Rural Leaders Newsletter

An example for public good is health care and education. These are sectors within our society that have a high degree of touch with everyday New Zealanders. There’s a whole lot of trust, like social license is almost unquestioned. No one questions whether we need education. It’s just there.

I’ve had the privilege of having a lot of time on farm, so I know that the farm can be a place of healing, it can be a place of learning, it could be a place of inspiration, it could be a place of health. In my eyes, farming has the ability to transcend just a mere industry: shoes, iPhones, socks, handbags, and actually sit in a public good space.

I think that reframe is really important because it opens up a lot of potential. Now you can start saying, well, how would we make farming more like education? Why is education such a trusted sector? It opens up more opportunities for things like funding, because now you can say, can we go to the Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Social Development, and the MPI together and do system change. Because it’s really good for society. So, you’re suddenly in a different ball game just from that mindset shift. So that was the first bit.

BG: And you’re not talking about, for example, if we look at education, a lot of the schools are run centrally. You’re talking more about a partnership in a way of looking at things. So farming businesses go, my bottom lines are met by making a profit on these animals that I raise, but also taking these things off in a social or environmental sense. Is that the idea?

DE: Yeah, that’s the starting place. Then you start to think about what concrete solutions would look like. Education might not be the best example in this instance. Healthcare is probably a better example. To me, healthcare is quite interesting because you effectively have two models that sit side by side. You’ve got a private health care model where people pay for service, and then you’ve got a public health care model. Interestingly, doctors flip between the two. You can have public doctors that operate privately and vice-versa.

Regardless of which system you play in, every doctor gets paid well. It’s a very respected role in society. To me, they’re solutions that mindset will prompt you into.

A relatively concrete solution that I could see is if there was an organisation set up to encourage farmers who are farming close to cities to transition to local food economies and local food business models. Whether that’s community supported agriculture or technology driven food distribution, like Happy Cow Milk, which is the Fonterra factory-in-a-box model. That has some government support because it would be required to reduce the amount that some consumers are paying for food and it could operate on something like a postcode system where, depending on your postcode, you pay a different amount for your food.

But alternatively, a farmer who’s further away from town would probably participate in the more status quo export model running through your processor and then selling our kai overseas. There’s no reason why those two things can’t sit well blended together. But by having that, some farmers incentivised to operate in that local system, you’re solving all these other big issues like social license, like recruitment, like people understanding where their food comes from, and also creating this really fertile ground to tell a really compelling international story about food security and how important kai is to New Zealanders, and this is how we treat it. You’re creating content and you’re building this overseas provenance story as well.

So, a lot of it really does sit within that reframe that, you know what, smart investment from industry and government into these public good food system models, particularly local, can net some massive results in the long-run.

MP: I was just in India a short while ago, and they really want us to be investing there. The challenge for New Zealand is that we’ve got stories, we’ve got examples, we’ve got experience investing in other countries. Some of the challenge around that is sometimes we’ve gone in a little bit proud and arrogant, taking a copy and paste approach that hasn’t necessarily worked because you’re operating in a completely different system, a completely different environment, and operating context.

Copy and paste won’t work. It won’t work in many countries because New Zealand is unique in that it is an island nation, small, tight-knit ecosystem, driven by a temperate maritime climate. Just copying and pasting that, there’s very few places in the world you can do that in. That’s why we’ve got to shift our thinking to learning, growing and working together with others to create something entirely new that works in the operating context for them and also works for us.

BG: When you read about the possibilities of doing more trade with India, quite often the first thing you hear is, ‘yeah, but they won’t take our dairy products’. And so deal’s off the table. But I think what you’re saying might be that it’s a bit more nuanced than that, and there are things we can do and we should be doing?

MP: It’s most certainly more nuanced than that. I suppose my take home message from my time in India is – there’s a bunch – the first one is, we really do have to conduct ourselves with humility. I think from those that I engage with in India, they have an allergic reaction to anything remotely arrogant, remotely hinting of a colonialism approach. So, if we even begin to think that we can conduct our way without humility and without deep, deep respect and without a hunger to learn and understand and focus on building relationships, I think we’re going to go nowhere fast.

At the same time, they really do want to grow. They’re grappling with some big challenges, and they’ve got enormous potential to lift by doing small things really well. Talking to the Indian High Commissioner to New Zealand, they really do want us to be investing there.

But again, this is where we’ve got to be thinking about a broader picture than just a single process investment. We’ve actually got to be thinking about how do we grow the whole ecosystem. It’s government to government, industry to industry, farmer to farmer, company to company, people to people.

It’s building all of the ecosystem that is an Indian centric one, or whatever country it might be in the world, something that really works so that whatever investment we do there, it’s going to be successful. But we can be guaranteed it’s not going to be a copy and paste of what we see here in New Zealand. We have to completely shift our thinking altogether.

BG: Now, I mean, our food production ecosystem here in New Zealand is pretty well developed and pretty really well thought of, do you think it’s well placed to meet some of these global challenges?

HM: Yes. Look, I visited a place in the UK, a large place, and this was a lightbulb visit for me. They reduced their glyphosate usage on this farm. Big place. When I say big, about 30,000 ha. They reduced their glyphosate usage by 90% simply by adding sheep into their farming mix. And I suddenly thought, well we’re already doing that in New Zealand. That’s standard practice.

So, when you look down into the numbers and the application rates on a total per hectare basis in this country, we’re so far down compared to a lot of other developed countries for that fact.

I also saw the impacts of the other extreme Roundup ready crops in the Northern Hemisphere, United States and Canada, where applications of four or five times a year are not uncommon. When you multiply that up by the millions of hectares involved, it’s easy to understand how Roundup is now in the food chain in a lot of those countries.

BG: Now, despite finding out about the issues with some of those Roundup ready crops and those problems that they can have in some parts of the world here in New Zealand, while we don’t have those, Roundup is still pretty important to some of our farming systems, isn’t it?