John Foley is a senior seed production agronomist with PGG Wrightson Seeds in Canterbury, working in seed production research and precision agriculture. He grew up on a multi-generational sheep and beef farm near Waimate, took a Bachelor of Commerce in agriculture at Lincoln, and joined Pyne Gould Guinness as a graduate agronomist in 1999. A year as a field technician in the UK followed, then two decades in the proprietary seed industry, an MBA at Canterbury, and thirty trips to South America since 2007 building seed production capability in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. From 2015 he has run the company’s 171ha Kimihia research farm near Lincoln, where ten research teams and fifty staff work.
John applied to Nuffield after conversations with 2019 scholar Hamish Marr, whom he met on a post-conference tour in Oregon, and with Craige MacKenzie. His application proposed studying how automation would disrupt agricultural employment. Then the 2021 cohort spent three weeks touring New Zealand in a van, and at stop after stop someone said it would be good if a Nuffield scholar looked at the science sector. He changed topic.
Science and Innovation in New Zealand Agriculture, published in June 2022, draws on 85 interviews ranging from former government ministers to industry chief executives. John traces today’s fragmented, competitive science system to the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and argues three things hold it back: no one has enough time, because everything runs on electoral cycles, reporting periods and project lengths; the incentives are self-defeating; and government no longer holds enough expertise in-house to drive change. He proposes organising research around long-run national missions instead.
