Latest / Best of Business / Jamie Mackay: The Country host on farmers offering an alternative to Alliance Group's Dawn Meats offer

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Jamie Mackay: The Country host on farmers offering an alternative to Alliance Group's Dawn Meats offer · Best of Business

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  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talk ZEDB. Follow
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  Speaker 1: The Rural Report on hither due to see Allen Drive.
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  Speaker 2: Jamie mcai's with us host of the Country Jamie. Good evening,
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  Speaker 2: Good evening, Ryan. So we've got a bit of drama
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  Speaker 2: going on with Alliance. This is the meat processor.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, in fact, it's the world's biggest sheep meat process.
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  Speaker 3: So you might remember Dawn meets This Irish meat company
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  Speaker 3: has struck a deal. They're going to take a sixty
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  Speaker 3: five percent steak in the process for two hundred and
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  Speaker 3: fifty million dollars and it looks like it's the best
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  Speaker 3: of some other worse options, to be perfectly honest, because
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  Speaker 3: it is one hundred percent farmer owned cooperative and a
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  Speaker 3: lot of the farmers wanted to keep it that way.
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  Speaker 3: But they've just run out of rope, so they've basically
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  Speaker 3: got to get get a deal done so they can
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  Speaker 3: pove back two hundred million dollars of its working capital
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  Speaker 3: for facilities, or the banks could shut them down. However,
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  Speaker 3: some well heeled and high profile Southland farmers have made
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  Speaker 3: a large, last ditch effort to recapitalize the company themselves.
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  Speaker 1: Now.
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  Speaker 3: They tried to do that last year. It didn't work.
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  Speaker 3: But these farmers are saying, look, farm sheep farmings and
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  Speaker 3: a lot better nick than it was this time a
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  Speaker 3: year ago. And to chuck some numbers at that ryan,
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  Speaker 3: this time a year ago, the average profit on a
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  Speaker 3: sheep farm was nineteen thousand dollars. Forty percent of the
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  Speaker 3: farms ran at a loss. In the coming season, they're
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  Speaker 3: predicting the average farm profit to be one hundred and
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  Speaker 3: sixty six five hundred. So these five large scale farmers,
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  Speaker 3: they've written to the board, they've written to the bank.
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  Speaker 3: They want to revisit this. But the Alliance Group chair Markwin,
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  Speaker 3: who used to be the chief executive of Balance Agrenutrients
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  Speaker 3: a reasonably qualified sort of business operator and the commercial
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  Speaker 3: world has said, look, he's all but shut down the ideas.
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  Speaker 3: They're just giving the farmer shareholders false hopes. So these
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  Speaker 3: guys will have to vote. I think it's October the twentieth.
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  Speaker 3: They're not going to have much mind, much time, should
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  Speaker 3: I say, to make up their mind on an alternative proposal,
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  Speaker 3: but one is going to be out there.
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  Speaker 2: And they're running up against that deadline, and it's coming
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  Speaker 2: up pretty soon, isn't it as you say to read it? Perhaps?
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  Speaker 3: Absolutely, And just interestingly, Mark winn is saying that if
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  Speaker 3: the vote fails, this is the October twenty vote. He
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  Speaker 3: said Dawn Meets could purchase the Alliance Group in an
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  Speaker 3: insolvency process. He says, that's the most probable outcome. And
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  Speaker 3: if that was the case, Ryan, they may not need
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  Speaker 3: to pay two hundred and fifty million dollars. They could
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  Speaker 3: get it at a fire soil price.
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  Speaker 2: Does not sound like a good outcome at all. Do
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  Speaker 2: we need to brush off the cobwebs for Sir Dave Dobbin.
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  Speaker 3: Well, I don't know. I think farmers here in New
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  Speaker 3: Zealand are doing considerably better than their US counterparts. It
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  Speaker 3: was just interesting only story I picked up on Ryan.
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  Speaker 3: I know you're a keen music fan. So last Saturday
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  Speaker 3: in the US they had farm Aide farm Aid forty,
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  Speaker 3: a bit like Live Age. You might remember in nineteen
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  Speaker 3: eighty five we had Live Aid Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia Stadium,
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  Speaker 3: or not long after that they had farm ad Because
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  Speaker 3: Bob Dylan was quoted, some would say incorrectly as at
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  Speaker 3: the time of saying, look, we're worried about the people
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  Speaker 3: in Africa, what about our own farmers, Because in nineteen
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  Speaker 3: eighty five, crop prices were crashing, bank foreclosures were wiping
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  Speaker 3: out family farms at alarming rates and pushing farmer suicides
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  Speaker 3: to record levels. So they got together in September of
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  Speaker 3: nineteen eighty five. And it's interesting that Willie Nelson, Neil Young,
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  Speaker 3: Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp, I can't remember whether he was
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  Speaker 3: a cougar or not at the time. Ryan, they were
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  Speaker 3: in the original cast in nineteen eighty five. They came
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  Speaker 3: back again for farm Aid last weekend. Over the forty years,
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  Speaker 3: they've raised something like eighty five million, nine million in
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  Speaker 3: the first year. And you look back to the playlist
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  Speaker 3: or the people who turned up in nineteen eighty five
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  Speaker 3: for farm Maid, Foreigner, Chris Christopherson, Bonnie Rait, Roy Orbison,
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  Speaker 3: Billy Joel, Tom Petty, the Beach Boys, Emmy Lou Harris,
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  Speaker 3: Glenn Campbell. To stop me, Ryan, because they really got
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  Speaker 3: in behind this, and with the exception of one or
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  Speaker 3: two years, we've had a farm Maid concert every year since.
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  Speaker 2: All right, I will stop you there. Actually, Jamie Jamie
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  Speaker 2: mckaye hosted The Country. Good to have you on the show.
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