Fassifern Consulting provides in depth advice on sustainable food production and agribusiness management.
Providing advice on developing agribusinesses
Providing advice on sustainable agriculture
With over 36 years of agricultural experience. I have an extensive knowledge of crop and livestock production and a unique expertise from field production to the senior corporate level
I was a senior member of the sustainability steering committee when NBPOL gained ISO 14001 (Environmental Management & Monitoring) Certification in 2004. My involvement with the Round Table for Sustainable Palm Oil goes back to 2008, when as General Manager for New Britain Palm Oil Ltd, the company was the first in the world to be audited under the Principles and Criteria. I also successfully led Ramu Agri Industries Ltd through certification for RSPO in 2010. During my time as CEO, NBPOL increased and strengthened it’s Rainforest Certification with four fifths of the production now certified.
Certified as a Lead Auditor in ISO 14001, RSPO Principles & Criteria, RSPO Supply Chain Certification, Rainforest Alliance, I intuitively understand that in order for agriculture to be sustainable it must comprise of legal, economically viable, environmental appropriate and have socially beneficial management and operations.
I am also a Certified Social Compliance Auditor with the Association of Professional Social Compliance Auditors (APSCA) auditing in Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA) and the Fair Farms Standard.
With a career spanning 32 years, from estate management to CEO of a large multi business unit company, I have a comprehensive understanding of the industry. As CEO for NBPOL, I was responsible for 92,000 hectares of planted oil palm, 12 oil mills and two refineries. Being fortunate enough to to have worked with plant breeders, agronomists, tissue culture scientists, entomologists and pathologists, I have built a sound understanding of the research and development of oil palm. The vertically integrated nature of the palm oil businesses that I have run have given me experience both at the upstream and downstream levels of the industry.
The seven years that I worked as General Manager for Ramu Agri Industries Ltd gave me the opportunity to gain both insight and experience of cultivating, harvesting, processing and packaging of cane sugar. The nature of this business gave me experience in running a Fast Moving Consumable Goods enterprise. As well as the responsibility for running a sugar factory that produced 34,000 tonnes of sugar every year, I was also responsible for running the ethanol distillery that produced 2.5 million litres of hydrous ethanol per annum.
My grandfather and uncle owned and ran a beef farm in the north of Scotland and were responsible, I believe in my interest in agriculture. I first started ‘work experience’ with my uncle at the age of 13. I worked in various other farms including beef before moving to Papua New Guinea. I had overall responsibility for the Numundo herd in West New Britain as General Manager and during the 7 years at Ramu I was also responsible for the beef enterprise. With a combined herd of 26,000 head, three feedlots and two abattoirs, this vertically integrated enterprise supplied the domestic market within PNG. With a reputation for high quality meat, the business’s greatest challenge was managing the customers expectations as far as availability of supply.
I spent three years working in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea working as the Senior Assistant Manager overseeing the cultivation and production of Arabica coffee. With over 560 hectares of estate coffee and numerous supplying small holders, I gained a considerable amount of experience in coffee production in a very challenging part of the world. With two estates and a coffee factory, the business produced green bean for the European, Australian and New Zealand markets. As a single source producer of high grade Arusha and Catura Arabica, strong partnerships were developed with customers and I gained exposure to the importance of good customer relationships.
As CEO of NBPOL we achieved Nasfund’s Employer of the year in both 2019 and 2020. We also achieved first place in the Zoological Society of London’s Sustainability Policy Transparency Toolkit in 2020. My specialist expertise is in agribusiness management, the enterprises that I have expertise in are palm oil, sugar, cattle, coffee and rubber.
