Tauranga’s Colin and Dale Armer’s path to becoming the country’s largest corporate dairy farmers started in the 1980s with an investment in a 90ha farm on the outskirts of Te Puke.
They were sharemilkers with 140 cows and zero capital – “normal young broker farmers”, Colin Armer has said.
The couple now own 37% of Dairy Holdings, which has $1 billion in assets, and also own Armer Farmers which has farms in the North Island. Colin Armer is a former Fonterra board member.
The extensive South Island Dairy Holdings was started in 2001 by Armer, the late Alan Hubbard and other investors. Its operations comprise 59 dairy farms, producing 17 million kilograms of milk solids from 50,000 milking cows, and 16 grazing farms. It is the largest supplier and shareholder in Fonterra while five farms supply west coast processor Westland, and it supplies bulls and cull cows to Silver Fern Farms.
Their other company, Armer Farms, also has 15 dairy farms and three support blocks in the central North Island, milking some 14,000 cows and producing about 3.7 million kilograms of milksolids a year. It operates a farming system based on high pasture utilisation.
The past few years has seen the industry face an onslaught from Mycoplasma bovis and late last year Dairy Holdings chief executive Colin Glass said the company had plenty of close calls but so far had not been affected by the virus.
It has been a financial challenging season for the dairy industry. In May Fonterra said its payout would drop to $6.30-$6.40 per kilogram of milk solids while the shareholder dividend dropped 10 cents to between 10-15 cents. Its forecast for the next season is a wide-ranging $6.25 to $7.25.
However Dairy Holdings, which champions a low-cost, pasture-based dairy system, expected most farmers to finish the season profitably.
The Armers have described themselves as a “cup and saucer” couple who complement each other.
“When everything overflows from the cup, the saucer catches it and puts it all back into place,” they told the Stuff website.
In 2016 the couple were winners of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year product category.
Despite the spread and depth of their investments, the couple claims to be simple people operating a simple business philosophy. They say their main driver is profitability, not cow productivity.
2018: $250 million