Synlait co-founder and multipreneur John Penno could retire if he wanted to.
Neither lounging on a beach nor signing up for a round of golf fills the Canterbury agri-businessman with much enthusiasm.
For him retirement means doing all the things he wants to do and that just happens to be business.
"I’m also not that old," he says, chuckling at the thought.
"I stepped down from the CEO role at Synlait back in 2018 and that was far too young and I didn’t step down to retire. The thinking was with [wife] Maury we wanted to get involved in a few other things and take what we had learned collectively and push it into new areas."
Bringing far more satisfaction for him is taking what New Zealand is good at and making it better or finding new business to earn a living in this world.
So after helping Synlait build a fledgling milk processor into a $1.5 billion business on his exit, he and Ms Leyland Penno have put their efforts into a North Canterbury farm, a protein business called Leaft Foods and hop and apple growing.
As if that is not enough, he has just become the new chairman for The NZ Merino Company (NZM).
The common thread running between these business interests is farming.
They run 3000 sheep plus lambs on three blocks bought near the mouth of the Hurunui River about five years ago. About half is irrigated and the other 50% rolling to steeper hill country.
Romtex ewes mix with trade lambs, dairy animals are grazed, while beef cattle are also traded.
"The truth is I have never been a farmer. I would like to have been, but I’ve always been one step removed. But I certainly love the process, love farming and growing things and producing."
The farm spawned a general interest in wool, but was not the only reason he joined the NZM board as a director in 2020.
In his view NZM has done as well as any primary company in developing a value model — up there with Zespri, the dairy industry and others.
He had always admired former chief executive John Brakenridge and the company building strong relationships with end customers in certain markets and then working to link the supply chain with farmers.
From a distance he observed long-term contracts adding value to customers and farmers through the highs and lows of commodity markets.
He went there as much as anything to learn, he said.
Now he wants to help chief executive Angus Street and his team take on strong wool opportunities, grow market share and keep driving NZM forward.
"I think the wool industry in NZ needs consolidation and there are too many players, too many CEOs and too many management teams taking too much out of the supply chain which means farmers don’t get much out of the strong wool game."
To keep producing wool at a net loss was ridiculous. By applying the fine wool model of finding the right customers and removing costs farmers could earn more.
Furthermore, he sees NZM continuing to build fine wool market share in New Zealand as well as Australia, South Africa and South America.
Demand was growing from "new economies" in Asia across the range of merino products.
NZM is a private business about 60% owned by fine wool farmers, as well as staff and private investors, with shares traded on the Unlisted Securities Exchange (USX).
Mr Penno said his role was to lead governance, not run the business.
"My view is governance has a job to look after the legal requirements of companies, but that’s 20% of the job and 80% is making sure the management team goes better."
Often, a company’s strategy development came out of the management team and the board was there to refine, test and challenge it to make sure the big ideas were right, he said.
After earning an agricultural science degree at Lincoln University, he became a consulting officer for the New Zealand Dairy Board and a research scientist at Dexcel, later completing a PhD in animal science.
As a scientist, he worked to help dairy farmers increase their productivity and profit.
Before long, he realised farming was a better way to raise capital than science so he, Ben Dingle and Juliet Maclean bought Robindale, a dairy farm in Te Pirita near Dunsandel about 25 years ago.
The trio developed more dairy farms, forming Synlait five years later.
The first milk was processed in 2008 at the new Dunsandel site in the first step towards it becoming a major export dairy company sending nutrition products around the world.
"I have very fond memories of Juliet Maclean and Ben Dingle and I spending lots of time dreaming up what that could be and then building it. Not everyone gets the chance to do that. It was a great, fun thing to do."
Since then he and his wife have developed Leaft Foods, a start-up manufacturing rubisco protein concentrate from the leaves of commonly grown crops.
For the past six years they have been deep in technology.
Mr Penno said Leaft was at the stage now of producing about 4 tonnes of high-value proteins per hectare per year compared with a sheep and beef farm’s 200kg of dry-weight protein and an efficient dairy farm’s about 500kg.
The return per hectare was "considerably" higher than dairying, he said.
Just launched is Leaft Blade, a performance nutrition product sold in a pouch and designed to be taken before exercise.
Sold in New Zealand and the United States, its high iron content is finding favour with people dealing with iron deficiencies.
Mr Penno said they were gearing up to commercially manufacture a food ingredient protein.
Starting to be sold locally, this was always designed to be an export business, marketed to major food manufacturers around the world to grow enough demand to build the first factory, he said.
The protein is concentrated, frozen and eventually distributed in 20kg blocks.
Leaft is still in a start-up phase with no revenue until now after about $40m in investment from venture capital led by Khosla Ventures, government funding and local money including from Foundation for Arable Research, Ngāi Tahu and Ravensdown.
Mr Penno said this might seem like a big number, but the new factory was capable of producing about $10m in revenue a year.
"From start-up to that is pretty good going."
The next stage is supporting 35 staff, many of them in their thirties, to build it into a "business of significance" by connecting with customers around the world and ensuring farmers are well paid.
Their Bold River Hops venture is supplied by hops grown at their North Canterbury farm and a Nelson property.
The couple have had an apple trial running over the past five years with about 26 different varieties performing well in yield and fruit quality and they are quietly thinking about their next move.
More than likely this will see them growing a range to hedge their bets, but they do see horticulture gaining in importance because of its high return per hectare.
"We didn’t buy the farms to be sheep and beef farmers. We bought them because with climate shift that region around Cheviot and particularly the coastal river flat areas have about the same climate today that Nelson and Motueka had about 30 years ago. Things that could be grown then should be able to be grown now. The hops were really the easiest way to prove that at scale because you get to pull harvest within two years."
Learning from the merino model, they have connected to end customers to sell their hops to individual brewers.
Anyone drinking a craft beer in Christchurch is likely to be enjoying their hops and they are being sold to the US, Japan, and hopefully Australia soon.
