The Intelact Group
Driving sustainable food production and results for farmers.
Headlands
Headlands provides comprehensive support to its farmer and agribusiness clients, helping them innovate and build resilient, profitable businesses that prioritise both economic and environmental sustainability. With a focus on sustainable farming principles, Headlands helps its clients achieve long-term success through innovative solutions and expert guidance.
Nutrinza
Nutrinza is a specialised provider of custom feed blends for farmers throughout New Zealand. With the ability to create tailored feed options that meet the unique requirements of individual dairy herds, Nutrinza offers a comprehensive range of high-quality animal nutrition products and services to address the diverse needs of farmers across the country during each season.
Intelact
Intelact offers top expertise in profitable and sustainable intensive animal production for dairy and beef feedlot operations, and pasture-based animal production and arable farming enterprises. With experience in arid, tropical, and temperate environments, Intelact provides premium solutions to maximise profitability and sustainability across diverse farming systems.
Nutrinza's history with Intelact
Intelact was formed on the back of farm trials undertaken by a well-known Waikato Veterinarian Soren Moller, who was doing his PhD thesis on “the cow and pasture interface” in the early 1990’s.
As part of this thesis, Soren was particularly interested in seeing if feeding a supplemented energy source to the dairy herd would have a positive impact on conception rates and whether this would be profitable. Soren trialled feeding molasses on a clients dairy farm to half the herd and not to the other. The result was that the empty rate (not in calf) was halved in the cows fed molasses in addition to pasture. The farm also appeared to have a lift in profitability through increased milk production.
Interested to see if the same result would occur using a grain based supplement into the pasture-based system instead of molasses, Soren approached the largest feed mill at the time NRM Feed Mills (owned by Tegel Foods which is a poultry company). Soren negotiated to get the compound feed supplied free of charge provided he made the results available to NRM. The trial resulted in an almost identical outcome to feeding molasses in halving the empty rate of the herd supplemented with the compound feed, compared to those cows that were fed only pasture.
NRM and their parent company Tegel Foods were excited by the potential opportunity to supply feed into the large dairy industry which apart from calf feed they had never managed to do successfully. Tegel realised that to be successful in building this market opportunity they would need Farm Consultants who both understood dairy farm systems and nutrition to advise farmers on how to feed supplements without wasting pasture or losing pasture quality. Tegel then created the Intelact Nutrition Company and employed 3 consultants in the first year one of which was Soren Moller.
In the first year, Intelact had 3 consultants and 40 dairy farming clients that were trialling these pasture plus supplement systems. After the first year, having a client base of 40 very engaged and happy customers who for the first time saw their investment in their animal genetics actually perform under a optimal feeding regime, Intelact decided to increase their consultant numbers from 3 to 10 for the following year.
In our 2nd year, Intelact’s parent company, Tegel got into financial difficulty and decided to consolidate back to their core business. As part of restructuring, they decided Intelact should be folded and the consultants would be employed within NRM Feed Mills as Sales Reps. This wasn’t something the Intelact consultants were happy to accept, so they offered to purchase Intelact from Tegel which Tegal accepted. Intelact was officially taken over in May 1996.
Clients pushed Intelact to find cheaper and more reliable sources of feed to fill in pasture supply gaps when growing conditions were worse than expected. Intelact started contracting by-products feeds from the human food industry such as brewers grains, corn gluten feed, millrun/bran & pollard, hominy meal etc.
Overtime the by-product feed part of Intelact grew substantially which meant local storage, processing and screening were required and a large investment in stores was necessary. From here, Intelact needed to identify a point of difference and decided to specialise in custom blends, where the farmer or their nutritionist/adviser could develop their own diets from the list of ingredients.
Over this period Intelact decided to separate the consultant business from the feed supply business which created the feed business, SourceNZ, then later rebranded to Nutrinza. Technical sales representatives were appointed for the various regions which has grown to ten technical sales representatives covering the North Island and one in the South Island.
Today Nutrinza sells approximately 300,000 tons of feed with approximately 60% of this being sold as a blend through one of our three blending stores in the North Island.
P. 0508 768 723
PO Box 370,
Te Awamutu 3840
E. [email protected]
Disclaimer
All animal feed products should be fed as part of a healthy balanced diet matched to the specific requirements of the herd. Nutrinza makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, as to the suitability of any of the products supplied to the specific requirements of your animals. Please note that recommended feeding rates are given as a guideline only and will vary based on the total diet and actual feed intake of your animals. It is recommended that you consult your vet, nutritionist or farm consultant before making any dietary changes. Nutritional information is based on accredited feed nutrition sources and sample test results. Specifications on an individual feed test will show some variation.
