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workforce

Richie Cameron

Richard Cameron

Navigating Sheep and Beef Manager Retention

This report by Richard Cameron identifies key challenges in attracting and retaining skilled farm managers, including low wages, poor work-life balance, and limited ownership pathways. It explores equity partnership models, presents a successful case study, and offers recommendations for sustainable industry solutions.
  • 2025
  • Kellogg 53
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Chris Beatson

Process mapping within farm consultancy.

This report looks at how process mapping could be used in farm consultancy for application in a case study setting.
  • 2023
  • Kellogg 50
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Nicki Davies Kellogg 48

Nicki Davies

From knowing to implementing.

This research report attempts to answer the question “how to support and achieve environmental compliance in a world of change?
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 48
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Dustin Rothstein Kellogg 2022

Dustin Rothstein

Team Building in a Seasonal Workforce.

Seasonal horticulture work requires a group of individuals from diverse cultures, work experiences, and employment motivations to form a team in a short period of time. Often in the span of a few days, these workers are recruited, divided into teams, trained, and put to work. Their success in quickly forming a high performing team is directly linked to the success of the harvest season.
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 48
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Cameron Burton

Cameron Burton

Early Implementation and the Future of Individual Cow Monitoring Technology in the New Zealand Dairy Industry.

Recent and ongoing improvements have produced large-scale, commercially viable individual cow monitoring technologies that can significantly reduce the workload on farms as well as increase animal performance and health measures.
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 48
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Lauren Woolerton

Happy and Healthy at Work.

With the growth goals of horticulture and seasonal labour shortage, how do we build a successful and productive Recognised Seasonal Employer workforce? This report investigates what makes a successful RSE team, with a focus on the kiwifruit industry. The seasonal workforce is explored as well as the drivers of what a successful team looks like. Recommendations are made to orchardists about how to build an engaged RSE team.
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 47
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Harriet Gibson

Supporting older farmers to adapt to the rapidly changing food and fibre sector.

Older farmers enjoy the farming lifestyle and make their systems work for them at various stages of their life. But an increase of challenges, like rising costs, workforce, climate change, and the increase in new regulations are making farming harder. This report aims to better understand how the food and fibre sector can better support older farmers through these changes and challenges. Research in this report aims to better understand change adoption and mindset, reverse mentoring, learning preferences, and older farmer’s key drivers and challenges.
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 47
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Braydon Schroder

Farm System Influence on Dairy Workforce Retention.

A surveyed 49% of farm assistants on New Zealand dairy farms leave their employment in less than one year from starting. There is an abundance of recognised soft skills and human resources that can be altered to improve job satisfaction and retention in the New Zealand dairy sector. Although, there is a gap in the literature considering how physical aspects of a farm system may influence employee job satisfaction and retention, why this may be the case and how valid solutions can be implemented.
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 47
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Melissa King Kellogg 2022

Melissa King

Lead your people – they will stay.

Leadership’s impact on staff fulfilment, engagement, and retention is significant and is the fundamental driving factor that can make or break an organisation’s culture, engagement, and retention.
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 46
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Melaia Lousi Kellogg 2022

Melaia Lousi

Pasifika subsistence farming in New Zealand.

The aim of this report is to gain an understanding into the New Zealand Pasifika subsistence farming operations, identify the skills and values being developed/maintained in this setting, assess the sustainable livelihood opportunities, and understand the potential values and skills of New Zealand -based Pasifika bring to the Primary Industries.
  • 2022
  • Kellogg 46
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Munazza Saeed

Munazza Saeed

Labour shortage – The role of technology led innovation in the kiwifruit industry.

The aim of this study was to investigate the extent of the labour shortage in the kiwifruit industry especially within postharvest, and how technology led innovation can help to ease the burden of the shortage in labour.
  • 2021
  • Kellogg 44
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Maria Fathollahi

Opportunities and challenges in creating functioning horticulture ecosystem for Te Tai Tokerau.

A flourising horticulture ecosystem, not only provides diversification of economic returns, but also encourages value chain partners to establish in Northland, thus increasing the skill base and opportunity for our future workforce. This has a knock on effect for improving local small businesses.
  • 2021
  • Kellogg 44
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Jordyn Crouch

How can the NZ dairy industry design workplaces to attract the best of the next generation?

“Cows are easy, people are hard” This research project investigated what is being done in our industry and how we can learn from industry leading employers, and out of industry leaders. The question is, “Learning from global workplace trends, how can the NZ dairy industry design workplaces to attract the best of the next generation into our workforce?” Over the past 20 years the dairy industry has seen huge expansion, with the herd size doubling in a twenty year period. As of 2018, the NZ dairy industry workforce was made up of roughly 40,000 people with 22,500 of these being employees.
  • 2021
  • Kellogg 43
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Sam Shergold

New Zealand labour force in the food and fibre sector: Resilience in times of crisis

The impact of a global pandemic crisis has highlighted that the development of strategic labour force plans like the food and fibre skills action plan and the primary three year plan was all too late to assist with the biggest challenge the industry would face in over 20 years. COVID19 forced the New Zealand border into lockdown and restricted travel into New Zealand. With upcoming seasonal work starting, how was the primary industry get its capable workforce to achieve the level of productivity it was used to.
  • 2020
  • Kellogg 41
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Lucy Moss

Employee Engagement: The key to retaining talent and passion on New Zealand’s Dairy Farms.

Historically Dairy farming was seen as an attractive career path where hard work and dedication was rewarded with the trophy of farm ownership, but that reward is all but out of the grasp of most; this amongst a plethora of other reasons has led to an ever increasing struggle to attract and retain talented individuals on farm. With 60% of new entrants to the dairy industry leaving within the first twelve months, retention is a very real issue on our dairy farms. Research has shown engaged employees are not only less likely to leave the farm or organisation, but when employees are engaged, the organisation will be both more productive and profitable.
  • 2020
  • Kellogg 41
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Isabelle Crawshaw

Using ‘Meat for Kids’ as a vehicle to enhancing children’s knowledge about agriculture.

Currently one fifth of New Zealand households don’t have enough food for active and growing children to support physical and mental development. Disadvantages such as these aren’t isolated to other parts of the world, this is happening on our door step. It’s common knowledge that children need to have their nutritional needs met to have … Read more

  • 2019
  • Kellogg 40
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Hamish Murray, 2019 Nuffield Scholar

Hamish Murray

Future Farm Workplaces

Hamish Murray – Scholar presentation (May 2020) Agriculture is awakening to the challenges of an ageing population and those entering the workforce with a new or differing attitude to work and life. That automation and technology is removing much of the mundane and labour-intensive work, outdated work structures and traditional ways of doing things are … Read more

  • March 2020
  • Nuffield 2019
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Becs Lough

A Classroom View of New Zealand’s Primary Industry

We certainly can’t argue with the fact that New Zealand has recognised the issues around the future of the Primary Industries workforce. We read about it every day, we have data to prove it and a sector constantly talking about it. Initiatives throughout the country have been set up to try and combat the issue … Read more

  • 2019
  • Kellogg 39
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John Fitzgerald

Opening gates: Staff attraction and retention on New Zealand’s meat and fibre farms

This is a research paper into how future employees, current employees and the employers of both, feel about their current situations in their in today’s tight labour market. It is concentrated on the meat and fibre production sector. The process used for the research below initially involves a literature review from previous Kellogg papers investigating … Read more

  • 2019
  • Kellogg 39
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Glenda Hutchison

Seasonal labour shortage in the kiwifruit sector.

The kiwifruit sector has a serious labour shortage.  What is the extent of the shortages, why has the industry got to this problem and how can we address the shortages? The aims for me in doing this project was to get an understanding of the labour problems facing the kiwifruit industry.  I wanted to see … Read more

  • 2018
  • Kellogg 38
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Mike Baker

Mechanised silviculture: Opportunities and challenges for the NZ forest industry.

The New Zealand plantation forest industry currently relies on manual labour to carry out silviculture operations, particularly planting, waste thinning and pruning. However, the industry is currently experiencing significant labour shortages. This is likely to be exacerbated for silviculture operations, particularly for planting in the short-term, with the commencement of the New Zealand Government’s ‘1 … Read more

  • 2018
  • Kellogg 38
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Hayden Dunne

Leadership: What are the key attributes for success.

Leadership is one of the many fundamental components of a successful business. Understanding and appreciating what makes up leadership can ultimately drive success. No matter what the business size, sector or turnover, a successful business requires great leadership. To be a great leader requires a particular skill set; not everyone is naturally a leader. However, … Read more

  • 2018
  • Kellogg 37
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Michael Skudder

How has New Zealand dairy employment trends changed in New Zealand since 2000.

For the last 15 years I have been involved with the dairy industry in the capacity of a rural bank manager . Prior to this I worked as an accountant, property valuer and seasonal farm worker. Ironically I started with another topic in mind “key factors to staff retention in Northland dairy farms”, however after … Read more

  • 2016
  • Kellogg 32
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Harden Brad

Do employees feel valued in the workplace

This report looks into how employees feel in their current workplace, how they view their efforts, their ethics, how they view their employer and career. Harden Brad

  • 2012
  • Kellogg 28
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