A day of tours,

Firstly let me explain what Nat Com is.

In NZYF we have a Board

with four Young Farmer elected members

 and four co-opted members

Each Region, of which there are seven has it’s own executive,

a chair, usually two vices, treasurer and secretary and

sometimes a Regional Executive Officer (REO)

who is semi paid for administer the Region.

Nat Com is the elected Board members,

the Regional Chairs plus each Region

gets to bring along one Vice Chair

so they alternated attending.

We have two full Nat Coms and one short Nat Com a year.

This time we are in Auckland.

North Auckland, Snell’s Beach.

I do have to say this is the third time I’ve stayed here and

the weather is always blah.

Not wet, not dry, not sunny, not really anything

just filtered daylight.

But back to Nat Com.

We spent yesterday in the Big Smoke,

I’m serious here one of our guys had never been to Auckland before and

most of the rest had only been once, maybe twice and

really all they did was fly into the domestic terminal and transfer to international.

However Cole who is a dairy farmer on our Board

is born and breed in Auckland and Melbourne.

So city folk can make the change if they want.

First stop after finding everyone at the airport was Wilson Hellabys.

Scotty, my favourite Northern Chairman is a buyer for them. 

Hehad organised us a tour of the plant.

Yes a tour of an abattoir and it was really interesting.

But it's hard to look good in ompah lopmpah suits.

It was so well automated it reminded me of a Disneyland ride.

Really wasn’t that much blood, no guts and lots of singing.

My favourite photo of the day.

We viewed the beef chain (above hehe), the lamb chain

and the pig chain.

The carcasses are hung and move along

the chain passing by the workers as they do their task.

Hellerby's has 500 workers in this processing plant.

They supply Countdown and some other supermarkets

but if you live in the North Island you will be eating meat from this plant.

Don't worry they are really nice people who know what they are doing.

We also went to Wiremark.

They make fencing wire for fences, just to clarify

(though you should know by now that when I speak of fencing there are no sabres or epee involved).

 Wiremark is part of Pacfic Steel and

did you know, cause you will now,

that all steel in NZ is recycled?

Serious.

(this is Jayson being serious)

They melt down a bijiliion tonnes of

old, striped cars, washing lines, I don’t everything and

it goes gets electrocuted which causes it to melt

(how scary is that?),

 then they add whatever ingredients to make it

whatever kind of steel for whatever kind of use

there you have it.

(Keri peaking around Tractor)

PacSteel is a little like Pacman in that they eat up all the old steel and

own the market.

They are NZ’s second largest exporter.

And then we visited NZ’s largest exporter Fonterra.

(Sir Henry van der Hayden, Chairman of Fonterra with

Sam Williams, Vice Chairman of Waikato/Bay of Plenty NZYF)

Let me make a plug by way of explaining how Fonterra is.

It’s a co-op owned by 10,500 NZ dairy farmers

it’s not a huge faceless, corporation cause

I’m going to show you some of those dairy farmers now….

Sir Henry spoke inspirationally to us about governance and leadership.

He made a real impact on the Young Farmers.

There are more photos but it's taking an age to upload them
and I have to go organise today's meeting.