Jon Pemberton didn’t set out to argue that New Zealand’s freshwater problem is institutional. The 2025 Nuffield Scholar, who operates two dairy farms either side of Edendale in Southland and serves as Environment Southland’s Southern Ward councillor, originally proposed a research project on whether nature-based solutions could be developed into a tradeable commodity at the catchment scale – sizable wetlands cleaning downstream water, planted headwaters reducing the need for ever-higher flood banks, and the contributing farms benefiting commercially in return.
International travel reshaped the question. Visits to the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, Chesapeake Bay and Canada turned up only fragmentary examples of such trading schemes working in practice. What kept emerging instead was a different observation: the countries delivering measurable freshwater improvement had something New Zealand doesn’t.
The clearest example came from the Chesapeake Bay watershed in the United States, which faced dead fish and a nitrate crisis in the 1990s. Pemberton describes a programme that pulled the Delaware and Maryland counties together with no exemptions, and with an independent science institution at the centre.
“When you get the right format for delivering that science – that is to say, extension – and you get the right programme and who is actually driving the science – that is to say, not sector owned – it brings everybody in the tent together. And once you get that trust, everybody gets on board, and actually you can make some pretty serious quick changes to the environment.”
From there, Pemberton’s argument settles into a clear thesis. New Zealand has the farmers, the technology and the willingness. What it lacks is an honest broker – a credible, independent institution that ground-truths the science all parties can agree on.
“Catchment groups don’t have a line of sight back to what you’d consider an honest broker.”
He proposes a Lincoln University-anchored model, loosely echoing the land-grant universities he encountered overseas, with a direct line of extension officers running into catchments. Catchment groups, of which the Edendale Aquifer Group – where Pemberton sits on the committee – is one of more than 220 nationally, would remain the engagement and education hubs they already are, rather than being asked to substitute for institutional architecture they were never designed to provide.
“These are voluntary roles that are run inside catchment groups, so it’s very much that is engagement and the education space. It shouldn’t be around policy making.”
The MAF extension service of earlier decades comes up as a partial template – not for what it did, but for the trust farmers placed in it as a non-commercial source of advice.
Pemberton also points to regulatory inconsistency as a symptom of the same institutional gap.
“Look at Otago versus Southland – there’s a stark difference to how we manage our effluent when you drive through the border. You look at winter grazing rules like the 190 rule: if it has black and white animals, dairy cattle grazing it, that restricts the 190 rule, whereas for every other farm system it’s open slather. There’s those inconsistencies that aren’t very helpful.”
His report concludes with four specific proposals: a land-grant-equivalent institution at Lincoln, a national cost-share programme for on-farm freshwater works, resourced catchment groups with professional coordination and independent science access, and sector-neutral environmental regulation with no permanent agricultural exemptions.
Pemberton’s framing throughout his report is that the problem isn’t the farmer – it’s the system.
“Farming and clean water use are not mutually exclusive. The question is whether New Zealand has the institutional courage to build structures that make both possible.”
