Media attention has been focused on Katie Milne’s election to national presidency as the first woman in 118 years to lead the peak farming organisation.
She is a West Coast dairy farmer and director of Westland Milk Products, a former Dairy Woman of the Year, and the 2015 Rural Woman of Influence.
On the federation’s board since 2012, she came to national prominence as spokeswoman for biosecurity and adverse events.
Milne’s vice-president is Andrew Hoggard from Feilding, formerly the dairy industry group chairman. Hoggard has been replaced by his deputy, Chris Lewis, from Pukeatua.
Hoggard and Lewis, both 42, were former provincial presidents of Manawatu-Rangitikei and Waikato respectively.
The three young dairy farmers now make up 40% of the seven-person national board.
The others are new meat and fibre industry group chairman Miles Anderson of South Canterbury, re-elected arable industry group chairman Guy Wigley, also from South Canterbury, re-elected national board member Chris Allen, Mid-Canterbury, and newly-elected board member Lynda Murchison, also North Canterbury president.
Portfolios would be discussed and allocated at the first national board meeting, Hoggard said.
“After the election we looked at the board composition and said ‘four Cantabrians’, but at the time it was the best person for the job.”
For the Feds it was the first time since 2002-05 that both national president and vice-president were dairy farmers – then Tom Lambie and Charlie Pedersen respectively.
Contested elections for senior positions had also been few and far between.
The election of Bruce Wills as president in 2011 was a strongly contested one, and the first to be so in 15 years.
Wills, as meat and fibre chairman, won against two controversial dairy farmers, Lachlan McKenzie and Frank Brenmuhl, and high-country leader Donald Aubrey.
Commentator Rod Oram called that Bruce Wills-William Rolleston election “a constructive change after six years of negative, adversarial, presidential politicking by Charlie Pedersen and Don Nicolson”.
Also in 2011, the first woman to serve on the national board, Jeanette Maxwell, was elected meat and fibre chairwoman.
She was followed by board member Katie Milne in 2012, and by Lynda Murchison this year.
In late June, Milne contested the national presidency against previous vice-president Anders Crofoot, and Hoggard contested the vice-presidency with previous meat and fibre chairman Rick Powdrell.
Hoggard had wondered whether delegates would want two dairy farmers at the top, but in the event that wasn’t raised by any delegate as an objection.
He had already served 12 years, since leaving Young Farmers, in a progression of leadership roles for the federation – at provincial and then dairy group levels.
Therefore, the demands of six more years, first as vice-president and then possibly president, had to be weighed carefully against family and farm.
Hoggard’s dairy farm operates with two people minimum, but three ideally, and so he had employed enough staff members to cover his absences.
It was during the most challenging parts of the season, like calving, that his experience and guidance would be most needed. The honorarium for the national position would help pay for the additional staffing.
Hoggard thought younger faces around the board table belied the length of service those people had already given.
Milne, Lewis and he had all begun provincial representation more than a decade ago, and had worked their way through local government and resource management issues over several terms in different roles.
“We have been around for a while now, and we have a lot of knowledge of the organisation and the issues it deals with,” Hoggard said.
An ongoing challenge for the Feds was growing its membership by convincing farmers they needed to fund the advocacy work done on their behalf and for their financial benefit, particularly at local government level.
More sheep and beef farmers were needed to balance the membership with farming demographics.
Hoggard said he normally played the ball, not the man, but his final speech to the Feds’ national conference as dairy chairman was an exception.
Constant harping by environmental activists on freshwater quality had gone overboard, and the facts were nowhere as dire as they claimed, he said.
“The end-is-nigh diatribe is continually dished out, and the broad brush efforts to take us back to subsistence agriculture are not the solution.
“Auckland Harbour water quality is getting attention, and the media is searching wider than dairy farms for reasons.”
Chris Lewis said he hoped for three settled years as national dairy chairman, in which the industry could concentrate on solutions to the problems.
The federation wanted to move past what Green Party co-leader James Shaw had called a Punch and Judy show.
“We want practical, affordable solutions that achieve real change, and not have national policies that achieve nothing.
“We reserve the right to defend ourselves at all times, but we will do that with credible arguments, not emotion, hyperbole and scare-mongering.
“Farmers realise there is a long way to go, but we need to encourage them to find solutions, not browbeat them,” Lewis said.
