The Meatworkers Union says Alliance employs 660 workers at peak season at its Smithfield site in Timaru. Photo / File
The Meatworkers Union says Alliance employs 660 workers at peak season at its Smithfield site in Timaru. Photo / File
Meatworkers Union national secretary Daryl Carran says he doesn’t know what Alliance bosses are going to tell all Timaru workers they’ve called to a meeting tomorrow, but “it’s not going to be about beautifying” their Smithfield plant.
The union has 660 members at the fully-unionised site, he said.
Carran said he’s been advised by the farmer-owned co-operative of the 11am meeting, to which all employees have been called, but he doesn’t know the content of the meeting.
“I can speculate, the same as everyone else,” he said.
Alliance Group chief executive Willie Wiese is reported to have said it was “inappropriate” to comment further on the meeting, other than to confirm it had been called.
Earlier this year Alliance asked its farmers to help raise share capital to ensure it remained 100% farmer-owned as financial pressures closed in. Last year it reported a $70 million loss after tax, following nine out of 10 profitable years.
The Smithfield site, which Carran said is more than 100 years old but has been modernised, processes sheep and lamb and deer for venison. At its peak season for both, it employs 660 people, he said.
Like others in the $12 billion red meat industry, Carran cites land use changes when asked if livestock numbers through the site have been falling.
“Unfortunately there’s a lot of land use changes going on for [carbon] emissions and there seems to be no real interest from the Government to put any regulations around farming trees. That’s had quite an impact ....”
Minister for Primary Industries Todd McClay earlier this month told the Herald the Government has “concerns with respect to excessive conversion of food-producing land to forest, however, it’s important to get the policy settings right so that farmers also retain choice over what they do with their own land”.
He said in the last year exotic (pine) afforestation numbers had come off a high, with estimates suggesting a further decline in the next year.
Todd McClay, Minister for Primary Industries. Photo / File
McClay said the Government was “working at pace” to implement policy that seeks a balance of land uses to achieve improved outcomes for agriculture, forestry and the climate, while considering the impact across the rural economy.
Carran said breeding ewe numbers had been falling year-on-year for 30 to 40 years, and next year the industry would be down 1.5 million lambs for processing because of a projected big drop in breeding ewe numbers.
Rival meat processor Affco recently forecast closures of aged plants with large job losses from next season because of falling livestock numbers. The Talley’s-owned company said the industry had to restructure to counter the challenge.
Asked if livestock numbers had fallen noticeably at Smithfield, Carran said a “massive decline” had been noticeable throughout the industry.
“We’ve been losing jobs every year through this, having to wind the [job] capacity back at certain sites because there aren’t the numbers to support it.”
Carran said even if he had been told by Alliance leaders what was going to happen tomorrow, he wouldn’t share it because the law demanded employers make a proposal, and then consult for 14 days before announcing a final decision.
He said in the South Island there were a number of meat processing sites that were more than a century old.
“The armchair experts from outside the industry talk about the old dinosaurs but it’s not correct that a large plant is not economical compared to a small site. In fact, it’s quite wrong. As long as you’ve got the numbers going through a large site, they produce more profit than a small site. It’s economy of scale...”
Beef+Lamb NZ said sheep numbers fell 4.3% to 23.3 million with a 2.9% drop in breeding ewe numbers in the year to June. There was a 2.8% decrease in beef cattle numbers to 3.5 million. The lamb crop for spring 2025 is expected to fall by 970,000 or nearly 5%, and spring beef cattle calving by 2.1% due to fewer breeding cows, it said. In the past three years sheep and beef numbers had fallen by 10%.
The primary driver of the falls in recent years is “land use change as a result of the conversion of sheep and beef farms into forestry”, though in the 2024 year the main cause was drought, the industry good organisation said.
Farm conversions to forestry were the result of the Emissions Trading Scheme and high carbon prices, it says. Between 2019 and 2022 around 180,000 hectares of whole sheep and beef farms were sold into forestry.
“While sheep numbers had been declining slowly, afforestation has accelerated this sharply and also driven down cattle numbers,” the organisation said.
The land use change translated into a reduction of around 1.4 million livestock units. While sales had slowed, there were still farms being converted to forestry in the last year.
Andrea Fox joined the Herald as a senior business journalist in 2018 and specialises in writing about the $26 billion dairy industry, agribusiness, exporting and the logistics sector and supply chains.
