Although Colin Armer will tell you he’s just a “poor farmer,” the mark he’s made on New Zealand’s dairy scene suggests otherwise.
He and wife Dale are arguably the country’s biggest dairy farmers with their Armer Farms milking 13,000 cows on 14 farms in the North Island while they remain 40% shareholders in mid Canterbury corporate giant Dairy Holdings.
The latter milks about 48,000 cows producing 17.3 million kg of milk solids a year on 59 dairy farms plus another 16 grazing properties.
Colin shared some background earlier this year at an Australian dairy conference in Melbourne where he said he and Dale started out 40 years ago as sharemilkers buying 140 cows.
He said they invested about $1 million in leased land before buying their own farms. Armer Farms now employ 75 staff and operates at a lower cost than benchmark, more than offsetting a lower per ha income, he said.
Dairy Holdings is huge, with about $1 billion in assets and hundreds of staff.
The company appears to have so far avoided the potentially devastating consequences of Mycoplasma bovis
"At the moment we are clear of M bovis, but it is reaching far and wide and you just don't know,” chief executive Colin Glass said in an interview with Stuff in May when the government announced measures to try and eradicate the disease by slaughtering 150,000 cows.
"Being relatively self-contained this leaves us as insulated as we are able to be from other events," Glass said.
With environmental concerns front and centre, Dairy Holdings has invested heavily in more efficient irrigation systems, putting in 110 centre pivot spray irrigators in the last 10 years to reduce water usage.
At times Armer has been critical of Fonterra, most recently campaigning to shrink the co-operative’s board – something he was partially successful in late 2016 when the number of directors was cut from 13 to 11.
Fonterra’s strong payout will be benefiting the Armer empire but Colin is never shy of a word or two when it comes to discussing its performance and strategy.
Colin is a member of the Institute of Directors and both he and Dale were finalists in the 2016 EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards. The couple have eight children.