Kellogg Scholar Reports

Whenua (land) is valuable. It is a place for us to live, to make a living and to grow food and materials we need for ourselves and export. Across New Zealand, huge variations in landforms, soil, and climate influence how land across the country can best be utilised and managed (Ministry for the Environment, 2021).

The state of our land today is a legacy of the ways previous generations used it. Some former land uses limit how we can use it today. In the same way, our choices about land today can be irreversible and will affect future generations and the potential production and profitability of our industry.

The Northland Region of New Zealand is a vital province for agriculture, horticulture, and forestry and, with its subtropical climate and mixed topography, offers a key competitive advantage.

A range of factors can drive land-use change, all of which tend to interact and influence each other and can be generally categorised into the following areas:

• Biophysical Factors
• Economic Factors
• Societal Factors
• Regulatory Factors
• Environmental Factors

These five factors are all interrelated. They are all equal in importance and in most cases, an aggregation of drivers will need consideration. An individual’s risk appetite, as well as any future succession plans, will also influence these decisions.

A person or entity’s drivers for change will be unique and must be treated as such. They could include:

• Looking to make a change to either reduce risk or maximise financial return (economically driven)
• Seeking an enterprise or activity that is more aligned to them personally (interest- driven)
• To improve the environmental impact (environmentally/regulatory driven)

Good land-use decisions depend on being well informed and understanding the trade-offs between profitability, physical land characteristics and environmental sustainability. To achieve all aspects, a mosaic approach to land uses may be required across the rural landscape in Northland. Many land uses can complement each other, helping to:

• Spread financial risk by diversifying investment
• Reducing environmental impact
• Improve the overall sustainability of the farm
• Creating succession options

There are three main aspects of land-use change and diversification identified in the Northland Region that are prominent today. I believe these factors will also be of most significant consideration moving forward into the future. The three main aspects are environmental considerations (primarily availability of water and the use of forestry to reduce our impact on climate change and emissions), economic considerations (profitability and access to capital), and regulatory considerations (subdivision of rural land). Four examples have been given based on these factors.

From the research completed in this report and my professional experience, I make the following recommendations:

• I suggest further analysis and information on current land use is required to ascertain what enterprises are covering what land areas in Northland. Similarly, information on soil types is difficult to obtain and is generally high level. Statistics are primarily restricted and usually well out of date. Information at a district or regional level could assist in future land-use decision making.
• I suggest further investigation and research into different land uses, specifically for the Northland region, including new crops or subtropical varieties. We need to share our knowledge and experiences so others can make informed decisions regarding land use diversification.
• I propose the availability of specialist consultants who can be accessed easily by farmers to assist landowners in uncovering potential land-use change options and what would best suit them as people, their land, and the viability. Having previous case study examples would assist with this.
• I advocate that water storage investment for the Northland region remains a priority, and I recommend the proposed water storage sites continue to go ahead, as well as an investigation into other potential future sites.
• I suggest local councils continue to plan urban development and weigh up the requirement of residential housing versus products produced from highly productive agricultural land.

The project described in this report formed part of the Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme. It investigated the use of a heat pump in kiwifruit pollen drying in order to reduce energy use.

The author worked with a pollen producer to establish limitations in the existing conventional system, before researching and developing a concept that utilised heat pump technology.

Initial findings suggested such a system presents significant financial and environmental advantages that may be exploited by individual producers and industry bodies alike.

The recommendations were to:

1. Build a prototype pollen dryer using a Temperzone packaged water-cooled unit coupled with a reheat coil as per concept design.

2. Use the above prototype phase to gather more data, particularly around water volume requirements and heat transfer.

3. Investigate other potential sources of supplementary heat to provide further efficiencies.

Kiwifruit represents 32% of New Zealand’s total horticultural export revenue. Kiwifruit growers and the wider industry works hard to make sure consumers across the world can enjoy fresh, healthy kiwifruit; however labour shortage could easily put high kiwifruit returns into jeopardy. If industry doesn’t pick and pack kiwifruit on time it can result in substantial fruit loss in terms of quality and revenue.

The current and predicted labour shortage is already having a significant impact on the horticultural sector including the kiwifruit industry. Projected growth in kiwifruit sales is predicted to reach 190 million trays by 2027. However, with the record-breaking volume increase every year, the tsunami of kiwifruit may arrive earlier than 2027. An additional 8,000 seasonal workers will be required if projected growth targets are to be achieved successfully, in addition to 23,000 seasonal workers in peak season (2021 data). Hence the extent of the labour shortages is critical for the kiwifruit industry.

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent of the labour shortage in the kiwifruit industry especially within postharvest, and how technology led innovation can help to ease the burden of the shortage in labour.

The physical, inconsistent/seasonal nature of the job plus lack of training and work culture, tighter immigration laws and COVID-19 are among the main factors hindering the industry from attracting and retaining people year on year. In most of the interviews, lack of change management, work culture, effective communication and leadership were raised as major barriers in technology-led solution of labour shortage.

Kiwifruit, along with the other horticultural industries needs certainty of labour supply. Key recommendations from this project are discussed here. One way kiwifruit industry can attract labour is by supporting employment staggered year-round or fixed contract with flexibility to provide job security. Improving work culture, where everyone is treated fairly, will help to build industry reputation and would encourage everyone to work and stay.

To empower and attract young locals, the kiwifruit sector needs to incorporate innovation, sponsor apprenticeships, change marketing strategies, provide accommodation, and travel facilities for seasonal workers. Universities and Polytechnic institutes need to encourage students to gain horticulture knowledge to produce a future workforce for the kiwifruit industry.

Even if all the unemployed in NZ would work, industry would still need more seasonal workers. What should industry be focusing on, to resolve long term labour issues? Industry needs to be creative and look for innovative solutions to ease the labour shortage issue.

Technology adoption could serve two major benefits to the industry: first easing the pressure on manual labour jobs, and secondly generating technical jobs for young kiwis. This new job market will call for skilled people to build, service and maintain technologies. To successfully introduce and implement innovation in the industry, employers need to follow a change management process. Industry needs to make sure that contractors follow compliance requirements and keep investing in fit- for -purpose innovation to improve supply chain efficiency.

All stakeholders need to understand that continued small and large operational improvements and enhancements will move the industry toward efficient and reduced labour efforts. A dedicated investment in technology innovation and a collective effort for adoption needs to be supported by Zespri, postharvest facilities, Government, and the private sector to improve performance and brace for future challenges.

World agriculture is dependent on and supported by cheap and readily available fossil fuels which have led to huge increases in global population, consumption, and economic prosperity.

Unfortunately, this has created undesirable side effects such as resource depletion and environmental degradation, and we may now be reaching the planet’s bio-physical limits. Renewables are unlikely to fill the energy void left by declining fossil fuels and agricultural systems need to adapt to face the threats posed by declining net energy, environmental effects, and approaching bio-physical limits.

Regenerative agriculture is gaining momentum as a profitable low-input farming system that addresses the current threats by treating the farm as an ecosystem, by delivering benefits to soil health, biodiversity, and plant animal health while reducing the impact on the climate and the environment.

When integrated with permaculture principles and implemented through a design process at farm scale, regenerative agriculture can provide better economic, environmental, and social outcomes to pastoral farmers when specific site and operational context is considered.

This report makes recommendations including that farmers better understand permaculture, and regenerative agriculture principles and the suggested design process to implement them at farm scale and that farmers create a 100-year plan for their farm based on these principles that considers economic, environmental, and social outcomes including well-being.

Legacy responses to improving unproductive land-based assets have failed Māori resulting in only a few high-performing Māori owned land blocks in Tai Tokerau. As such, when engaging in the primary sector, many Māori landowners – Incorporations and Trusts – are often starting from a zero-base or worse.

This is particularly the case in the rural community of Waima, Hokianga. Well known constraints to development of whenua Māori include legislative obligations and regulations, under-investment, limited access to finance and opportunities, lack of capability and sometimes fraught relationships.

Emerging research is beginning to identify learnings and insights of Māori landowners who have successfully overcome one or many of these constraints to grow high-performing farming operations that thrive both commercially and culturally.

This project is concerned with understanding the learnings and insights specific to Tai Tokerau and how they can inform enduring, sustainable agricultural production systems to unlock opportunities for future generations in Waima.

This report is based on a series of conversations, meetings and a literature review of select sources comprising primary and secondary sources to identify relevant and current content, themes and a brief case study of the Waima Topu B Ahuwhenua Trust.

The report concludes with findings and recommends that are fit for the Tai Tokerau context that encourages collaboration as stepping stone to collectivisation supported by a high-level business case that sets out a pathway for investment.

The purpose is to grow high-performing Māori farms in Tai Tokerau through investment in infrastructure and capability including governance and skills and training; establish and strengthen the relationship between Māori farmers, Crown-owned farms and investors that, in time, allows multiple farms to come together to work collectively to add value to, and de-risk, the value chain from farm gate to whare.

The purpose of this report is for the reader to gain understanding of the strong wool industry as well as find some guidelines that could work for the future of the industry. To do this there is an overview of the history of the industry, following this an overview of what is currently happening in the industry and finally some thought on what needs to occur in the future to creat a booming industry again.

The main goal for this report is to raise awareness for consumers to make the environmentally friendly decision to buy wool and encourage the industry as a whole to stand together, to pull the wool market out of the doldrums and put it back into the flourishing fibre position it deserves to be.

There has been a lot of research into the history as well as the present to gain a broad knowledge of the industry as a whole. In-depth research of what organisations are doing and have done in the past, what factors have impacted the strong wool industry and how the strong wool industry sits within the market. The future component of this report is made up of thoughts of industry leaders and the writers perceived opinions on what the wool industry and eco-friendly consumers need to do to change the future of wool back into its rightfully thriving state.

From this report I hope to encourage innovators to create new markets for strong wool and to get producers and government to invest into wool research and development. Consumers, retailers, producers and industry organisations will need to learn to understand what the needs are and what opportunities are available to increase the demand for the super fibre that is wool.

For the future to be positive for the industry, there needs to be innovation, investment, and collaboration. The industry needs to combine to become a team who work together, who invest within the industry, from the woolshed up, to increase the quality and research and development for the sector and to keep an open mind for innovation within the industry.

To help create a thriving strong wool industry again we need:

Producers to:

• Produce high quality wool
• Employ proper practice in the wool preparation
• Always look for new and different markets and opportunities
• Educate the market of the benefits of using wool in every way we can, so the consumer can make informed, eco-friendly and sustainable choices.

Consumers to:

• Encourage the industry
• Value the product.

And most importantly we all need to:

• Buy New Zealand Strong Wool products.

Northland is currently going through a transformational phase, with a surge of horticultural developments from the Kaipara all the way to the Far North of New Zealand. This growth is mainly due to land use change and land price/availability in the region, but also diversification of marketable food opportunities coming out of Northland.

This project involved the creation of a short film. The purpose of the film was to provide an impactful medium, showcasing Northland’s horticulture scene and its growth. This film highlights the implications of this growth. One of these is the regions ability to attract and retain a skilled labour force, as well as working on workforce solutions to create sustainable employment opportunities for local Northlanders.

Alongside this, we need to consider our social licence to operate in the community. Engagement with community groups, iwi and others is critical to ensuring the success of regional developments. A key theme that emerged during filming, is the opportunity that horticulture delivers to the regions economic growth.

A flourising horticulture ecosystem, not only provides diversification of economic returns, but also encourages value chain partners to establish in Northland, thus increasing the skill base and opportunity for our future workforce. This has a knock on effect for improving local small businesses.

Infrastructure investment for better roads, accommodation and power has been highlighted as key priorities for the region to flourish.

A range of stakeholders provided insights on our topics:

• Horticulture in Northland
• Growth and development
• Opportunities and challenges
• Workforce development
• Engaging community
• The future.

My recommendations are:

• Value chain businesses should consider supporting the region by establishing a base up in Northland.
• Develop a functioning ecosystem that becomes an enabler for driving skills and capability of our people.
• Design & Implementation of Workforce Development Solutions in association with industry groups, product groups, growers, businesses, iwi, and government agencies.
• Economic Development to support Infrastructure needs identified in the film specific to:
  • • power supply and capacity
    • housing and accommodation
    • town planning, roading solutions
    • transport & logistics.

Climate change is the most important environmental issue the world faces (PCE, 2016). It is impacting the world through increased frequency and intensity of adverse weather events like droughts, hurricanes and floods and through rising sea levels and ocean acidification (IPCC, 2021). Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in GHG emissions (IPCC, 2021).

Livestock farming of ruminants contributes significantly to global emissions of GHG (Garnett and Godde, 2017) and there is growing pressure internationally for agricultural emissions to be reduced (Greenpeace, 2021; Nature, 2019).

The 2015 Paris Agreement is the most recent global agreement on climate change (MoE, 2018). The main purpose of the Paris agreement is to keep the global average temperature well below 20C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.50C (MoE, 2018). Accordingly, in 2019 the New Zealand government set into law new domestic targets through the Climate Change Response (Zero Carbon) Amendment Act (MoE, 2021a):

• Net zero emissions of all greenhouse gases other than biogenic methane by 2050
• 24 to 47 per cent below 2017 biogenic methane emissions by 2050, including 10 per cent below 2017 biogenic methane emissions by 2030

New Zealand livestock farmers will need to play a pivotal role in helping the country achieve these goals as they are responsible for almost all biogenic methane emissions and own almost all the land that is suitable to plant trees on to help offset carbon dioxide emissions. Achieving these goals is going to require significant changes to the way we farm.

There are other external motivations to reduce farm GHG emissions: market access (He Waka Eke Noa, 2021), consumer preference (He Waka Eke Noa, 2021) and the desire to hold your head up when you walk down the street (O’Mannin, 2021). For a lot of farmers there is also a strong internal motivator- a desire to do the right thing (MPI, 2019; O’Mannin, 2021). There is also the fact that changing climate will directly impact farm businesses.

The farming sector has been through substantial change in the past. The dropping of farm subsidies in 1984 and amalgamation in the dairy industry are examples of major change that were extremely painful at the time, absolutely heart breaking for some, but looking back now it was the right thing to do and has helped get us to where we are; one of the most efficient farming nations on earth.

Climate change and Greenhouse gas mitigation is already causing significant change in NZ’s agriculture sector, but climate change is poorly understood by the majority of NZ farmers (MPI, 2019). The purpose of this project is to help sheep & beef farmers understand some of the things they should know about climate change and farm Greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s not often when a group a farmers meet, and the conversation does not turn towards increased compliance and regulation. Water quality standards are usually brought up and no matter whether you are rural or urban most would agree rivers and lakes in New Zealand need to be clean and swimmable, after all, brand “New Zealand” is all about plush countryside and beautiful lakes rivers and mountains.
In the last 30 years New Zealand agriculture has increased nitrogen use by over 600% from 62,000t to 452,000tonnes and cracks are starting to appear.

Anthropogenic inputs from intensive agriculture and poor practices can be harmful to the health of our waterways, precious wetlands rich in biodiversity and known for their many environmental benefits including filtering nutrients and carbon sequestration have been degraded or drained over time.

New Zealand has positioned itself well to feed a growing population, but land use change and intensification is adding pressure to ecosystems and in many cases degrading water quality. Because agriculture is so important to the NZ economy and the very social wellbeing of our people, how do we mitigate the impacts of intensive agriculture on the waterways so that future generations can enjoy the same privileges many of us had growing up.

In this report, I review research on wetlands and other methods which have been proven to mitigate agriculture nutrient loss to waterways. In hope of finding a silver bullet to many water quality issues the answer really is not that simple, the dynamics of agriculture in NZ is diverse. Finding a solution is difficult due to different production systems, geographic, climatic and soil property differences.

I came to understand that many mitigation techniques are on farm management practices such as keeping your Olsen P within economic optimum range, avoid soil damaging activities, better effluent storage etc. I also discovered that land use capability should be at the crux of decision making when it comes to consenting what production system is suitable for that piece of land from an environmental perspective as its much cheaper to allocate the correct land use than back pedal damages to the water quality.

Wetlands are significant for many other reasons other than filtering nutrients and understanding their importance for biodiversity I discovered that they can be a useful tool in the toolbox and are recognised in nutrient budgeting models such as overseer, rejuvenating existing wetlands is a great place to start and constructed wetlands whilst costly can serve many purposes.

The trend to towards the development and use of bioprotectants to control crop pests and disease is now in a surge mode, as evidenced by growth rates in bioprotectant sales (3x that of chemical protectants), start-up company formations, mergers and acquisitions, and multinational and venture capital investments. The stars are aligned in New Zealand for us to engage in this trend and indeed take a leadership position in it.

This report begins with some necessary background and context to this endeavour, followed by an assessment of market drivers and local and global opportunities that present themselves for bioprotectant development. An overview of New Zealand capabilities in public sector research institutions and their enviable track record bodes well for the ability to deliver on the goal of being a partner in bioprotectant development at a global level.

Looking back at the factors that have promoted or constrained past product developments, and the nature of our commercial partnerships, then enables us to develop a strategy to achieve a more focussed, collective, engaged approach to new product development, resulting in clear benefits to all participants in the value chain of bioprotectant development, commercialisation and use.

A vision for 2030 could look like this:

• Fundamental science activity is adequately resourced to support product development
• There is a branded and collective ‘front door’ through which bioprotectant IP is channelled to commercial partners and thence the market
• Commercialisation and business development professionals are active from within this entity
• This entity also acts to promote awareness of NZ capabilities to attract investment and co-development partnerships
• Product developments are tied to clear market needs, especially global opportunities
• Product development is coordinated across key public sector institutions
  Commercial partnerships begin early in the development phase, are robust and enduring
• Several IP assignments or licenses are executed for bioprotectants every year
• The regulatory framework favours bioprotectant development and registration
• Revenue exceeds NZ$15m per annum and continues to grow
  The product brand is established and respected overseas.

Recommendations

Section 5 details a strategy to enhance bioprotectant development in New Zealand for global markets. In summary, the proposed actions encompass recommendations in the following categories:

Revenue sources

Private capital; redirection of internal funds; ‘A Lighter Touch’ programme engagement

Scientific Expertise

Postgrad and postdoc support; public-private research secondments and exchanges; sponsored senior research positions

Foundation science

Target biology and ecology; culture collections; new sources of accessions; biofermentation facilities; nanostring technology

Commercial partnerships

Earlier engagement models; strategic relationships are formalised; active relationship management

Prioritising product goals

Focus on global markets; greater rigour via new assessment tools applied early; new modes of action developed; semiochemical-based control products developed; targets agreed with commercial partners; microbial consortia; new markets (floriculture, postharvest); wider label claims on existing products

Commercialisation

Patentability a key criterion; improved contractual conditions in testing with commercial partners; performance criteria in licenses

Regulatory reform

Broadening group standards; preferential review for bioprotectants; referencing overseas data

An incorporated entity

For collective IP and commercialisation activity from public sector organisations; branded

Sector engagement

More extensive engagement of public sector professionals in agrichemical/bioprotectant industry events and organisations

Validation of biocontrol

Post-market data and practices to validate technology; industry outreach programme for biocontrol.

Above all, focussed leadership and a collective mind-set from public and private organisations, and a vehicle for it, will be needed to bring this strategy to fruition.