CraFarms

CraFarms (or Crafar Farms) is a group of companies of which Allan, Beth and Frank Crafar were Directors. Crafar Farms was New Zealand's largest family-owned dairy business. The family business owned 22 dry stock and dairy farms with approximately 20,000 cows in various regions of the North Island, and was put into receivership in October 2009. Crafar Farms was involved in multiple prosecutions for pollution offences and incidents of poor animal welfare from 2007 to 2011.

Allan and Frank Crafar are brothers who grew up in Wanganui. Their father died when Allan was 11 and he had to hand milk their single cow. Frank left school at 14 and started his first sharemilking job at 16. Frank, along with his other brother Neville, brought a farm in the Manawatu four years later. In 1973 Allan met Beth on a blind date and they started working on Frank's farm. By July 1979, Allan and Frank Crafar had gone from milking 140 cows through an old-style walk through bale cowshed, to 400 cows using the same system after adding a 366-acre leased block in 1978. Production had increased by 28,000 kg annually and their large herd averaged one kilo of fat per day. In 1981 Frank, Allan and Beth brought their first farm together in Reporoa. They began their expansion by buying the neighbours farm the next year and by 1999 had 6,000 cattle on numerous farms around New Zealand. In 2009 they owned 22 farms, 18 of which are dairy, and 20,000 cows, making them New Zealand's largest family owned dairy business.

During the 2000s CraFarms was prosecuted multiple times in the Environment Court for unlawfully discharging stock effluent. In August 2008, Ian Balme the chair of Environment Waikato's regulatory committee described the Crafar family as "the poster boys for dirty dairying", whose "track record suggests they consider public waterways a perfectly appropriate place to tip their cowshed effluent". The Crafars had been prosecuted four times by then, with two more prosecutions pending. Balme commented that most farmers who have good farm systems and infrastructure had every right to resent farmers like the Crafars who damaged the industry. In 2009 they also were investigated by MAF for animal neglect after a video was released on YouTube showing calves starving on one of their farms. In October 2009 after they could no longer service the mounting debt the farms were placed into receivership. In 2010 the Ngāti Ruanui iwi were angered after stock damaged a Pa located at Crafar Farms Hillside Farm. Following criticism of the Crafars in the media a Facebook page was set up by Oamaru farmer Stephen Smit in support of Allan Crafar. Russell Bouma, the son of a family friend who was murdered in a home invasion meters from the Crafar's own home, said they ran their farm for six months without any payment and described them as being "extremely efficient operators who have helped out a lot of people."

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