Dairy NZ

Historically, industry good activities were undertaken on behalf of dairy farmers by the New Zealand Dairy Board. When Fonterra was created and the Dairy Board disestablished in 2001, it was agreed that it was essential that these industry good activities be continued, and are owned by dairy farmers. This resulted in the creation of Dexcel and Dairy InSight.

Dairy InSight administered the levy all dairy farmers paid for the purposes of furthering dairy industry knowledge through research, development and education. Dairy InSight's role was to provide funding to the various providers and measure outcomes for farmers to ensure the levy was being well invested.

Dexcel was a lead provider of research, development and on-farm education to the dairy industry in New Zealand, and incorporated the former Dairying Research Corporation (DRC) and the Consulting Officer Service of Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC).

The NZ Dairy Board provided funds to enable Dexcel to take ownership of DRC from itself and AgResearch. Dexcel used these funds to purchase the livestock and farmland at Newstead that had been leased by DRC from AgResearch. The NZ Dairy Board also initially provided most of Dexcel's operational funding. After deregulation of the dairy industry, New Zealand's dairy farmers voted in favour of funding Dexcel by means of a direct levy, paid via Dairy InSight, on all bovine milk producers, collected under the Commodity Levies Act 1990.

DairyNZ was formed on 1 November 2007 when farmers voted in favour of the recommendation to merge Dairy InSight and Dexcel. 

DairyNZ's levy is voted on every six years, and the last levy vote was held in May 2008. We actively encouraged farmers to vote and succeeded with 61 per cent (by milksolids) of farmers voting, one of the highest-ever participations recorded in a commodity levy vote. The yes vote of 75 per cent, an increase of eight per cent on the 2003 result, was a resounding mandate from farmers and strong evidence of the fact we have farmer support for our work.