I investigated why catchment groups are formed, how they are formed and what they are producing. By gaining an understanding of the literature around resilience, social sense making, the social licence to farm and the legislative requirements on farmers. I aimed to seek any correlation between the above topics and catchment groups.

Market signals and regulation necessitates sustainably produced products that meet the expectations of the conscious consumer and society. These will require improved ways of doing what has been done before and in some cases a transformative change. This report identifies barriers facing New Zealand farmers towards innovating and taking on new technologies.

Many rural communities have lost their hospitals, police stations, banks, government departments, schools, sporting clubs and churches. This report explores whether healthcare, employment, crime and education outcomes have worsened for rural residents compared to their urban counterparts due to these changes, and recommends enhancements to public policy to address this.

For farmers to measure and manage their carbon footprints there must be a robust system in place to calculate not only their carbon dioxide emissions, but also their carbon dioxide sequestration potential. This research report will focus on answering the question of; what is the carbon sequestration potential of indigenous woody vegetation on New Zealand farmland and how can it be used to more accurately model on-farm carbon footprints?

The New Zealand arable industry is faced with an ever-increasing problem of maintaining a competitive and profitable advantage, that still provides for its consumers. These challenges are compounded by increasing environmental compliance. Lean theory offers an ever-evolving group of practices, both theoretical and managerial, that create a problem-solving culture, that could help the New Zealand arable industry face these challenges.

The aim of this report is to explore whether there are opportunities to improve animal welfare through climate change action. Beginning with a literature review of animal welfare and climate change articles, thematic analysis was then used to code common themes and compare and contrast the information. Using heat stress as an example several areas where greenhouse gas mitigation could improve animal welfare outcomes have been identified.

This project discovered why some farmers still burn their plastic and investigated current waste recycling options for sheep and beef farmers. I sought to gain a deeper understanding of the mentality of farmers who burn or bury rubbish to help understand how their opinions could be swayed. The perception of farmers as kaitiaki could easily be undone by smoking piles of plastic or holes on farms full of plastic containers.

Continual advancement of technology has created an excess number of data creation and management tools for use within agriculture. Multiple tools exist with similar purposes. Many of these are farm management tools or feed directly into the decisions associated with farm management. Reducing the number of new tools being created, would create for drive for information to be shared among the existing tools.

The principle aim of this report is to identify the impact of the developing plant-based protein category on New Zealand red meat sales and investigate whether red meat protein has a positive outlook and if it can hold its position as the dominant source of protein on the supermarket shelves.

The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as reduce the loss of contaminants to water is going to be a major challenge for the farming sector in this country and difficult to achieve within complex farming systems. In response to these challenges many communities have founded catchment groups as a collective response to need provision on farm.

E-commerce is a fast-developing sales channel, on which the agricultural sector was a long way behind. This project looks at the growth/opportunities for e-commerce operations for agricultural supplies businesses. The willingness of farmers to use online stores to make farm input purchases is now very high (83.5% in favour of using e-commerce), and now many Agri supplies businesses are ready to offer this to their customers.

My aim for this project was to break down the barriers and help create an understanding of ‘‘Why do sales teams succeed or fail?’’ and how organizations can unearth problems and enable their teams to discover the solutions to high performance.

China is New Zealand’s largest export market for red meat by both volume and value. It is important that we demonstrate our commitment to the market by exploring and investing in our opportunities there.