A Gore shearing business has gone into liquidation leaving creditors nearly $500,000 out of pocket. The national insolvency statistics will barely register it. The farmers, suppliers and workers who depended on that one firm will feel it for months.
That gap is the story. Sheep farmers have spent decades outsourcing one of their most time-critical jobs to small, lightly capitalised contractors, usually on a handshake. That works well until the contractor fails, and then the farmer finds out how much risk they kept.
A rounding error nationally, a big hole locally
For scale, Inland Revenue figures released under the OIA showed that in 2023 the department filed 764 liquidation applications nationally, with 356…