A DAIRY farmer producing his own dairy range, the manager of one of Australia’s largest glasshouse facilities and a leading Merino breeding couple have been named as finalists in the 2013 NSW Farmer of the Year award.
A joint initiative of NSW Farmers and the NSW Department of Primary Industries, the award recognises outstanding achievement, focusing on management skills, use of innovation, profitability, environmental sustainability and community involvement.
NSW Minister for Primary Industries Katrina Hodgkinson said this year’s finalists – John Fairley, Picton, Godfrey Dol, Guyra and Matthew and Cherie Coddington - were pushing the boundaries in their fields through value adding, the use of the latest technologies and genetics.
Mr Fairley runs a 120-hectare dairy at Picton and has taken an innovative path to securing the future of the family business by building a factory on the farm to process his own milk as well as the milk from seven other farms under the Country Valley label.
At the same time he has pursued a biological farming approach to the 240-head dairy farm with a major focus on soil health.
Mr Dol is the technical and business development manager at Costa's 20ha glasshouse enterprise at Guyra, which produces 12 million kilograms of tomatoes annually.
Water use efficiency at the facility is world leading with only 12.5 litres of irrigation water used to produce 1kg of tomatoes compared to 100 to 200L/kg of field tomatoes.
The Coddingtons own and manage Roseville Park Merino stud on 3240ha near Dubbo.
To work around the challenges of climate and commodity prices the Coddingtons run a mixed farming enterprise of cropping to supplementary feed their livestock and utilise a stocking rate to maintain ground cover and conserve soil moisture.
Their calendar has been organised so key individual operations occur at set times for labour efficiency, timing of markets and timing of climatic effects.
NSW Farmers president Fiona Simson said this year's applications highlighted the impressive range of operations and the different industries represented across agriculture in NSW.
"There were certainly some great stories about continuous generational farming, the focus on sustainability, meeting market specifications, benchmarking, energy efficiency, safety and lots more," Ms Simson said.
The Farmer of the Year, to be announced on December 3 at NSW Parliament House, wins a cash prize of $10,000 and the runners-up receive a $2000 prize.
The award is supported by The Land, the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW and WorkCover NSW.