As Chief Executive of Pouarua Farms, Jenna Smith spends her working days on more than 2,000 hectares of peat. The 2024 Nuffield Scholar leads a diversified Māori agribusiness on the Hauraki Plains owned by five Hauraki iwi, with operations spanning dairy, arable, beef and horticulture. Alongside her executive role, Jenna is a Dairy Women’s Network trustee, on the BEL Group board, and chairs St Francis Catholic School in Thames.
The question that pulled her into a Nuffield was simple but stubborn. Pouarua’s peat country has been drained and farmed for decades. Globally, peat is recognised as a carbon vault – in New Zealand, peatlands cover roughly 1% of the land area but store around 20% of biomass carbon, and drained peat is leaking an estimated 7% of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Jenna wanted to know what intergenerationally sustainable land use on peat could look like – not in theory, but in practice.
Her research took her through Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Latvia, the UK, Brazil and Taiwan. Each country was wrestling with the same physical problem and arriving at different answers – some technical, some political, some commercial.
The conceptual centrepiece she came back with was paludiculture: wetland-compatible farming that raises the water table back toward the surface rather than fighting it. In parts of Germany and elsewhere, the model is already working – pastoral systems running on rewetted peat, sphagnum moss farmed as a horticultural substrate, reeds and sedges harvested for biomaterials and energy. Bavaria was paying up to €2,000 per hectare to incentivise rewetting. Denmark was swapping peat parcels for non-peat land. Ireland had identified 80,000 hectares for rewetting; Denmark over 100,000.
The most concrete moment came in Lower Saxony, at a drainage scheme that had been pumping water off peat for four hundred years. The land had subsided five metres below sea level, the electricity bill alone was running at 700,000 euros a year, and the pumps were at end of life. The lesson translated cleanly to the Hauraki: continuing to drain isn’t free, it’s a deferred cost that compounds.
The implication for outcomes was clear. Rehabilitation, not restoration, is the practical goal – slowing decline, stabilising subsidence, and keeping land productive – not chasing a pristine state that would take thousands of years to recover.
Her report identifies sphagnum moss as the most realistic paludiculture opportunity for New Zealand, with strong horticultural substrate demand currently met by Polish and German imports. Closer to home, Pouarua is installing flux towers in partnership with Manaaki Whenua to measure real-time emissions from drained peat, cropping and blueberry blocks — turning international insight into local data.
The biggest mindset shift, she argues, is to stop viewing peat as marginal land waiting to be improved. Treated well, peat can be productive, cultural and climate infrastructure all at once.
