Hilton Collier

Hilton Collier (Ngāti Porou) is an agribusiness consultant who thinks all animals have mana in their own right and deserve to be treated with respect.

This scientist profile is one of six featured in this group of resources that explore animal ethics with a kaupapa Māori approach. A downloadable PDF of the combined scientist profiles is available in both a bilingual and a te reo Māori version.

He mihi

Ko Hikurangi te maunga
Ko Waiapu te awa
Ko Ngāti Porou te iwi
Ko Te Whānau a Rakairoa te hapū
Ko Rāmari rāua ko Nehe Collier ōku mātua
Ko Hilton ahau
Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Advocating for Māori farmers

For most of his professional life, Hilton has worked in the Māori agribusiness space between Wairoa and the East Coast. As well as farming, he became an advocate for the Māori farming sector. For many years, he was a member of the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (NAWAC). He was a founding shareholder in the AgFirst Consulting Group, and more recently his work has come to include climate change advocacy through He Waka Eke Noa and growing support for the Federation of Māori Authorities.

Until recently, Hilton was general manager of Pakihiroa Farms Limited, a Ngāti Porou business. He has established a new management company, Taiao Connect, to continue his agribusiness consulting work.

Hilton wrote a submission for the 2023 ministerial inquiry into forestry slash, which has badly affected his local region. He is very mindful of the damage to land in Te Tai Rāwhiti that was caused by Cyclone Gabrielle in February 2023.

Best practice for animal welfare

Over the years, Hilton’s work with animals has been in terms of best practice at a farm level, introducing best-practice methods and systems on farm to achieve the necessary economic drivers – for example, teaching farm staff how to condition score by placing their fingers on a certain part of the animal’s body to estimate the fat cut up over the last rib as the most accurate indicator of the condition of those animals.

Throughout his career, Hilton has worked with most farm animals and livestock: sheep, cattle, beef and dairy, and deer. In the old days, a farmer worked with the help of a horse and a dog or a team of dogs. That image of a farmer working with animals out on the land is the “romantic side of farming” as Hilton puts it, given all the paperwork, policy and advocacy work he does now.

Hilton’s pathway to agribusiness

Hilton grew up on a dairy farm on his ancestral lands on the East Coast Te Tai Rāwhiti. The land was farmed by his grandparents and passed down to his mother and then to him. He describes the family farm of his childhood.

It was fundamentally a dairy farm, but it was actually a mixed enterprise. We had big gardens, we had sheep, we had cows, beef, chicken. You name it, poultry, we had it. And we literally could live off the land. There was an ecosystem that relied on the farm.

Hilton Collier

As a child helping his grandfather on the farm, Hilton recalls how they milked 143 cows and knew each one as an individual.

They all had names. They all had their own pecking order. They all had their place in the shed. And when a cow came in in the wrong order, you knew there was something wrong with the cow.

Hilton Collier

Hilton went to Gisborne Boys’ High School. By the time he left, he knew he wanted to be a farmer so he went straight on to study at Lincoln University (then Lincoln College), completing his Bachelor of Agricultural Science in 1984. From there, he gradually took over full control of his family farm. His work then moved into Māori agribusiness consultancy.

Influence of te ao Māori on Hilton’s work

Two Māori concepts that Hilton relates to working with animals are whakapapa and mana.

For Hilton, being Māori and knowing about Māori ways of doing things is connected to how a farmer learns to read livestock so that they can tell by looking at an animal whether it’s well or unwell.

It’s about being attuned to what’s going on and learning the signs of the world around us. Hilton grew up in a world where farmers not only knew their animals but they knew how quickly they moved and that everything has its own natural rhythm.

Whether that’s Māori, whether that’s stockmanship, call it what you like. I'm not quite sure what it is, but as I’ve watched people who are successful as farmers, they tend to have that sort of intuition about the wellbeing of an animal.

Hilton Collier

Hilton thinks all animals have mana in their own right and deserve to be treated with respect. He explains the difference between good and bad livestock-handling practices, both through his own experiences and in terms of animal slaughter science.

In the old days on the farm, an animal killed for the house (providing food for the family) would be gently walked into the killing house. The animal would be rested and watered, and then they’d be dispatched and dressed. All that contributed to the meat being tasty and tender and to the full experience of having looked after the animal through to it fulfilling its purpose as food.

In contrast, when tired animals are loaded hurriedly onto a truck in hot conditions, they will arrive at the processing plant stressed with elevated glycogen levels. The meat will not set properly and the resulting steak will not be tender – it will be chewy, dark-coloured and of lesser quality.

If an animal is respected, its meat could be presented in premium quality, and the farmer would be justified in expecting consumers to pay a premium because they can guarantee that steak will be consistently tender.

Even in the business of food production, it is important to remember that all living things have mana, and if treated as such, they end up providing a much better food experience.

In terms of whakapapa, if we accept that all living things are interrelated, then that idea leads back to treating an animal with its own mana, with respect, with some dignity.

Hilton Collier

Hilton is a leader of Māori agribusiness. In his various roles, he participates in many national conversations. Based on all of those experiences, his advice for the rest of us as citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand is that our biggest challenge as a country is to realise that our strength is our diversity.

Some of the things we do are partially intuitive, partially about treating all living things in the way you would hope we’d be treated – it’s been interesting having that percolating in the back of my mind as we’ve been surveying some of the Cyclone Gabrielle damage. Then pondering if some of the traditional values had been maintained, would we be dealing with such a catastrophic event? Certainly, we would have had big rainfalls, but perhaps we wouldn’t have seen the degree of devastation that we currently have here in Te Tai Rāwhiti.

Hilton Collier