Phil Weir on Nuffield’s global perspective, sheep and beef farming, and industry good.

You’ve joined Rural Leaders’ Ideas That Grow podcast. In this series, we’ll be drawing on insights from innovative rural leaders to help plant ideas that grow so our regions can flourish. Ideas that Grow is presented in association with Farmers Weekly.

Bryan Gibson, Managing Editor of Farmers Weekly.
You’re with Ideas That Grow, a  Rural Leaders podcast. I’m Bryan Gibson, Managing Editor of Farmers Weekly. With me on this week’s show is Phil Weir, 2020 Nuffield Scholar. G’day Phil, how’s it going?

Phil Weir, Farmer, 2020 Nuffield Scholar, Consultant, Farmer Director B+LNZ and Associate Director AGMARDT:
Hey, Bryan. How’s it going?

BG: Pretty good thanks. Now, you’re a farmer in the Waikato, and also sit on a board or two, don’t you?

PW: Yeah, I’m, first and foremost a farmer in Te Pahu in the Waikato. We’re sheep and beef farming here, and I’ve been doing that for about seven years. Had a range of other roles in an agribusiness prior to that, and then did a Nuffield Scholarship in 2020, which we’ll probably touch on because it was an interesting time to do that.

Since then, I’ve become a farmer elected director for Beef + Lamb New Zealand, and that also involves the New Zealand Meat Board and an Associate Trustee with AGMARDT. And then do a little bit of consulting for AgFirst Waikato. So, I keep myself busy enough and a nice diversity of things going on. So nothing never gets too boring, right? That’s great.

BG: That’s where I met you the first time was when you turned up for your first Nuffield weekend, wasn’t it?

Doing a Nuffield Scholarship during COVID.

PW: Yeah, I think so. I think we were getting media training at that point, Bryan, about how to talk to journalists and then that thing. So hopefully, some of that flashes back to me, I guess, today. But yeah, we were down in Wellington at that point preparing for… That would have been 2019, and we would have been preparing for what a Nuffield Scholarship was to look like.

Ultimately, the experience I had was a wonderful one, but probably one that was a little bit different than when we were sitting when I first met you and in 2019. But I think the whole Nuffield thing, I think this year is 75 years of Nuffield, and I was really lucky to get a scholarship. As I mentioned, did it during COVID, which meant that some of the travel arrangements didn’t happen right away, but absolutely, we did at some point get to go around the world and see some fantastic agribusinesses.

I think one of the cool things was reflecting prepping for this was we did the first Value Chain Programme around New Zealand, so Rural Leaders are now running a programme which looks at how good New Zealand agribusiness and agriculture and growing is.

And we were lucky to be the forced guinea pigs for that because we couldn’t go abroad. And so we got the chance to go and have a look at the best growers and best Agribusiness is in New Zealand, and I think it’s fantastic that programme now has been created probably out of the back of that.

I think it’s so valuable to go and look at what’s in your own country because we do so many things really well. That was one of the lucky things, I guess, about a COVID disruption. Every cloud has a silver lining.

BG: That programme’s going great guns these days. As the old ad used to say, ‘don’t leave town until you’ve seen the country’. Did you grow up in a farming family? Have you always been rurally focussed?

A call back to the farm.

We grew up in a small dairy farm, so I showed Ayrshire Cows as a teenager and a child. My wife brings up some of the photos with me leading cattle around the ring.

We grew up on a small dairy farm on the outskirts of Hamilton. In. It was fantastic. It was the classic family farming upbringing. We were probably fairly poor, but we didn’t want for anything, I guess. We were lucky, we were on the outskirts of town, so we got the best of both worlds. Then after high school, I probably tried to get as far away from agriculture as I could, to be honest.

I went and did a social… I started doing engineering and found that wasn’t quite for me. And then social science. And then went and did a master of marine management in Canada. So, for someone to get seasick, it was a bit of a novel thing to go do, but it was probably just a case of seeing the world, right?

Then I ended up living in Sweden with my wife in a range of places before we made it back to New Zealand via Australia and then worked at AgResearch. In a few business roles there. Then the opportunity to come farming on my wife’s family farm presented itself in 2017. We took that opportunity. So, it was full circle, I guess. Probably I tried pretty hard to get away from it, but kept nagging away to come back and have a crack. When the opportunity presented, we took it.

BG: I get that story a lot when I talk to your alumni in the Nuffield and Kellogg Programmes. A lot of them grow up in farming, head off and pursue other things, do things in other fields, see the world. Then, I don’t know, something nags at them, and they find themselves back where it all started.

I think it’s pretty hard to get past the fundamentals of rural life. Particularly, as you become a parent, you have plenty of space, and you have fresh air, and you don’t have some of the challenges associated with having children in urban environments. I think It’s not all roses going back from a corporate or agribusiness to a farming role. Farming is quite hard work, and there’s different challenges to it.

PW: I think that’s probably one of the big drivers. I think that’s what we reflect on that we really like about it, is that life It’s still an opportunity for both us and probably our children as well.

BG: On the sheep and beef farming side of things, it’s been a pretty tough few years, hasn’t it?

Sheep and beef farming now.

PW: It has. Yeah, there’s no doubting it. It’s been tough. Everyone experienced rapid inflation, so your costs escalated significantly. At the same point, we had the global commodities really dipped. So it was tough, particularly for sheep farmers.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of love from wool for a for a long time, and some of the high pricing that existed around COVID for sheep came off at a really unfortunate time. So it has been really hard. I think it’s great now there’s a sense that most people’s budgets are able to balance.

When I hang out with other farmers, I see more confidence. It’s partly just because you know you can make the box balance, and ultimately, you’re working for a profit or to be able to have some improvements. I think, really, there’s across the country, we got smacked with weather events amongst that as well, whether it be Gabriel or Northland weather events.

I think most of the North Island anyway had an event that costs significant amounts to farming businesses. It’s been a hard couple of years with interest rates and other things. But I think it’s on the right trajectory now. One’s going down and the prices are going up. So, I think make hay while the sun shines, Bryan.

BG: Yeah, I’ve been talking to AgriHQ analysts a bit over the past few weeks, and they’re surprised but happy with the way things are looking in terms of export demand and farm gate returns. They don’t see a downside coming soon. It looks like it’s going to be pretty good throughout the season. So that’s great stuff.

The outlook is positive.

PW: I think it’s nice to know that the strong prices are projected to continue. The world’s not without a fair dose of crazy right at the moment, but things could change. But I guess the fundamentals is a bit of a deficit of protein, and the protein that we produce. It’s nice to be in that position at the moment.

BG: Just getting back to your Nuffield experience. Obviously, you investigate an idea, I guess. Your report was on the changing world in farming and diversification and resilience and that sort of thing, wasn’t it?

PW: My Nuffield report, I guess when I entered it, I’d come from a research environment. I believe there’s a whole lot of value in farmers and growers investing collectively. I looked the industry good bodies and how they might best arrange themselves.

I had a particular focus on commodity levies bodies. But I guess probably what I found through that was that there’s a whole lot of industry good activity that goes on. And ultimately, New Zealand does a really good job in doing a lot of that.

We’ve got Beef + Lamb New Zealand, DairyNZ and other organisations, but we’ve got a whole range of other industry good bodies. And to be honest, it probably worked pretty well together. I think I probably looked at it from the angle and I proposed some change that could happen.

The value of industry good to farmers.

PW: I suppose the starting point was, and I guess it’s why I’ve become a beef and land director, is that I see massive value in individual farmers contributing a small amount of money in the form of a levy or a relatively small amount of money in the form of a levy to enable certain activities to happen that we otherwise couldn’t do.

The R&D work and the helping farmers to perform better in areas where you’ve got market values, the stuff that I’ve always been interested in. I don’t know whether it was ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ reading that when I was at university or something like that, but that whole pooling of resources to get a better outcome and stuff that the market won’t fund the area I was interested in.

I was lucky to look at the New Zealand system, but also to look at the United Kingdom and some European examples, Australia and the US as well. I guess probably what the outcome of it was is that when it’s all finished, I don’t think any system’s perfect, but our one does a pretty good job.

BG: That’s really good to hear because I guess in terms of the industry good organisations, you could argue we’ve been through one of the more turbulent times in recent memory, I guess, fuelled by the emissions pricing process, which ended up with a lot of people questioning how farming side of things went through it.

We seem to have evened out on the other side of that now. Of course, this government doesn’t have such a strong hand of regulation on the sector. It’s good to hear that through your insights globally, we look pretty good compared to others.

PW: Yeah, Bryan, I think the He Waka Eka Noa and water and those big media issues are often what people think of as the work that some of this industry good stuff does. But I think probably the thing we often forget is the amount of other work that goes on.

So whether it be the benchmarking work that can enable a farmer through Beef + Lamb’s economic service or a dairy base or some other tool to work out, well, hey, if I have this property and I’m running this system, then how are my peers going economically? What are they spending their money on? How does that work? Those data sets that have been prepared on behalf of industry for many years are really powerful and really important and can help us farm better.

I think there’s also areas where industry good bodies can ultimately collect some resources and they can make determinations around where some of our investment is spent from an R&D perspective. If we look at facial eczema in our area, if it rains today, then I’ll be happy. But in another level, I’ll be worrying a wee bit about facial eczema.

The fact that there’s an industry good body, in our case, doing work on that’s great. It’s not something I can afford. I can’t afford to do that work, but it’s stuff that very much underpins my business. I think we often forget or get caught up in those couple of big political critical areas where there’s a bit of conflict that clouds our overall perspective of all the good stuff that goes on.

BG: And of course, New Zealand being so unique in the world of farming, with its geography, climate farming systems, we’ve really got to do all that stuff here. We can’t just import IP or knowledge from other places because no one does it quite like we do.

PW: We’re so unique, right? There’s not many people produce sheep meat or kiwifruit, for that matter at any real scale. We’re the leaders in that, or us in Australia, and it depends maybe on what product you’re talking about.

Ultimately, we do have a unique primary production system based on grass, and so we have some unique challenges we need to deal with. I think it’s great that for the most part, growers have, whether it be onions, or potatoes, or tomatoes, or dairy beef, sheep, whatever, pulled little bits of funds together to help out the collective. It’s probably builds a problem like cooperatives and other collective models that have been really effective and efficient to helping New Zealand Ag, I think.

Despite your Nuffield experience being curtailed or hit, I guess, with the pandemic, how did you find the whole thing?

The Nuffield experience.

It was a life-changing experience, Bryan. To that point, we were on Tangalooma Island, which is off the Coast of Brisbane, like a tropical paradise, doing this scholar conference for Nuffield when the world fell apart during COVID. I think the group this year are coming to New Zealand. And so what happens there is that 100 scholars from each year converge on one location and discuss global agriculture. So we got the start of that, and then things changed.

But I guess probably what Nuffield provides as perspective, I think. Perspective as to where New Zealand’s agricultural system fits. So the basic thing of it is you get to travel and then you do a report. But through the travel piece, I suppose from a perspective, you get to see a range of different agricultural systems. Our group visited North Carolina, we visited Argentina, we visited Chile, we visited a range of places.

So, we saw agriculture in the United Kingdom. We saw agriculture being done on a range of scales, from massive feed lot systems, to avocados and lemons being growing on areas where there was basically no soil left, and it was all irrigation and social licence issues to do with that.

Then right down to small scale producers, 20,000 sheep, milk, dairy sheds, 100,000 hams hanging up in Iberian ham factories. So, you got the range of scale and perspective. And so I think that made me think about what is the role for New Zealand agriculture. I think the other one that it does is it provides a significant amount of confidence. And I think that’s across all leadership programmes.

Gaining confidence through leadership development.

I did Kellogg a number of years ago, and I think it provided the same thing. Both programmes empower the individual to think that they are credible contributors, that they can have an opinion, that their ideas are important, and that they can discuss and work through those with a range of different people in the industry.

So you get to interact with the people that are running the big businesses, whether it be Fonterra or Zespri, or others, and you get to hear their perspectives. I think that confidence is something that I’ve definitely taken from it. I think, yeah, confidence and perspective are probably the two . I think the other one that’s probably also stuck with me is, I remember Julian Raine talking to us, who’s been heavily involved with rural leadership in New Zealand.

He’s saying that a lot of it’s about how spending as much time as you can to really understand a problem. I guess part of it is it’s a programme, and I think Kellogg as well, they really encourage you to critically think about an issue to go a bit past the social media grab or the particular part of spin or headline grabbing that might be going on and actually think, what is this? Whose perspective is this from? What does it mean for me? What does it mean for the people I might represent?

For me, that was a really powerful learning experience. I’m very grateful for the Nuffield and for the sponsors that sit behind it.

BG: So, you’d recommend it to those thinking about doing it?

Investing in yourself.

You often speak with people that are looking at doing it and there’s no great time to do it. But the reality is you’ll probably have young kids, you’ll probably have… You will have business commitments. And what it makes you do is drop all of that and invest time in yourself and understanding agribusiness or agriculture globally. They used to stick you on a ship and send you off for six months, but now it’s more like five or six weeks. But regardless, it is a circuit America.

The programmes when you’re abroad are so busy, you can’t be running your own business at home. You struggle to deal with the family affairs, and so it provides a real disconnect. That is one of the strengths of it. I think that the best time to do it is now. It’s not going to get any easier to do it. I feel scholarship-wide, very young kids. I have a very supportive wife. I was very lucky in that sense. But I think it’s something you just need to do. The immersive learning component of it is something that’s really unique. I really encourage people to have a crack at it.

BG: Thanks for listening to Ideas That Grow, a Rural Leaders podcast presented in association with Farmers Weekly.

You can read Phil’s Nuffield report here.

For more information on Rural Leaders, the Nuffield New Zealand Farming Scholarships, the Kellogg Rural Leadership Programme, the HortNZ Leadership Programme, the Engage Programme, or the Value Chain Innovation Programme, please visit ruralleaders.co.nz