John Roadley - A 'bloody farmer' in cow heaven

By CARROLL du CHATEAU

John Roadley sits at the makeshift boardroom table talking a mile a minute, dangerously frank, never big-noting, explaining how he achieved his mighty triumph.

This week, 1800 dairy farmers at a Matamata youth camp voted overwhelmingly for Mr Roadley's dream - that New Zealand's $12 billion dairy industry and its 13,500 dairy farmers join together.

Over the next weeks, Mr Roadley, the chairman, and his board will choose a chief executive - "someone from within the organisation, but, hell no, not me, I'm a bloody farmer."

They will also find a name suitable for this huge co-operative, now known as GlobalCo, to take on the world.

After one of the most exhilarating weeks of his life, 56-year-old Mr Roadley and his wife, Lois, went home to Ashburton, where their son, Greg, oversees the milking of 2000 cows on five farms, together worth around $15 million.

Not bad for a boy from Paparoa on the hills between the Brynderwyns and Dargaville who walked to school barefoot. "I can still remember looking after my kid sister in the dairy, pushing her in one of those canvas swings," he says. "Mum would drag us to the shed long before daylight."

It was a beginning that gave Mr Roadley a lifelong strategy: "To get big enough, with a large enough cash flow, to employ people.

"At all costs, to avoid ending up milking cows on your own at 60."

But, he says, he always had a bigger picture in mind. "I wanted everyone in the business to make dairy farming into a socially acceptable business."

In the 60s, dairy farming was tough. While sheep farmers, with their built-in British market, erected mansions and followed gentlemen's hours, cow cockies worked pre-dawn to post-dusk for a pittance.

That was to change. Mr Roadley realised the wool business was in trouble when growers voted against compulsory acquisition of the wool clip. "I said to Dad, 'That's the end of the wool industry - we've got to get out of sheep'." And they did.

As Mr Roadley says, "Individual producers are extremely weak in the market. All business is driven by two things, to screw down the cost of your raw material, sell at the highest price possible - and get the margin." Certainly wool, sold individually to the highest bidder who then took the margin, has languished. Meanwhile, co-operative dairy farmers who took the margin themselves, moved "from the bottom of the heap to modest prosperity."

Mr Roadley's talents are threefold: an ability to see things clearly; to not deviate from the strategy; and to talk others into coming along for the ride.

His stamina is phenomenal, too: weekends on the Ashburton farm, most weeks in the North Island, board meetings, farmer meetings, Beehive meetings, interviews. Nothing in this newborn company is tied down. Auckland headquarters are vacant office space in Newton Rd near the Dog's Bollix. The boss stays at an apartment near the Salvation Army at the top of Queen St and walks to work in his well-cut suit, tie pin firmly in place.

Mr Roadley is an articulate man. He rattles along telling two life stories, barely stopping to sip his tea. First story is the personal strand with Lois and the boys back on the farm. Second is the shorter political version, starting in 1988 as a director of Alpine Dairy.

The personal story shapes the political one: "One thing my parents did was send me to boarding school. I went to Northland College at 12 and left with that wonderful qualification, School Certificate."

Naturally, the only son would return to the farm. "Next my father taught me how to work ... We developed that farm, cutting scrub, burning it off, fencing."

The "next important thing" was when his father gave him Roadley Farm Ltd to manage. "I was 18. He gave me the family chequebook and I was responsible."

Next on the "important" list was his 1969 marriage to Lois, an "Auckland girl who came to do her teaching country service." Then came the birth of Graeme, now a trainee surgeon at Waikato Hospital, and Greg.

And always the farmer stuck to the strategy. Pour assets back into the business, get big enough to employ staff.

It was a hard life. They decided Lois would never work in the shed but for 15 years she did the books, and cooked and cleaned for the family and sometimes three farm workers at a time.

One particularly muddy season in the mid-70s, Mr Roadley reread a Dairy Exporter article about dairying on the Canterbury Plains. He and Lois made two trips down and were hooked. "There was no mud, dry ground, the cows looked happy in their woollier coats. We came home and our cows were bogged up to the knees ... "

A year later they developed the second dairy farm conversion unit in Canterbury. Within a season they had outstripped their Auckland production and soon bought the neighbouring farm.

Next came Roger Douglas and the removal of subsidies, floating of the dollar and chaos. "Milk prices halved, interest rates doubled and we're in it up to our necks," says Mr Roadley, who insists changes were overdue. Typically, when the advice was to diversify, he refused to change tack. "It was just a matter of battening down - and at the same time focusing on our business and ramping up development. We increased the herd size, fencing, put on more fertiliser."

By now it was 1988 and Mr Roadley started "paying attention" to the marketing side of his business. "Hell, this thing had to perform," he says. "The Alpine Dairy Co-op [based at Temuka] had been growing at an astronomical rate - 30 to 40 per cent compounding growth a year. I'm not the kind of person to stand on the sideline chucking rocks."

By 1992 Mr Roadley was chairman of Alpine and soon the "bigger is better" man had suggested a merger with the co-op's Southland counterpart.

Within a year he took the new, merged company, Sidco, to the North Island, looking for suitors. After a brief tussle between Dairy Group (producers of Anchor brand) and Kiwi Co-Op, the South Islanders chose Dairy Group. Mr Roadley and two others became board members.

All that was left now was the big one. The first attempt, MergeCo, failed. But, undaunted, Mr Roadley and his mates kept to the strategy. "In December 2000, a merger agreement was signed between the New Zealand Dairy Group and Kiwi to form GlobalCo. I was chairman of the new company and [in a move to smooth the coming transition] chairman of the New Zealand Dairy Board."

Mr Roadley's biggest challenge starts now. His plan is "to hire the best people, agree with them what needs doing, monitor their performance - then get out of the way," but his guiding hand and vision will be there for a while. Although he insists he had no great leadership aspirations, his popularity among both farmers and his boards is as solid as a block of Colby.

And the ongoing dream? "I want everyone to be proud of our champion company. We can become an icon like the All Blacks. Smart people will be able to leave uni and work here or internationally for a world-class company that's 100 per cent New Zealand owned."

He smiles like the cat with the cream: "Milk's like a big onion. We're just starting to peel it back, layer by layer, and finding uses and products, nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic. We'll take those products to market and get the margin - that's what it's all about."