Only One Way Forward for Farming. Together.

Dad and I had an argument recently.

We’re fencing off a stream on the farm soon and I want to include a patch of bush in the job.

We traded reasons for and against. “It’s good for biodiversity, there’s no feed in there anyway”. “The stock need the shelter, we’re already losing grazing around the stream.”

It got pretty heated. His parting shot was that “this is a beef farm, how much more production are you going to make me lose?”.

I’ve been trying to see his point-of-view. Here’s a man who religiously checks his stock every morning. Who keeps meticulous animal records and has dedicated 15 years to building a top-notch breeding program that produces some of the best animals in the district.

Here I was, a part-time farmer telling him in a roundabout way, that all that wasn’t really important anymore - protecting the bush and nurturing biodiversity are the benchmarks of good farming now.

With a cooler head, I realise that our argument wasn’t really about the bush at all. Dad loves the farm and wants to make it better in every way. It was about my inability to pitch positive change in a way that validated his hard work and identity. If our farm isn’t just about stock anymore, and he’s a stockman, where does that leave him?

This story is an analogy for the angst sweeping across rural New Zealand right now.

The farming arguments seem relentless. Methane control, freshwater proposals, vegan and plant-based customer trends, fertiliser-use, alternative proteins, the list goes on. They’ve been interpreted as everything from outright attacks on farming life to common-sense measures to move us forward.

What’s clear is that many farmers feel under siege by the changes. None of these issues even existed just five years ago. It’s too much, too fast, particularly when the average Kiwi beef farmer is 57 years old.

The industry pushback and apprehension is understandable. Even though research suggests that 4/5 Kiwis have a favourable view of farming, it doesn’t feel like it. Rather, it feels like a time of many sticks and few carrots. Lots of expensive regulations, rapidly changing customer trends and protests, but little talk of tangible support for farmers like price premiums, environmental subsidies or pathways from debt.

There is a new script being written for farming – by the industry, government and market. For decades, the mantra for high performance in agriculture was ‘get big or get out’. Now it reads ‘get green or get out’, with the implicit assumption that those who don’t buy in, aren’t good farmers.

What is this new script for farming? It’s about eco-system regeneration, ultra-low emissions food production, less reliance on animal agriculture, diversification into plant-based food & fibre and experiences like tourism, ag-tech, radical transparency and storytelling with customers.

The pain some farmers feel is the disruption of the old script – where being a good farmer rested most on genetics, stockmanship and production. ‘Good farmers’ today, need to follow both scripts. And therein lies the problem - change is hard. When we sign-up to change and try new things, we sign up to be vulnerable, to risk failure, to be a novice again. We’re asking a bunch of 57-year-old farmers to rewrite themselves in less than a decade. What did we expect?

But the reality is that the new script is the only way forward in a world of conscious consumers and environmental breakdown. The industry itself is charting the course. The Primary Sector Council recently released the #fitforabetterworld vision, grounded in the Māori concept of Taiao (connectedness to the natural world). There’s a groundswell of farmers embracing regenerative agriculture. The NZ Farm Environment Trust is making heroes of those famers leading on environmental stewardship. The industry has also recently supported Open Farms – a movement to reconnect urban Kiwis with our land and farmers through a nationwide open farm day on Sunday March 1st. It’s about supporting transparency in our food system and giving individual farmers a platform to tell their story and learn about their customers.

The simple fact is that we need our farmers. Townies talk a lot about our great Kiwi missions – going Predator Free, achieving a zero-carbon economy or planting a billion trees. But few will get in the mud to get the job done. Our farming families will.

We can both advocate for the new script for farming and genuinely appreciate the angst and apprehension of those farmers in transition. To move forward, we have to hear them, be there for them and work with them.

In the end, Dad agreed to fence the block. On the condition that I spend more time at the farm and do the weed-spraying. And because Mum said he had too.