Farm NZ$200 million in debt

New Zealand’s largest family owned dairy business, Crafar Farms, has been put into receivership by its banks Westpac, Rabobank and PGG Wrightson Finance. Read more

The banks are owed around NZ$200 million and put KordaMentha partners Michael Stiassny and Brendon Gibson in as receivers early on Monday afternoon after Crafar Farms breached covenants on its loans.

The group owns 22 farms with 20,000 cows across the North Island’s Central Plateau, the Manawatu and the Waikato. Crafar Farms (CraFarms) has around 200 workers and is supplying tens of thousands of litres of milk each day to Fonterra.

CraFarms’ banks have been working for almost a week with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Federated Farmers and Fonterra to ease the Crafars out of their business. This follows multiple convictions for environmental lapses and animal neglect in recent years and the revelation last Monday from interest.co.nz of animal neglect on one of its large farms in the King Country near Benneydale.

Agriculture Minister David Carter ordered an inquiry into animal neglect into CraFarms last week and said the Crafar family, including its leader Allan Crafar, needed to be out of the industry. The revelations about animal neglect have shocked the dairy industry and raised questions about the sustainability of large herd dairying in the wake of the explosive debt-funded growth of the last decade Read more