Dairy Exporter’s generational shift
New Zealand Dairy Exporter has undergone a generational shift with a move to new owners.
Sixty years before I was born, Dairy Exporter was launched. In 2025, the legacy guide to dairy farming in New Zealand will turn 100 years old. We are proud to have been passed the baton to hold for such a significant milestone for the dairy industry.
This generational shift is my farming friends moving further into their family businesses, and our industry leadership looking younger and more diverse. There is no denying it is on the shoulders of giants that we are standing today; giants who in their own late 30s leaned into the challenge.
For my family, it was the creation of a stone fruit industry that my great-uncle helped build after World War II in the 1950s; a deer industry in the 1970s in which my stepfather was flying; a Merino industry in the 1980s in which my uncle was building value chains. It was also the age that Tony Leggett and Dean Williamson took over the custodianship of New Zealand Dairy Exporter.
It is the inspiring innovation of the dairy industry that has existed over that century and continues today in this issue where our Deputy and Features Editors, Anne Lee and Sheryl Haitana, dive into the value-add opportunities of veal for a part of our farming system that has been disregarded for years.
It is the tangible, practical solutions-led journalism our farmers, who are the backbone of our industry – past, present and future – look forward to. I just love and look forward to continuing presenting everything from overcoming drench resistance to financial modelling software under the talented eye of our Group Editor, Jackie Harrigan.
As the rural media industry’s kindest man, Tony Leggett, signs off, he is effectively handing over the baton, entrusting my business partner Lucinda (Diack) and me, as the new generation at Dairy Exporter, with an oath of commitment to your farming journey. As those before us have done, we will be alongside you with trusted ideas and inspiration so we can continue to farm together into the headwinds.
SARAH PERRIAM-LAMPP
sarah@countrywidemedia.co.nz
