2020

This report explores ways that well–being can be enhanced in the post–harvest kiwifruit sector. The kiwifruit industry has expanded substantially over the last few years and is expected to continue with exponential growth. It is more important than ever to focus on the wellbeing of employees to ensure that the industry can fulfil its potential.

Wellbeing is linked to many positive business aspects, including engaged staff, reduced absenteeism, and higher productivity. Employees are faced with the reality of various job and life demands daily.

Additionally, the kiwifruit harvest season from March to June each year see these demands escalated with increased workloads and longer work hours. Employees may experience compromised wellbeing, becoming burnout risks if these demands aren’t balanced out with job resources and personal resources.

The main findings include:

• Leaders of the industry interviewed believed that the seasonal demands were the biggest barrier to enhancing wellbeing, resulting in significant impacts to work– life balance.
• The conceptual framework called The Job Demands – Resources Model can be used to predict and enhance wellbeing. It considers the balance between energy in and out energy out for an employee to have optimised wellbeing. If it is unbalanced a health impairment process can be expected.
• The culture of the organisation is what drives the wellbeing of the staff.
• Using a transformational leadership style is the most conducive style for wellbeing. More training and development of leaders and managers is required amongst the industry.
• Succession planning is important for keeping job descriptions within a reasonable scope for individuals. Along with future proofing the business, it also fosters engagement and development opportunities for employees.
• Utilizing flexible work options helps to create better work–life balance and is linked to happier and healthier staff.
• Quarterly engagement surveys help to inform management about employee wellbeing. This could be of help for the kiwifruit industry where work demands vary throughout the year.
• Wellbeing programmes can be used to educate employees around wellbeing and lifestyle habits; however staff must first be engaged for this to be of use.

New Zealand’s current protein production is dominated by meat and dairy. There are ongoing and increasingly growing challenges for sustainability, environmental limits, and pressure for greater efficiencies. Emergent and developing trends in plant-based proteins are creating movements and shifts in consumer demand and food production. Health and nutrition are influencing consumer demand more than ever, therefore the value proprositions in the food market have to meet this demand. The current alternative protein industry is still in its infancy in New Zealand with some sectors such as Hemp and Quinoa rapidly growing. However, in general, New Zealand is behind the main growth countries producing plant based protein like Canada and the Netherlands. This presents an opportunity to take learnings and develop potential collaborations, to advance New Zealand’s progression.

Throughout this study, a greater understanding was sought in the global positioning of alternative proteins and within the New Zealand context. This was then used to identify the considerations required to evaluate the importance of alternative proteins to the Agri-industry in New Zealand.
Key findings and discussion points raised are:

• Food production needs to increase by 70% to feed the world population of 9.7 billion in 2050.
• New Zealand has a natural bioeconomy as there is low fossil fuel use and more energy produced by renewable sources (80%) such as wind, geothermal, hydroand biomass, but New Zealand needs to move into a new bioeconomy charactarised by biotechnology and greater cross -sector thinking and actions.
• The Fourth revolution is here and characterised by building on the Third, the digital revolution, that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. The fourth is combining human and machine where technology is embedded in our societies enabling artificial intelligence, renewable energy, 3D printing and autonomous vehicles.
• Sustainability is key in all aspects of food production. Using the fourth revolution and utilising plant-based opportunities to create products that fill market gaps or outperforms the rest of the world will enable New Zealand to be a global leader in food production.
• The steps that enable New Zelaand to be a global leader should concide with achieving goals in climate change (the Paris Agreement) and mitigating the affects of green house gases and the other pollution occurring like high nutrient loading in water bodies.
• “Farmers are motivated by a diverse range of drivers  and constrained (and enabled) by a range of social, cultural, economic, and physical factors. Farmers will therefore react in different ways to external drivers of change and will respond differently to encouragement, incentives, and legislation aimed at influencing their farming practice.”

From the above findings and conclusions , the following recommendations have been suggested:

• Keep monitoring consumer trends & food markets to increase awareness of markets and consumer change
• Maintain and grow our reputation/ story of being food producers of high value and highly nutritious ingredients or wholefoods.
• Leverage our competencies of current successful sectors especially as meat and dairy innovators
• Seek expertise where knowledge or skills are low and empower people to become experts in new alternative proteins.
• Encourage and develop coalitions with the government departments such as Ministry for Primary Industries, the Ministry for the Environment and farmers to provide incentives and/or support in areas where New Zealand can deliver the world’s best produce.
• Reward and support leaders paving the way for the nation and their peers in agricultural and especially in new products or production that adds value to the New Zealand Agricultural Industry.
• Develop a New Zealand plant-based food strategy for New Zealand agriculture
• Create and develop a greater understanding and technical expertise in plant-based opportunities to enable greater diffusion of adoption to farmers.

The New Zealand horticulture sector is currently enjoying a period of growth and prosperity. However, the future operating environment for the horticulture sector is uncertain and unlikely to be a continuation of the current track. There are multiple possible futures with different levels of warning, timeframes and impacts: for example, sudden deep impact occurrences such as the kiwifruit pathogen Psa1 or the Covid-19 pandemic compared with a slower burning issue such as the labour shortage. In order to be resilient and successful into the future, the sector needs to be ready to adapt to a changing domestic and global environment.

Development of plausible future scenarios is a tool that can be used at different scales to explore what the future may bring. Scenarios have been utilised by researchers and organisations around the globe for numerous purposes, for example for pre-policy research, to strive for commercial resilience, to influence military strategy and even to consider the future state of the planet.

The aim of this project was to explore how plausible future scenarios can be used as a tool to better prepare the New Zealand horticulture sector for what the future may bring. The project objective was to develop scenarios to help to consider what the future operating environment could look like for horticulture in New Zealand, and what challenges and opportunities different plausible futures might present for the sector.

Four divergent and plausible future scenarios were developed and analysed to identify insights, risks and opportunities. They are not predictions or advice – they simply present a (non-exhaustive) range of ways that the future could plausibly play out. The scenarios were developed using group workshopping and the underpinning process was based on the general morphological analysis methodology.

The timeframe selected for the scenarios was 2040 – 20 years from the present day. Each of the scenarios is able to be interrogated by an individual organisation or business through their own lens to determine what opportunities or risks each could present. However, at a high-level the common themes across scenarios included:

• The power of public sentiment and opinion and the resulting impact on a sector
• Consumer preference influencing not only the final product, but all aspects of production
• The culture and cohesiveness within a sector and how that can influence the perception of those outside the sector
• The importance of environmental sustainability as a foundation of a sectors prosperity
• The power of a sector that lifts performance across the board and works together to improve
• The influence that the diversity in operator scale and approach can have on the sector as a whole
• The ability of a sector to adapt is critical
• Storytelling is important

The insights identified that would be more relevant to an individual business were primarily around competition, market expectations and the different domestic and export dynamics.

The insights identified that would be more relevant to an industry body were primarily around sector cohesiveness, ability to advocate and key issues for growers that require support.

It is hoped that the scenarios and analysis will help those involved in the horticulture sector to acknowledge that the future is uncertain, and encourage them to incorporate flexibility and resilience into their planning and decision making. New Zealand needs a successful horticulture sector that is fit for the future, whatever the future.

High quality agricultural science underpins New Zealand’s primary sector, economy, rural communities, and wider society. The science capability of New Zealand’s agricultural sector is largely responsible for our competitive advantage in the global food market. The ability to produce safe, healthy food is highly dependent on robust science, technology, and innovation.

NZ agricultural scientists do an outstanding job of translating their research to farmers. This can be measured through the productivity gains we have seen over the past few decades in pastoral farming systems.

There is a disconnection of the public’s understanding of what happens to our food and fibre, through the supply chain, from pasture to plate. The objective of this research was to understand how New Zealand’s primary industry can communicate the importance of agricultural science more effectively to the New Zealand public, and who should be responsible for doing this. Understanding how the rural community views current government support for agricultural science and science funding is also important.

The aim here is to determine how best to ensure that there is a better appreciation of the value of agricultural science to New Zealand’s bioeconomy.

Fifteen semi-formal interviews were undertaken with farmers, industry personnel and scientists who work, or have worked, in the public and/or private sectors. Key themes were identified for discussion through thematic analysis. Qualitative data was labelled, collated, and reviewed to identify patterns with a shared meaning.
There were several key findings from this research. Firstly, the research suggests that our primary industry does not communicate our agricultural science effectively to the New Zealand public.

The link between the science community and the public need improving to ensure science messages are understood by the urban community. The primary sector needs to communicate simple, consistent messages, which are objective, fact based, and are packaged to resonate with the public and support strong story telling. To find some common ground with our urban counterparts, we need to outline the health, social and environmental impacts of our products, and align this to their values and beliefs. As well as providing information to help people understand the ‘why’ about our different farming practises.

Respondents’ views were divided over who is responsible for agricultural science communication. Some thought scientists, industry, and farmers should individually be responsible – but a collective co-ordinated effort is required. It was evident the primary industry would benefit from having more Honest Brokers (Pielke
Jr, 2007) to communicate our messages to society. Honest Brokers are trusted scientists who engage with the public and can provide a wide scope of information to help the receiver make a well-informed evidence-based decision.

A pattern emerged that agricultural science needs political leadership, without politicising the science content. Policy makers need better connection with farmers to understand how farm systems operate. Respondents were of the opinion that central government does not support the primary sector enough through science
investment and that the current funding model is not working. Given the importance of agricultural science and innovation to the New Zealand economy and society, this should be a central focus for our government to address.

There is an opportunity for a national conversation about targeted science communication. Several recommendations were drawn from this research. Given the link is missing for scientists to communicate agricultural science to the public, a strategy needs to be built to get agricultural science into mainstream media. This requires a collective working group with individuals from different areas of the industry supply chain, scientists, media, as well as central government. MPI and CRI’s could also develop specialist communication units to transfer science messages to the wider public, not just to farmers, academics, and stakeholders. A further proposal was that the primary industry needs more government support, through
funding for agricultural science and a revamp of the current funding system.

The recommendations could start with The Royal Society or the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science (NZIAHS), working in conjunction with selected Honest Brokers and the primary industry
to have a national conversation on effective science communication. Central government’s influence, with a top-down approach, can also have a positive flow on effect, where society sees the value of our industry and especially our agricultural science capability.