Kylie Leonard farms 22 hectares inside the Lake Taupō catchment, which shapes almost everything about how the family operation runs. She milks 400 cows on a converted farm outside Taupō with her mother Jenni Molloy-Hargreaves and step-father Murray Hargreaves, working across 300 hectares of milking platform and support block in the Tukairangi Valley. Kylie came to farm ownership sideways – trained as a teacher, worked with dyslexic children across Taupō schools, and bought into land through rental properties before the family converted the block to dairy.

Her Nuffield research asked a specific question: how does ESG – environmental, social and governance reporting – actually reach the farm gate, and who pays for the changes it demands. Travels took her through Brazil, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Belgium, plus the International Dairy Federation World Dairy Summit in Paris in 2024.

Two findings anchor the report. First, ESG is now a lending consideration at every level of the value chain, and businesses with it embedded in their strategy come through downturns better than those without. Second, the cost of meeting ESG targets keeps landing on the farmer, who often cannot carry it. Companies like Nestlé and Mars have started paying farmers to make the transition, recognising that the emissions reduction they need to report against sits at the farm end of a chain they don’t own.

Kylie’s proposed mechanism is a reverse auction or transition payment system running through the value chain, letting farmers choose their level of participation and be compensated for it. She points to New Zealand’s cooperative structure – Fonterra in particular – as the natural vehicle for that kind of collective transition.