WHEN Danny Hailes looks back over his meat industry career he quotes one statistic he says reveals much about the capability of New Zealand sheep and beef farmers.
In 2004 Hailes managed the company’s newly bought and renovated Dannevirke plant where the average weight of lambs processed that season was 15.5kg.
Seven years later in his last year managing the Pukeuri plant north of Oamaru the average weight of lambs processed was over 18kg.
“That’s a massive shift and testimony to the great progress made by sheep farmers, the genetics they use, their animal husbandry and management.”
His career with Alliance began as in-house legal counsel before he became a plant manager, commercial manager and company secretary.
He now replaces Heather Stacey as livestock and shareholder services manager, a position that oversees, nurtures and maintains relationships and communication between the company, its shareholders and suppliers.
His role is also central in the inexact science of matching market returns and prices paid for livestock while factoring in things like weather patterns, farmer needs, processing capacity, consumer patterns and demand.
Each Friday morning various meetings of the executive team and senior managers consider a host of information including sales, marketing, pricing changes, procurement and capacity, from which emerges what they will pay farmers for livestock.
“A big part is distilling what is actual information and what is noise,” he says.
The real science is finding that fine line between capacity and supply, an-at times difficult art of telling a mini supply bubble from an early or late season peak.
For example, there is now unseasonally high demand from farmers wanting to quit bulls well before the traditional autumn peak.
Hailes was born in Lawrence in south Otago but raised in Dunedin.
On leaving St Paul’s High School he worked in the commercial affairs division at the Ministry of Justice, a job that sparked an interest in law, which he studied at Otago University.
On graduation he joined the Invercargill law firm AWS Law, which did work for Alliance and its subsidiary, Southland Farmers, a stock firm that also sold cars, trucks and tractors.
In 1993 Alliance was looking for an in-house legal counsel and Hailes successfully applied, lured by interest in company law and the co-operative model.
He initially worked under chief executive the late Rick Bettle and his successors Owen Poole, Grant Cuff and now David Surveyor.
His work was mostly in areas of employment relations and company growth, which culminated in 2003 when Alliance bought and rebuilt the Dannevirke plant in Tararua.
It was a year-long post that end in July 2004.
“It was an interesting time, our first foray into the North Island although now we have got Levin.”
While other meat companies were not overly enamoured an Invercargill meat company had moved into the lower North Island, Hailes says Dannevirke achieved what was intended, supplying out of season meat.
He moved back to the South Island to manage the Pukeuri plant in North Otago, a large, older-style plant.
It provided a different set of challenges such as sourcing fresh water and dealing with wastewater, which in the past was pumped out to sea after minimal treatment.
There was also the constant challenge of finding enough staff, which led them to recruit workers from Tonga and Samoa, many of whom subsequently settled in the Oamaru community.
“The North Otago rugby team had a lot to thank us for,” he says of the Tongan and Samoan players who have helped make the side successful in recent years.
In 2011, after seven seasons, Hailes was on the move again, this time to head office in Invercargill where he worked in a commercial role overseeing the company’s involvement in Red Meat Profit Partnership projects and sitting on the board of Deer Industry NZ.
Three years later he replaced the retiring Michael Horne as company secretary, a position that involves supporting the board on its governance and corporate responsibility roles, overseeing due diligence on potential investments and risk management. Environmental responsibilities were added to the role.
During his career Hailes has seen the meat industry become more co-operative to the point it is working together on many aspects of the business.
The members of The Lamb Company had always co-operated in nurturing the North American market but there is now greater interaction in areas such as health and safety and joint marketing initiatives.
Hailes stressed that legally companies cannot and do not co-operate on areas such as pricing and procurement but all companies have a mutual goal of keeping staff safe and benefit from sharing information and ideas on how to do it.
Alliance has started holding board meetings at plants, during which directors interact with staff and talk about workplace safety in a move designed to stress its importance.
Hailes is optimistic about the future of red meat saying the growth of plant-based protein does not create an either-or situation. There is room for both.
“There are still people who want the real thing and NZ farmers are so good at producing red meat and doing so efficiently.”
There are still untapped consumers in places like India that have potential for new red meat exports.
“I think farmers should feel good about the long-term outlook.”
