“I have a lot of interaction with farmers in their 20s and 30s so I don’t just have a view of what my generation think but also younger generations, what they are thinking about when it comes to farming and also the environment we work in,” she said.
The 53-year-old from New Plymouth is standing again for the DairyNZ board after 10 years with the organisation, the first four with Dexcel. She and her husband Louis have been farming since 1979 and are equity partners in the each of their three adult children’s and their partners’ farms – two in Taranaki and one in Wairarapa. They won the Taranaki Sharemilker of the Year in 1987 and the AC Cameron Rural Excellence Award in 1999.
Kuriger is a director of Dairy Training, the Primary ITO, Te Kauta, Dairy Women’s Network, NZ Young Farmers and the Taratahi Agricultural Training Centre and a trustee at the Taranaki Agricultural Research Station. She was the first woman regional director of LIC in 1993 and was on the Fonterra Shareholders’ Council between 2001 and 2007, chairing the governance and ethics committee from 2003 to 2005.
She won the inaugural Dairy Woman of the Year competition in 2012 with her prize the year-long Women in Leadership Breakthrough Programme run by New Zealand Global Woman. Her various roles in the industry helped with her work for DairyNZ, she said.
“DairyNZ is a central point for a lot of things and retaining and making new connections between groups is important. We need to grow links from our own industry to others to make New Zealand even stronger.”
The next four years would see more challenges for DairyNZ than ever before.
“We have to find new ways of doing things, especially when it comes to technology. Farmers have always gone to discussion groups to find out new information but younger farmers may want to use social media instead. We have to find that out.”
DairyNZ’s new strategic plan was the foundation that would see the organisation into the future.
“The boat hasn’t turned and gone in another direction,” she said.
“The strategic plan is giving us momentum to drive our industry forward. I’m really hopeful we can build the respect of New Zealanders for dairying, the respect that we had when we began dairying. We are part of a community and proud of it.”
