Rangit\u012bkei Mayor Andy Watson.<\/p>\n
Giles said the closure had caught a lot of people off-guard.<\/p>\n
\u201cUp until recently, it [Malteurop] has been a very good option for many growers.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dad was one of them right back at the start, and we\u2019ve grown pretty much every year.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe knew they were reducing demand for total tonnes, but we thought they might have carried on malting the barley at Marton.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watson said Malteurop\u2019s silos represented \u201ca significant grain storage pathway in New Zealand\u201d, with a capacity for 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThose facilities are in fine shape,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would love to see someone move in that starts adding value to grain, rather than just using it to store, but, open to any suggestions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Giles said the plant closure showed viable options were reducing for arable farmers.<\/p>\n
Conversion to livestock was possible, especially in the Manawat\u016b-Whanganui region, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not 100% pure arable farms with no fences or reticulated water, so that helps.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut this is definitely not ideal. <\/p>\n
\u201cBecause the arable industry doesn\u2019t have a big export footprint, it hasn\u2019t got a lot of profile in Government.\u201d <\/p>\n
Malteurop had always been a great company to grow for, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always felt they\u2019ve done their best to set the pricing as good as they could.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mike Tweed is a multimedia journalist at the Whanganui Chronicle. Since starting in March 2020, he has dabbled in everything from sport to music. At present his focus is local government, primarily Whanganui District Council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Malteurop was approached by the Chronicle for comment but declined at this stage. Federated Farmers arable chairman for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1975,138,9525,6789,1656,14134,8127,11775,23361,65838,264856,264855,5829,194497,111,139,69,1118,127490,384,4885,8417,2687,8037,1533,102],"class_list":["post-537868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-at","tag-business","tag-caught","tag-closing","tag-company","tag-decision","tag-end","tag-french","tag-growers","tag-halt","tag-malt","tag-malteurop","tag-many","tag-marton","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-offguard","tag-people","tag-plant","tag-production","tag-saying","tag-september","tag-will","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}