FEATURE SUPPLEMENT 23
www.age.co.nz Thursday, June 24, 2021
DAIRY FARMING
Maori ownership brings new approach to dairying
INTO THE FUTURE 2021
A Maori-owned business with Wairarapa Moana Inc (WMI) as one of its cornerstone shareholders is leading the way in a new approach to milk production, which just may be the way of the future. In 2009, WMI and fellow Maori trust, Tuaropaki Kaitiaki Ltd, went into partnership to form the Miraka dairy company – ‘miraka’ being for the Maori word for milk. Located near Mangakino, WMI manages one of New Zealand’s largest farming operations with dairy, beef, and forestry. Tuaropaki Kaitiaki Ltd farms over 3900 hectares of land for dairy, sheep, beef and deer along with a geothermal power plant. Together the two Maori entities led in the construction and operation of a milk processing plant at Mokai, 30 kilometres northwest of Taupo. The history of WMI goes all the way back to 1896 when the original owners of Lake Wairarapa gifted the bed of Lake Wairarapa to the Crown in an exchange that should have seen the Crown gift a reciprocal amount of land somewhere within Wairarapa. That gift occurred 20 years later when in 1916 scrub and tussock land in the central North Island was ÿ nally vested in gift to Wairarapa Moana’s owners. It was a long way from home. The land was purchased in the 1890s by the Crown to accommodate a railway linking Hawke’s Bay to the central main trunk line. However, the rail line was never developed and the block had no use.
While located close to Lake Taupo, Miraka’s roots go back to Lake Wairarapa. Instead, this poor pumice country covered with tussock and scrubby tea-tree, with no road or rail access was given to Wairarapa Maori. Without legal access it remained inaccessible and untouched for a further 30 years. In 1948, when road access was ÿ nally established, the Wairarapa community sent six of its best and brightest young men up to Pouakani to settle and to begin the work of breaking in the land. It eventually became the productive farmland that WMI occupies today. WMI administers the land for over
3000 descendants of the original owners of Lake Wairarapa. Fast forward to the 2000s and the poor record of understanding and representation of Maori landowners in Fonterra’s business model, and the formative seed for the birth of Miraka began to form. Murray Hemi, Kaitiaki o te Ara Miraka/ GM Environmental Leadership at Miraka says the requirement to buy shares to supply milk to Fonterra had not worked for Maori. “Maori farming has been, and will continue to be, in dairy for hundreds
of years. Maori don’t sell their land nowadays. Having their money locked into someone else’s business for many, many years, if not forever, simply does not make any sense.” Miraka decided it could do something better, he says. Murray was born in Greytown and shifted to the new farms in Mangakino. His work for Miraka brings him close to the WMI farms, while his family in Wellington ensures he makes it back to his marae at Papawai. CONTINUED ON PAGE 24
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