Westpac's stressed dairy loans tick up

Jenny Ruth
Tue, 05 Nov 2019

Some heavily indebted dairy farmers are barely covering their interest payments despite relatively strong prices for several seasons, Westpac NZ chief executive David McLean says."The ones who've got more leverage, most of those are still covering their cost of production but some of them are close to the edge," he says."Their interest cover isn't that great – there are a lot of farmers who are doing it tough and there's not a lot of buffer."That's why although only 0.32 percent of Westpac's agribusiness portfolio was actually impaired at Sept....

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