Carlos Bagrie didn’t plan to write a report about New Zealand’s economic identity, he planned to figure out what to do with abattoir waste. The 2024 Nuffield Scholar is co-founder of Royalburn Station, a 460-hectare high-country farm on the Crown Range Road outside Queenstown, where he and his wife Nadia have built something genuinely unorthodox: an on-farm abattoir and butchery, 4,500 pasture-raised laying chickens, an organic market garden, grain crops feeding a branded beer and single malt whisky, and a direct-to-customer retail store in Arrowtown.

Before farming, Carlos co-founded My Food Bag, helping grow it from a living-room start-up to over $100 million turnover in four years, and has been a director of the Nadia brand since 2012. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing Management from Otago University.

It was the Nuffield travel programme — specifically a month in Brazil — that redirected everything. Standing in the middle of an 800,000-hectare combine-ready cropping operation owned by a single family, with its own research laboratories, humidity-controlled seed stores, and a fleet of numbered combines, Carlos found himself rethinking not just New Zealand agriculture, but New Zealand’s entire economic position.

From Brazil he moved through Zimbabwe, Georgia, the Netherlands, the UK, Scotland, and the United States, watching how different nations use, or step back from, farming as a driver of national prosperity.

The report that emerged, Beyond the Farm Gate: Rethinking New Zealand’s Economic Future, shifts the lens from what New Zealand produces to what it earns from the world, and asks whether agriculture and tourism, both approaching maturity, can carry the country for another 25 to 50 years without a deliberate third pillar alongside them.