Phil Weir grew up on a small dairy farm on the edge of Hamilton and showed Ayrshire cattle as a teenager, then (as is so often the case) spent fifteen years getting as far from agriculture as he could manage! He started engineering, switched to social science at Waikato, took a master’s in marine management at Dalhousie in Nova Scotia (despite getting seasick), played a season of semi-professional rugby in Ireland, lived in Sweden, and ran environmental impact assessments for large mining clients in Newcastle. He came back through AgResearch, where he led a $20 million research portfolio and then the organisation’s intellectual property, some 200 patents across 70 families. In 2017 he and his wife Megan took on her family’s 240ha drystock property at Te Pahu, on the slopes of Mt Pirongia.

Phil came to Nuffield through the Kellogg programme, which he completed in 2016, and the question he brought sat at the intersection between research and farming. He had left a Crown Research Institute full of silos and found the same fragmentation on farm, where he pays levies on his maize, indirectly on the dairy heifers he rears, and on his sheep. He wanted to know whether the structures themselves were restricting collaboration.

Covid cut his cohort’s conference at Tangalooma short after two days and they never got abroad that year, so he went deep at home instead, spending time inside Beef + Lamb New Zealand and interviewing more than fifty sector leaders. He set three case studies against it: the National Farmers Union and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board in the UK, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, and the Three Waters reforms. Phil’s report, Restructuring Industry Good for the Future, published in March 2022, proposes a peak body, Ahuwhenua New Zealand, organised around land rather than around what is produced on it.