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Long-term Goal to Capture Health Food Market
Published Country-Wide August 2005 southern edition.
The long-term goal of Allan and Sonia Richardson’s marketing business
is to franchise an organic café/deli under the Avalon organic
brand.
In so far as their products are concerned, Sonia and Allan hope to
capture a share of the growing health food market by developing new
organic products.
Ultimately, they would like to be able to add further value by to the
Avalon brand by selling the Avalon Farming System. This would
include their genetics and access to organic markets into key overseas
countries.
This system would help people retrace Alan and Sonia’s steps in moving
from conventional farming to a commercial organic farming system.
The Avalon Farming System is based on holistic management and low
inputs, including the use of natural soil, plant, and animal therapies.
Recently, Allan and Sonia have been using homeopathic animal treatments
instead of drenches and vaccines, and have been using the Probitas soil
conditioner for the past three years.
Allan says farming holistically is becoming pivotal in how they farm
and make decisions.
“So much of what we used to do was just treating the symptoms each year
without thinking what the cause of the problem was.”
“We are also using the holistic grazing management, rotating stock all
year round apart from lambing.”
The goal of the Avalon Farming System is to maintain the level and
quality of production at around 90% of maximum while driving down
unnecessary and expensive inputs to around 35% of farm working expenses.
While all these seem lofty aspirations, Allan and Sonia are pragmatic
about their ability to run their businesses and have set up a set of
directors to guide and grow the Richardson’s vision.
The directors are paid commercial rates for their time and are
accountable to Allan.
In their genetics business, Allan and Sonia are aiming to breed what
they regard as the ultimate sheep by 2012.
This sheep would be a high performance sheep with multi-disease
resistant genetics. It would require no drenching, no dagging,
have no belly wool and require few inputs.
To achieve these goals the Richardsons have been using Perendale,
Texel, and Wiltshire genetics.
The Perendale is the Richardsons base breed and is top in all the
traits they are selecting for including multi-disease resistance.
While the Texels tend to be less parasite resistant, Allan and Sonia
have bought Texels from a high fertility flock and these sheep are
proving their worth as the maternal breed.
While Wiltshires are poor performers Allan says they have good disease
resistance and are bare around the points.
As no Wiltshire flocks in this country have been SIL performance
recorded, Allan and Sonia purchased semen from an Australian
performance recorded flock.
Wool traits are taken into consideration in the couple’s breeding
programme as Allan believes wool will have its day again.
Running an organic based system has a big advantage in their breeding
programme in that it puts the sheep under pressure, so only the sheep
that perform under organic conditions will be used in their breeding
programme.
Two managers take care of the day to day running of the Avalon farm,
leaving Allan free to spend half his time to work on the marketing arm
of Avalon Organics.
Their internet shop, selling Avalon lamb, beef, and mutton has been
running for three months now and Allan says orders are just starting to
trickle in.
The meat is couriered to the customer’s door from an Invercargill
butchery.
While growing this business they will also look at expanding their
product range to include products with health and nutritional benefits.
“There are no limits to what we may sell in the future.”
Allan believes farmers going into the 21st century will have two
options.
The first will be to go large scale or factory type farming based on
high production with high inputs.
He says to survive in a commodity market farmers will need to be
continually lifting production while accepting commodity prices.
The second option is to maintain the small to large scale, family and
community-based farms producing branded value added products.
Detailed nutritional information would accompany these products along
with their health benefits to satisfy ever-increasing consumer demand
for information about the food they eat.
Allan believes farmers will be marketing directly to the consumer using
tools such as the internet and farmer’s markets.
“If we can shorten the supply chain its going to put more money in
farmer’s back pockets.”
Through his experience selling his Avalon branded products he has found
consumers actually want to talk to the farmer.
“For us it is about offering farmers our system, our vision, and our
genetics and then saying come along with us and we will give you a
premium, a contract, and a market for your product.”
Allan says to be successful they have to take people along with them.
“Our focus now is to talk to people in New Zealand beginning with our
ram buyers because they already believe in our genetics.”
He believes many of the top conventional farmers would successfully
make the move to organic farming.
“The biggest challenge is probably moving from a strict production
focus to becoming more market oriented.”
The Richardsons are 100% committed to agriculture and to help encourage
young people to choose agriculture as a career. Avalon farming is
offering a Lincoln University Agricultural Scholarship.
This is a three year scholarship and interested students can access
information on the avalonfarming.co.nz website
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