This year’s Zanda McDonald award winner is no stranger to collecting scholarships and awards for his efforts to look longer and harder at the challenges and opportunities in the pastoral sector.
Thomas Macdonald, business manager for Spring Sheep Milk Company, has been awarded the prestigious Platinum Primary Producer (PPP) Zanda McDonald award valued at $50,000 in recognition of his work in the sector and his continuing contribution to the innovative sheep milk company. The award is a combination of cash, business management programmes and mentoring sessions with selected PPP members across Australasia.
The award was created in memory of Zanda McDonald, a prominent identity in the Australian beef and livestock industry who was killed in 2013, aged 41, on his Queensland farm. He was the biggest private landholder in Australia with 3.36 million hectares in Queensland.
Since graduating with a Masters in Agribusiness from Waikato University in 2014, Macdonald has demonstrated an ability to tap into the sector’s zeitgeist.
His Masters work at Waikato examined the environmental compliance costs for Waikato dairy farm systems. It came at a time when anti-farming rhetoric was gaining in intensity, and more heat than light was being shed on what the dairy sector in particular was and was not doing to try and remedy nutrient losses into the environment.
This work earnt him the New Zealand National Fieldays scholarship in 2015.
His body of work put some solid numbers around just how much effort dairy farmers had put into environmental compliance in recent years, determining it amounted to $400 million in recent years. The research did much to determine what farm systems were going to be more efficient under regulation, and what ones would suffer.
After a period of time spent as a business analyst with Landcorp brand Pamu, dairy business manager and now with Spring Sheep Milk Company, Macdonald brings a global, consumer-focused view to what will enshrine success for pastoral New Zealand in years to come.
The sheep milking sector earnt some strong praise recently from visiting Wisconsin sheep guru David Thomas, who was impressed at the sector’s scale on farms and ability to innovate.
“While I cannot speak for the whole industry I think here at Spring Sheep we are being cautious in our approach to how we develop our scale and capacity.
“The conversations we are having are good ones, around consumers and what they are looking for in a milk product. We are very much regarding ourselves as food producers, rather than simply farmers and that keeps you focused on the consumer, the person who keeps you in business.”
He says this is a contrast to New Zealand farming’s “No.8 wire” approach to growth and opportunity.
“It’s often been a case of ‘build some farms, end up with too much product with no understanding of who is buying, then small farmers lose money’.
“The sensible approach is to look at what problem can we solve for the consumer, and work from there.”
In the case of Spring Sheep, the solution for consumers is to offer an easily digestible milk product that’s delicious, rich in nutrients and doesn’t contain the A1 protein found in regular cow’s milk.
“So for anyone who may be sensitive to cow’s milk, this is an option.”
Macdonald consistently emphasises a need to understand what is motivating consumers, and pushing them to make the decisions they do.
While his company’s product works on meeting certain physical expectations on health and well-being, he is also conscious of the emotive features pushing people to make the purchase decisions they do.
“Our milk is positioned as a ‘gentle’ milk, coming from gentle sheep in beautiful farm surroundings with a more gentle environmental impact.”
Sitting around that is a desire to purchase milk that is grass-fed and palmer kernel-, antibiotic- and GMO-free.
He says understanding of consumer desires extends back into the culture of how Spring Sheep Milk Company operates. The business is aiming to remove the “industrial” angle from farming that has come to dominate larger dairy cow operations, with staff encouraged to think of themselves as food producers, working with animals they feel an authentic, strong affinity for.
“We have attracted people from a range of areas, including cow dairy, and they all enjoy working with the sheep. We are building up a level of skill now, with some staff having been here for the full three years.”
Interestingly, Macdonald’s Masters work on traditional dairy farm effluent costs has highlighted some future opportunities for the business he oversees now.
The Masters research project revealed a tranche of “medium input” farms that fell into something of a black hole for effluent compliance. They sat at a point where the average cost to comply was double that of “low input” farms and where the marginal cost of compliance was greater than any additional milksolids it may have produced.
It opens the door to other land use opportunities on properties that might not be absorbed into bigger farms, and particularly sheep milking.
“You can drive around Waikato, or anywhere else for that matter, and see 20 year old dairies needing an upgrade, where debt is too high and the owners are may be burnt out.
“Sheep milking on such properties may be a means of attracting a new generation of farmers back, it could be a great way to use that existing infrastructure.”
With a family farm north of Hamilton, and an academic and career background firmly rooted in traditional dairying, Macdonald is cautiously optimistic the sector can manage towards tuning in to what consumers want, rather than simply driving more dollars from more grass.
“We are starting to see it with A2 milk, and Fonterra’s palm kernel index.
“If you take your eye off the ball and toping thinking about the next 10 years, you will tip over. To think there will be someone who always wants NZ produce is a bit naïve, and now is the time to make those big changes around understanding what makes consumers want to buy your product.”
