James Allen is Managing Director of AgFirst, one of New Zealand’s largest agribusiness consultancies, with 15 regional offices and over 100 staff working across dairy, sheep and beef, horticulture and engineering. Based in the Waikato, he built his career at AgFirst from a two-person Waikato office in 2002 to the national CEO role in 2022. Before AgFirst he consulted with Agriculture New Zealand from 1996, having started out on a Bay of Plenty dairy farm.
The 2023 Nuffield Scholar turned his research inward. His original topic was redefining excellence in agribusiness consultancy, how the rural professional role needs to adapt to stay relevant. As he travelled and dug in, a bigger question kept surfacing: productivity in the New Zealand primary sector has flatlined, and the gains that used to come from nitrogen fertiliser and rotational grazing aren’t being replaced by anything of equivalent scale. The consultancy question and the productivity question became the same question.
James travelled through the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Singapore and East Africa. He looked at Bayer’s Climate FieldView auto-scripting corn planting rates for US farmers, Farmer.chat delivering agronomy advice to smallholders in Ethiopia and Kenya at a fraction of traditional extension costs, and Halter’s cow collars generating heat maps of grazing behaviour that most farmers using the system don’t realise are available.
His report lands on a working thesis. For advisors whose job is purely transferring technical knowledge, agri-tech is already taking over large parts of the role, and AI has the potential to accelerate that shift substantially. The advisor of the future is a behaviour-change specialist, someone who takes the technology’s analysis and works with the farmer on what to actually do about it. Two structural blockers keep holding New Zealand back regardless: rural internet connectivity, and the lack of data sharing between platforms.
