Sustainability is big for us here at Spring Farms
There's three legs to a stool really. There's an environmental aspect, there's a financial aspect
and there's a social aspect. If one of those legs is not there then the stool falls over.
I'm Mark Crystal. I along with my wife Jane, my brother Richard
his wife Julia, and Amanda and Rob Collier farm here east of Taihape.
We're here in Taihape, in Moawhango. I farm with my wife Jane, my brother Richard and his wife
Julia, and Robert and Amanda Collier in a joint venture business called Spring Farms New Zealand Limited
I went to work for mum and dad in 1999, and in 2003 my mum and dad retired. That's
when my brother came back from Hawke's Bay, and we started in a partnership then. We farmed
about 700 hectares at that stage until 2008, when we we formed Spring Farms New Zealand Limited.
We did a lot of work on how we would grow as a business.
Taihape is very conservative, and not a lot of land historically comes on the market, so we
needed to think outside the square on how we grew. I was always keen to to separate land ownership
from our trading or our cash business. I just wanted to pull them apart. Spring Farms New Zealand
Limited is a bit of what I call a "hybrid model" of only owning the stock and plant and we
lease all the farms from the land owning entities. We started in that business with roughly wintering
15,000 stock units. We've had some growth along the way purchasing another property in 2009
in the Kawhatau Valley which now takes us to 27,000 stock units that we've wintered.
We had a big drought in the 2007-2008 year, and we ran a high stocking rate on our hill
country and unfortunately in 2008 we had to sell all of our ewe lambs and this really made us look
at our business and and look at how we could change and become more sustainable.
So what we did was turn all of our class one country into lamb finishing crops. We pulled the
stocking rate back in our hills, and finished all of our lambs basically to customer requirements.
That's given us that consistency of selling a unit load of lambs basically every week, from
December through until the end of April. We're very focused on the environment and put a lot
of energy into that space. We've planted last year four thousand native trees. This year we've got
five thousand planned to plant. We fence off a lot of our waterways and created wetlands.
We're also looking towards doing some pest control work and even liberating some blue ducks and some
whio into those areas. We've been a big part of setting up catchment groups in the Rangitikei.
We're part of the Upper Moawhango one, and that's been great, we've done a lot of work
on water testing in our streams to see what the nutrient levels are. We're running an old man's beard
workshop shortly, and we've done some macroinvertebrate studies in in our rivers. We see added benefit
for the farm, it looks good when we can see all these water corridors of ours being fenced off and planted,
native birds coming back, and we are saving on nutrients getting into our waterways.
Professional development is a big part of what we promote as well,
whether it be Richard, myself, Rob, or our staff, we're always learning.
I think I get the best out of myself when I'm challenged, and I think we
as farmers need to be on a little journey like that.