meat is essentially carrying farmers' entire revenue," he said.
Lift the returns of wool, and farmer viability would improve, he said.
Farmers controlled the future of the industry by deciding who they supplied with stock.
"Essentially, it's in farmers' hands. There is no point buying assets for aggregation if there is no farmer support for it."
Aggregation of procurement would lead to aggregation in the market, he said.
"If that is what they [farmers] seek, it's in their hands."
His counterpart at Silver Fern Farms (SFF), Eoin Garden, agreed that industry consolidation was in farmers' hands.
If farmers were prepared to supply stock for a few cents a kg more to a company other than one they owned, then that was at the "collective peril" for company owners.
Mr Garden said this week farmers had to take a long-term vision for an industry where the traditional model of companies maximising the number of animals processed and selling commodity products had failed.
The sector had to extract more value out of products, he said.
Farmers had not invested enough in new technology or marketing and unless they did, they would repeat the mistakes of the past.
"With the strategy the industry has got now, in 10 years' time we will be back having the same discussion," he told shareholders at SFF's annual meeting.
Mr Garden has consistently said the industry needs a strategy first and a structure second, and SFF has embarked on its own strategy of selling higher-value branded meat products and trying to capture more of the value chain.
It was a long-term strategy, and payback was likely to take two years and was also a clear sign that SFF was getting on with business.
The strategy appears to have the support of shareholders, but the proof will be in the behaviour of those shareholders, measured by who they supply stock to.
Asked about the possibility of industry aggregation, Mr Garden told shareholders that SFF would "engage in sensible dialogue that would contribute to sensible rationalisation of the industry."
Lincoln University's head of farm management and agribusiness, Prof Keith Woodford, said the perilous state of the wool industry was having a large impact on farm profitability.
Meat companies had done well to achieve record market lamb prices, but he questioned whether retail lamb prices could be pushed higher given relativity with beef.
The future of the sheep meat industry lay in new markets such as China, and those with oil-based economies, as the populations in the traditional lamb markets of Europe were static or falling.
Consumers were also demanding changes in the way lamb was presented, and Prof Woodford said while integrated supply chain models addressed their concern, lamb remained a difficult industry from which to make money consistently.
Despite all these words and actions, an immediate concern remains of excess processing capacity, and in the past three years Alliance, Affco and Canterbury Meat Packers have all increased capacity, despite falling sheep numbers, to increase their geographic spread.
SFF has been the only major company to reduce capacity.
This year, companies are embraced in a procurement battle to source stock for the valuable Easter trade, paying prices that do not reflect market returns.
It is business as usual.
