Till the cows came home : inside the battles that built Fonterra / Clive Lind.

"History of the dairy industry in NZ and the creation of Fonterra"--Publisher information.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"It was a miracle the New Zealand dairy industry, with it's strong-willed people and philosophical conflicts, completed the mega-merger that formed Fonterra, says the author of a new book.

Clive Lind, a Fairfax executive and former daily newspaper editor, spent three years researching and writing Till the Cows Came Home, to be published mid-next month.

Through the eyes of key industry people he interviewed, Lind tells the stories behind the multi-billion dollar industry - from 40 years ago when the single-seller Dairy Board was jolted into an urgent search for new markets when Britain started talks to enter the European Economic Community, to the emergence of added-value products, the economics-driven consolidation of more than 100 dairy companies into less than a handful, to the writing on the Beehive wall for the single-seller producer board and the efforts of the industry to find a structure solution for the future.

Highlights of the research for Lind included discovering the huge power vested by 1961 legislation in the Dairy Board - "it could do anything it liked as long as it wasn't illegal" - and interviews with industry leaders James Graham, Dryden Spring, John Storey and other key players.

Lind says his book does not comment on the merits of the decision to form Fonterra, from a 2001 merger of Waikato's New Zealand Dairy Group, Taranaki's Kiwi Dairies and the Dairy Board.

But his personal view was that there was no other logical way to handle the necessary industry refor