The meat industry board Meat & Wool NZ says it plans to axe about a third of its Wellington head office jobs in the wake of farmer rejection of an industry-good levy on wool.
The loss of wool funding has triggered a restructure of the organisation, with 23 jobs going and seven new ones being created, most of them outside the capital.
In a referendum in August, farmers voted to continue funding sheep meat and beef research and market related activities for another five years but baulked at contributing for research or promotion of wool or goat meat.
Meat and Wool lost more than $6 million a year in income, and farmers lost access to another $5m of taxpayer funding for things such as wool research. Industry board chairman Mike Petersen said loss of the wool levy will also mean cuts to sheep research projects and these will be announced next week.
"The reality of the loss of $6.4m in wool levies has forced us to think carefully about what we do and how we deliver to farmers, and it has catalysed some significant change for the organisation," he said.
"Inevitably that means staff redundancies".
Shearing and wool handler training programmes funded by the wool levy are still up in the air while negotiations have started with commercial organisations about alternative funding. The board is not only cutting its costs, but making changes to improve the impact of the business.
The new organisation will arrange itself under the programme areas of "farm", "market" and "people", with research and development included in the "farm" business unit.
More focus on extension - transferring the benefits of research into the wider farming economy - will be achieved by separating this activity from farm survey work. The same number of staff will be involved, but they will specialise in either extension or survey work, rather than continuing to split their time 50/50.
Mr Petersen said farmers valued the independent information of the Meat & Wool New Zealand's Economic Service and this had been kept intact, but further discussions are required about the collection and provision of information relating to wool.
It is likely the board's market development activity will be delivered through a separate, jointly-funded and jointly-governed entity with the meat industry, which will also seek increased industry funding for the work.
Meat & Wool New Zealand chief executive Scott Champion said the organisation had been consulting with staff over the changes for the past two weeks.