The largest global supplier of wool socks in the active outdoor market wants to step up its wool contract with New Zealand merino growers, worth more than $100 million the last nine years. A top executive team from the United States company SmartWool will meet wool farmers at a North Canterbury function centre on Monday reports Stuff.

The company has indicated it will extend orders for New Zealand- grown merino and mid-micron wool in its partnership with The New Zealand Merino Company (NZM) from double-digit growth projected each year for the next three years. SmartWool will go into more detail at the meeting about its increasing demand for 18 to 26 micron wool and give farmers volume and price projections for its wool requirements to meet growing orders.

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Dairy industry leaders have put farmers on notice to lift their game after a damning report showed many have substandard effluent management systems. Fonterra announced yesterday that from next season it will visit every supplier’s farm each year to inspect dairy-effluent systems. The company has demanded higher compliance with the regulations, with threatening fines and the refusal to collect milk from repeat offenders reports The ODT.

The latest Clean Streams Accord data, gathered by regional councils, shows the number of farmers around New Zealand adhering to council dairy-effluent discharge consents has slipped from 64% in 2007-08 to 60% in 2008-09. “That’s a level that whilst we do not like it, you have got to say it’s not a bad level. It’s one of the best in the country.”

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Meat processor Silver Fern Farms is working on replacement funding for an existing $75 million of bonds reports Business Day. The $75m tranche is due to mature in December and the meat processing co-operative is mulling options including a further bond issue or alternative funding from banks.

SFF had about $184.5m of debt at August 31. It needs capital or further facilities to help pay debt that is rolling over and to continue its farm-pasture-to-customer-plate marketing strategy. SFF’s previous capital-raising plan ended with a splutter rather than a surge with farmer suppliers only ploughing in about $22m of new equity, much less than originally envisaged.

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Blaming sheep farmers for the loss of 43 jobs at AgResearch is akin to blaming investors for the failure of a finance company. Instead, the focus needs to turn to the private sector to unlock new wool fibre uses reports Scoop.“I think this is a tragedy for the research staff involved and for NZ It highlights a massive gulf between what is expected from research and what’s actually being put into the field,” says Don Nicolson, Fed Farmers President.

“But with the national flock less than half the peak of 70 million reached in 1982, research monies have simply followed this 28-year realignment. AgResearch is basing its business plan on where the sheep industry is, not where it once was. “For wool to be on a par with 1980s returns, it ought to be a $2.8 billion export but now it’s down to just under $500 million. It’s simply wrong to blame farmers for pulling the wool levy when our returns have collapsed.

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Women know more about the dynamics of dairy farm finances than most of them realise, says Rebecca Rowe, a former rural banking manager and ex-farm consultant. She was talking to about 30 women who were at Woodville’s Dairy Women’s Network day that aimed at empowering dairy women by giving them budgeting tools to take charge of their farm financial planning.

 It means they become empowered, rather than have financial incomings and outgoings just happening to them, Ms Rowe explained in the Manawatu Standard. About half of the women said they had done farm budgets, but many were uninitiated and she estimated less than half were doing farm budgets every year – let alone updating them every two months to keep them valid, as advised.

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Dairy farmers spilling cow effluent were seen by the public as more of a threat to society than drink-drivers or murderers, Southland dairy farmer Mike Horgan told a dairy industry conference in Invercargill yesterday. His daughter Bridget, 19, and two friends, Megan Hamilton, 22, of Winton, and Virginia Armstrong, 22, were killed by a drink-driver on Good Friday in 1995.

Mr Horgan told delegates at the NZ Large Herds conference at Stadium Southland about his shift from Taranaki to Southland in 1994, and the challenges he had faced, including criticism from sheep farmers. While he admitted the dairy industry could be let down by mediocrity, Mr Horgan criticised the public and the media’s willingness to condemn dairy farmers reports The Southland Times.

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Dairy farmers needed to make a greater effort to be aware of their neighbours and their concerns, delegates at the Large Herds Conference were told yesterday. Speaking at the opening of the annual conference in Invercargill, NZ Large Herds Association chairman Bryan Beeston said farmers had to make sure the tools and skills they used were up to the job to ensure environmental compliance reports The Southland Times.

“There have been many instances where machinery has failed, people not trained, the suppliers of the gear, the systems we run, are not up to the job.” But he was confident the conference would show the industry was complying with the standards and conditions placed on it by councils and the Government.

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Murray Horn, former Treasury secretary and head of ANZ Banking Group’s New Zealand arm, has been tapped to help lure warring factions of the wool sector out of their trenches to create a new industry good bodyreports Scoop. Horn will act as an independent convenor and will call a meeting of wool sector organisations to begin the process of forming a single voice for the industry, said Agriculture Minister David Carter.

Horn’s appointment stems from the work of the Wool Taskforce, which Carter convened last year in the wake of the grower vote to dump Meat & Wool New Zealand’s wool levy. The group reconvened last month to consider the Wool taskforce report: Restoring Profitability to the Strong Wool Sector, which recommended a marketing strategy focusing on wool’s heritage and green credentials.

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Farm prices and sales volumes have collapsed in the last two years as the withdrawal of easy bank lending has dried up farmers’ appetites for capital gains, fresh figures show reports interest.co.nz. The slump in the number of transactions is expected to ripple out through the rural and provincial economies, given the surge in lending and activity through 2006 to 2008 helped drive spending on coastal and provincial residential property.

The national median farm sale price was NZ$1.045 million in the three months to February, down 40 per cent from the NZ$1.75 million seen in the three months to February 2008, Real Estate Institute of New Zealand figures show. There were 11 dairy farm sales in February and 34 in the three months to February, which is down 78 per cent from the 158 seen in the three months to February 2008, which was seen as the peak of the dairy boom.

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Crossbred wool auction prices have stabilised after making a strong recovery from the lows of last year’s world recession reports Business Day. Prices for best-style clean fleece and second shear are up 20% to $3.50 a kilogram on prices in July and August; good lamb’s wool is up 15% to $4.30 and oddments are up 30% to $2.70.

Wool was last at these levels towards the end of 2008 when it was on its way down from a high of $4 a kilogram at the height of the world commodities boom. Wool exports earned NZ $576 million in the year to March last year and the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry estimated in July 2009 that this year’s export returns would fall to $458m.

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