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Gavin O’Donnell, proven right here together with his spouse Sue, has been awarded the Queen’s Service Medal within the New Yr honours.
Balancing the financial and environmental challenges of farming has been a part of Gavin O’Donnell’s working life.
Being awarded the Queen’s Service Medal within the New Yr honours for providers to the agricultural group and conservation is recognition the previous Motueka Valley sheep and cattle farm supervisor has performed it properly.
His involvement in Nelson Federated Farmers – he has held quite a few roles, together with chairman – drew him into the fraught space of the business’s impression on the setting.
“I used to be actually extra average and extra targeted on options, as a result of I believed that environmental requirements would play a better half in farming,” he stated.
He additionally wished to make sure that the farmers’ voice was represented within the environmental dialogue. He has been on the board of the Tasman Environmental Belief since 2012, and is a member of a variety of different environmental teams within the area, together with the Waimea Contemporary Water and Land Advisory Group and Tasman Bay Guardians.
O’Donnell stated there was little question that environmental requirements for farms would proceed to evolve, pushed by provide contracts that required minimal requirements.
He believed there had been a disconnect between the final Labour Authorities’s farming insurance policies and the business. The brand new coalition Authorities had already begun “a reasonably fast swing again to the center on plenty of fronts”.
O’Donnell has additionally been a volunteer firefighter and committee member of the Ngatamoti rural brigade, and helped arrange the Nelson Tasman Major Cluster Adversarial Occasions Community that gives a key connection between emergency controllers and the agricultural group.
After 20 years on the farm at Little Pokororo within the Motueka Valley, O’Donnell and his spouse Sue moved to Havelock in 2022. He has additionally stepped utterly away from agriculture: “I realised it was time for youthful folks to return into the business with their very own concepts”.
As an alternative, he makes deliveries for a ironmongery store which will get him out into the Marlborough Sounds. “It’s the place I used to vacation once I might get away from the farm. I at all times discovered it meals for the soul.”