CraFarms
Open-knowledge reference entry
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. The business owed about $NZ200 million to its lenders. The Crafars stated that the recession and a drop in the Fonterra payout were major factors in the business going into receivership.
History
Allan and Frank Crafar are brothers who grew up in Whanganui. 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “CraFarms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.