The precarious state of the sheep and beef industries gave farmers little choice but to back PGG-Wrightson's plan to buy half of Silver Fern Farms.
Because returns have been woeful and farmers are flocking to dairying, the ground was fertile for new ideas and new structures.
Farmers, often by nature canny and sceptical, remarkably passed the 75% in-favour threshold to go down this new path.
Dunedin-based Silver Fern Farms began as farmer marketing co-operative PPCS, having stock killed at other companies' meat works.
It then grew to buy processing plants and become New Zealand's largest meat company.
After a long and expensive battle, it bought North Island-based Richmond in 2004, with the subsequent debt nearly bringing down Silver Fern Farms.
The company has returned to some sort of profitability and has continued with new marketing and robotic processing strategies.
It has also taken hard decisions to close plants.
But it remained burdened by killing over-capacity, debt and a shortage of money to advance its plans at anything like the required speed.
Pressure to combine with southern rival Alliance has gone nowhere, despite a clamour for change, and dark clouds continue to hang over the whole sheep and beef industry.
In this context, the offer of $220 million provides Silver Fern Farms suppliers hope through a fresh industry model, through additional expertise and crucially, through a capital injection.
Silver Fern Farms can now advance its mechanisation much more rapidly and its clients can work with the company and PGG-Wrightson to try to bolster the whole industry, as the propaganda puts it, "from plate to pasture".
Against a background of guaranteed farmer control of the Silver Fern Farms board, despite the 50% ownership, changes in stock procurement options, farmer capital structure and marketing strategy are all proposed.
Specifically, plans are afoot to pay premiums to extend the shoulder lamb seasons and to seek higher returns from Asian and Middle Eastern markets.
Given the paucity of decent meat industry profits over past decades, PGG-Wrightson's foray is itself bold.
The argument goes that with two-thirds of its clients sheep and beef farmers, what is good for them is good for the company.
Its vested interest in the prosperity - and even the survival - of these farmers is a powerful motive.
At the same time, PGG-Wrightson sees itself benefiting from additional slices of the business, from the "integrated supply chain" from "plate to pasture".
Company chief executive Craig Norgate, once Fonterra's chief executive, has been dynamic and innovative and the combined board is likely to be stacked with business talent.
Silver Fern Farms will now be an odd hybrid - half co-operative and half owned by a public company - with a clutch of specific farmer safeguards.
It is, in fact, the potential for clashing interests - a public company would want maximum profits and therefore pay farmers the minimum for stock, while farmers may want the highest prices irrespective of company profits - which has caused opposition.
The response has been that Silver Fern Farms must remain competitive in stock purchase. Farmers will be able to send truck-loads of stock to Alliance's Mataura works instead of Silver Fern Farm's Finegand if the price is not right.
Whatever its public utterances, Alliance must have its own concerns in the wake of the transformation of land use of the Southland Plains. It was not that many years ago (1991) that it, too, went to the brink of collapse, and now it faces a fitter competitor.
But while deep-seated ill-will means that further radical developments and co-operation in the meat industry might be some way off, change will come eventually one way or another.
In the meantime, the owners of Silver Fern Farms have agreed to change and thus provide hope and opportunities. Sheep and beef farmers, particularly at a time when red meat prices are rising and the peak of the dairy boom is passing, are positioning themselves to weather the current storms and to plan for a brighter future.
