Ben Anderson grew up on a sheep and beef farm in a remote part of the King Country, where the stock work was done on horseback. With no pathway back onto the land, he joined the army, was commissioned in 1996 and served about a decade. When Afghanistan came up he didn’t want to miss out, and the army wasn’t going, so he left and worked there privately on the constitutional elections. Years in private security and risk consulting across the Middle East followed, latterly running his own firms. He took a master’s in international relations at Victoria. In 2018 he and his wife Amanda bought Puketotara Farm at Ongaonga in Central Hawke’s Bay, a velveting operation, as a going concern. He had earlier developed the Beef + Lamb New Zealand farm safety management system, and chairs his regional deer industry discussion group.

A decade of assessing risk professionally left him with a habit of weighing it against return, and the numbers in farming did not work. He applied to Nuffield in 2020 intending to study climate adaptation. What he researched instead was why deer farmers are paid so little, and whether environmental performance could be made to pay.

Ben’s Nuffield report, The Green and the Black of It, published in June 2022, found deer farmers averaging 3.4% return on capital against 6.5% for the New Zealand share market since 1900, with real capital gains close to zero once inflation is counted. Velvet growers receive around 3% of the end value of their product. Sustainability can be monetised, but mainly as a first-mover advantage that erodes once it becomes an expectation. The lever that matters is how product reaches the customer, and he recommends the industry build short value chains on the model of Spring Sheep, NZ Merino and Zespri.