Silver Ferm Farms

[percy]

Comments from SFF's Chief Executive,Simon Limmer in his fortnightly Market Report:

Silver Fern Farms works hard to ensure we are the best at what we do, and this includes our commitment to the community and the environment. However, unfortunately we don’t always get it right and this week we have had to front up to this reality again.



A year ago we had an ammonia incident at our Hāwera plant which exposed some of our people to unacceptable risk and had a really detrimental impact on the local environment. We have acknowledged what went wrong and worked hard, to the very best of our ability, to put things right. We have faced a prosecution by the Taranaki Regional Council, to which we pled guilty, and this week we accepted the Court’s findings and the associated fine.



While never a nice process to go through it is important to learn from this experience, and we have made some substantial changes to how we manage our ammonia and stormwater systems, not just at Hāwera, but at sites across the company. We have made a commitment to continue our work with local iwi, Ngāti Ruanui, to restore the Taw’iti stream.



For those interested in more detail you can read more on that by clicking here. Thank you to the Hāwera team and others leading our response to better managing ammonia. It has been a huge team effort and reinforces for me why we are investing to improve infrastructure and needing to lead the way when it comes to sustainability and environmental performance.