Daniel Eb runs Dirt Road Comms, an Auckland agency that works only with organisations pushing for a more just and regenerative food system. His mother worked in public relations and his father farms, so he went into agricultural communications. He grew up mostly in the city, and from his early teens spent weekends at the family beef finishing block in Kaipara, which he counts as the useful part of his background: he can speak to growers and to customers, and is wary of the blind spots in both. He took a psychology and management degree at Auckland, was commissioned in the Army Reserve, and spent eight years in marketing at Pead PR in Auckland and Edelman in London before founding Dirt Road in 2017.

In 2020 he built Open Farms, a nationwide open farm day. The first, on 1 March that year, took 3,500 people onto 45 farms. He applied to Nuffield six months later with an argument already formed: that the sector’s most stubborn problems, a fracturing social licence, recruitment, and the want of an authentic provenance story, are not production problems and will not yield to better marketing. They are about culture and identity.

Daniel’s Nuffield report, The Home Paddock, published in November 2022, builds on an analogy. What if food and farming were treated more like healthcare and education, as a public good? That comparison lets him set systems designed to sell to consumers against systems designed to meet people’s needs, and to weigh what each gains and loses. Drawing on Kaupapa Māori examples and on ventures already operating at the edges of the sector, he ends with a strategy for scaling local food economies: farmers near towns supplying their own communities directly, alongside the export system rather than instead of it.