Travelling the country with the company's roadshow, Alliance Group chief executive David Surveyor spoke at the Longford Function Centre in Gore recently and said he was thrilled with the progress made in health and safety.
It was now about linking health and safety with everything else, he said.
The company was ''making sure we are getting the manufacturing and processing gains as we are improving health and safety''.
With almost 5000 staff, Alliance, in 2014, was at the stage where one in every eight or nine employees was getting injured each year.
But the year was blighted by an incident at Smithfield in March, when an employee's hand was severed in an auger, Mr Surveyor said.
''There is still a long way to go before we can class ourselves as doing incredibly.''
The end goal was to get the company down to zero harm.
Along with health and safety, the company's balance sheet was also making great progress.
In 2015, Alliance had falling revenue and rising costs and was on the way to hitting rock-bottom.
There were five things going on: falling revenue and rising costs, farmers saying they were not being paid enough, Alliance was not creating value for farmers, the banks were saying farmer shareholders were not making enough and the company had no strategy.
Fast-forward to 2017 and the company had almost done a full 360, with a strong balance sheet and this year, a bonus share issue for stock supplied by shareholders, Mr Surveyor said.
''Fundamentally we've really made substantial progress in terms of those five things,'' he said.
In 2015, Mr Surveyor travelled the country talking to farmer shareholders about Alliance's strategy and how the company was going to move forward, with the first step being to get fit.
''Everything that's done in the company is about how do we return it to you [the shareholder].''
While getting fit had been a three to five-year goal, Alliance was now ready to make the next step which was about becoming more sustainable, which it was starting to do now, Mr Surveyor said.
This had included further investment, looking to target the value in the market, building the capability of the company, and more, he said.
Last year's debt figure of $41million would be halved to somewhere around the $20million mark, Mr Surveyor said.
The company's profit would also be up dramatically on last year, but Mr Surveyor could not yet give a figure until he had the audited accounts.
''There's still a lot more to do - cut more costs and achieve more revenue,'' chairman Murray Taggart said.
Alliance was also cautious about macro-issues such as low wool prices, as they provided uncertainty about whether sheep farmers would change their operations, Mr Taggart said.
The recent election had also highlighted some challenges for farmers that needed to be addressed such as emissions, the possibility of a water tax and a nitrate tax.
''The issues aren't going to go away.''
At the other end of the scale were things such as synthetic meat, which the company was keeping an eye on, Mr Taggart said.
''We're watching really closely but we don't see it as an immediate threat.''
At the moment synthetic meat producers were targeting different markets, he said.
Overall, Alliance had a much stronger balance sheet, but there was still work to be done to move further down the cost curve and achieve more revenue, Mr Taggart said.
''[Alliance is still] making too little money for the size of company that we are.''