Shannon Harnett is a chartered accountant and co-owner of Rural Accountants in Whakatāne. She grew up on a sheep and beef farm in southern Hawke’s Bay and started in a Dannevirke farm accountancy practice straight out of school, going back to a senior role there before studying at Massey, where she took a business degree in accounting and management and a postgraduate diploma in agri-commerce. Accounting roles in Palmerston North, Rotorua, Waipukurau and Taupō followed. From 2015 Shannon was group financial controller and second in charge at Rockit Apple, through the period of its private equity buy-out, and founded Rural Accountants in 2017. She chairs or sits on boards across kiwifruit, Rockit apple and sheep and beef entities, among them a joint venture organic kiwifruit development with Māori landowners in the Eastern Bay of Plenty.

Shannon applied for Nuffield after being shoulder-tapped at an industry event. By her own account she would not have put her name forward otherwise, not being on farm and doubting she was a suitable candidate. Her application proposed examining whether New Zealand horticulture could make fuller use of the plant variety rights model, naming apples, hops, berries and kiwifruit.

Covid closed the borders and the international study became a domestic one, which suited a topic she already knew from the inside. Shannon’s report, Getting Plant Varieties Right, published in February 2022, works through two cases: Zespri SunGold kiwifruit and the Rockit apple. The royalty, she concludes, is not the point. What owning a plant variety right buys is control over how much gets planted, which keeps demand ahead of supply and rewards everyone along the chain. She also argues that updating the Plant Variety Rights Act to UPOV 1991 standards, required under the CPTPP, is a chance for New Zealand to write the best such legislation in the world.