David Eade grew up on a Hereford stud in the north Waikato, rowed for New Zealand, and took a business studies degree in finance and economics at Massey. He began in banking at BNZ and Heartland, then spent six years in San Francisco’s fintech sector, first at the student lender Earnest running credit operations and analytics, then at Square as a risk manager and product manager. He co-founded Spark Finance, which set out to widen access to finance for international students. In 2018 he and his wife Harriet bought an 80ha finishing block at Brunswick near Whanganui, leased it out, and took over running it in 2021, converting it to regenerative practice. Covid brought the family’s return home forward by about six months.

He came to Nuffield from the Kellogg programme, and was the first recipient of the scholarship established by Whanganui & Partners with NZ Rural Leaders for people contributing to the region’s agribusiness sector. His application proposed studying alternative ways to finance land stewardship: paying farmers for ecosystem development, fractional investment to connect urban money with rural land, share schemes to attract staff.

What he did instead was run a design process on the problem. Resign or Redesign, published in March 2022, opens with the observation that commodity prices were near record highs while farmers were protesting in the streets. Fifty hours of interviews and more than a hundred survey responses produced a picture of compounding pressure: thin margins, wages that cannot attract staff, understaffed businesses pulling owners into day-to-day work, no time left for regulation, and a negative public image on top. He then designed against criteria farmers had set themselves, and pitched the resulting prototype to nineteen of them. Three quarters said they would pay for it.