Lucie Douma came to her Nuffield research from the Ministry for Primary Industries, where she worked in policy and investment programmes. She was three when her parents left Friesland in the northern Netherlands for Southland, taking on dairy properties at Edendale and Woodlands near Invercargill and installing Southland’s first rotary shed milked from the inside. She grew up on the farm and worked on it until 2009, in dairy and beef. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Applied Science with first class honours from Otago, and a master’s in biodiversity, conservation and management from Oxford. She spent three years at KPMG in climate change and sustainability before moving into government.

At MPI she ran the data interoperability workstream of the Agritech Industry Transformation Plan. Four years on, the sector was still working out how to tackle it, which she puts down to the difficulty of the problem rather than a want of effort. She applied to Nuffield with two topics scoped, data interoperability and value chain resilience, and took the first, wanting to see what other countries had tried and help move the work from discussion towards action.

She spent four months overseas, starting at the Contemporary Scholars Conference in Norfolk in March 2022, the first since Covid, with about 140 scholars from fifteen countries. Norway and the United Kingdom showed her what does not work. Australia showed her what might. In Brisbane she found a cattle business employing a data manager who worked between head office and two feedlots of 20,000 head each, translating what each end needed from the other. Her report, published in April 2023, proposes the same role for New Zealand farming: a farm data manager holding a portfolio of clients, as an accountant does, so the farmer is not also expected to be the data expert.