Move to app gathers momentum for farm reporting

This year's roadshow was a particularly rewarding one for all of us at Westland and I would like to thank everyone who came out to meet with us.

Of course, it was a great opportunity to meet our new CEO, Alex Turnbull, and it was good to see the welcome that you all extended to him, while not letting him off the hook when it comes to the things that matter most, your business.

This year has already got off to a strong start after Westland, Yili Oceania and Yili Group globally all producing strong financial performances in 2025.  

Executive Director of Yili Oceania, Zhiqiang Li, told us about Yili's 36.82 per cent rise in net profit year on year in 2025, with profit rising more than 15 per cent in the first quarter of 2026.

In the media release we sent out to you earlier this year, we also advised that the Yili Oceania group of companies in New Zealand has delivered record consolidated revenue of $1.58 billion in 2025, an increase of 14 per cent over 2024.

Combined pre-tax profit reached $58.44 million, a 319% increase from the previous year, an all-time high. Combined pre-tax profits of 2023 and 2024 were $31.77 million and $13.95 million, respectively.

As well as accelerating the shift towards value-added products in 2025, we have made real progress in capacity expansion, operational efficiency and global channel development.

At the roadshow meetings, Alex also outlined our target of more than 90 per cent high-value production by 2040.

Last year's responses to our survey from you were invaluable and will now shape a large part of our work over the next year.

New milk tankers are on the horizon again this year and we hope to give you an estimate for their arrival soon.

We're also pleased with the move towards silo monitoring which will tell you:

·         Milk temperature entering during milking,

·         Milk temperature in the silo,

·         If the agitator is on,

·         If the chiller is on,

·         Volume.

White books and green books for Farm Dairy Assessments and Grass Fed certification information will be digitised on a mobile app and desktop later in 2026, removing the need to continually re-enter information. This should speed up audits, with a lot of information able to be checked off before auditors come on farm.

With much of the audit content able to be done off farm we will be able to consolidate audits, meaning less of them. This also means we can use one contractor to complete the task, avoiding multiple providers and visitors to your farm.

Our Milk Supply Managers who previously performed your FarmEx audits will now be free to support farmers with the process and technology.

This is a large piece of work for us and we are relying on farmers to help with testing before we fully release the software. To ease our way in we will be operating both digital and the existing paper-based formats for as long as we need to.  

Many thanks for your valuable input to date. Audits are important, but our hope is to produce an efficient process that benefits everyone.

By Richard Managh