In this series, the team each offer a big-picture strategy for food & fibre. 

Two very different people asked me the same question recently: What should I do with my life now? 

One was nearing retirement after a successful career. The other a mum considering her newfound freedom after the toddler years. 

Both conversations bogged down quickly. This was complex stuff, after all – a matter of trawling through life experiences to weigh up the countless options open to them. So we tried another approach. 

Forget about “what” the right choice is. Let’s consider “how” you’ll choose instead.   

That reframe was electric. In minutes they had the outline of a plan. For the retiree, that included professional coaching, a national road-trip to reconnect with admired friends and a deliberate step out of the comfort-zone – in this case immersion in Te Ao Māori. 

When Einstein said “we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them”, I’m pretty sure this was what he was talking about. Stepping back to come at the problem differently. To consider how, not what. 

Maybe I’m just on the lookout for examples of  how, not what – but I keep seeing them everywhere. 

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear offers some confronting advice. Ignore goal-setting and focus on building better everyday habits and systems. Having had SMART goals drilled into me since childhood, I nearly choked on my Weetbix when I read that. But on reflection, the argument holds up. 

Daily systems – like going to the gym, eating right, reading more etcetera – are what actually move us forward, not the New Year’s resolution. Any farmer will tell you the same – get the inputs right and the outputs will fix themselves. Save your pennies, and the pounds will save themselves. Work on the business, not in it. 

I saw”how, not what” in the Sinai desert on my Nuffield global experience. Living in some of the toughest conditions on earth, the people of the Neot Samadar rural community were running a thriving business stretching across hospitality, tourism, renewable energy, horticulture, education and branded health products. 

When I asked to see their business plan, they said they didn’t have one. Their culture – the “how” – is the engine of their business success. 

Individuals are encouraged to explore new diversifications, with their ideas reviewed through a long consensus decision-making process with the whole 400-plus person community. Leadership roles change regularly to give emerging members opportunities to grow. Time together as a group is prioritised above anything that happens on farm. In this system, their business success happened almost by accident. 

Back here in the New Zealand food and fibre sector, we have a new goal. It’s a good one too. To double the value of our exports in the next 10 years.  

The leadership system tasked with achieving that goal is now 34 years old. The dust had barely settled on the rubble of the Berlin Wall when the Commodity Levies Act was signed.

Back in 1990, we went through a system-change – part of a series of deeply painful reforms, but in this case, worth it. That change set up the sector bodies that enabled three decades of production gains and growth. The success we enjoy today is a direct result of that decision to change the system.  

But more production won’t get us to a doubling of export value. No chance. Instead, we’ll need to do new things. Like building a shared data exchange so producers only have to input data once. Or a verifiable national food story that makes NZ food and fibre products genuinely stand out to global consumers. Or a workforce system that improves the retention rate of new staff – at least up to the national average. Or a sector-wide pathway to find and invest in great talent and future leaders. Or a land-use change pathway to help producers diversify and stay viable as markets and our climate changes. 

I’m not convinced that our current leadership structure, despite being staffed by some phenomenal Kiwis, can overcome its inbuilt silos and develop these kinds of sector-wide future systems. 

So I’m in support of KPMG and AGMARDT’s proposal for The Common Ground, a collaboration platform where our 150-plus industry-good organisations can pool resources and people around our mega challenges and opportunities. 

A disclaimer here: I’m deeply biased. I provided comms support on this project. But I took the job because I believe this kind of work – to build better systems – is what will ultimately enable a doubling of export value in the constrained, complicated world we find ourselves in.

To quote Clear, “We don’t rise to our goals. We fall to our systems.” If we’re not prepared to have a serious conversation about system-change in this sector, then our grand goal is meaningless. 

In this series, the team reflect on what the Olympics mean for NZ ag.

Every four years, our family dinner table morphs into the International Olympic Committee boardroom. The topic up for debate: which sports “feel Olympicy” enough to step into the global spotlight, and which don’t. 

It’s always a chaotic discussion. Full of flip-flops, inconsistencies and flagrant exceptions for our favourite sports. It’s messy and I love it. 

To bring a little order to the verbal judo, we quickly turned to Uncle Google for some ground rules. How do the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and host cities actually determine which codes make the cut? 

In short, there are three broad requirements a sport has to meet. There’s the functional, straightforward stuff like logistical feasibility, rules to judge by and the chance for all nations and people to legitimately have a go.

Then the powers that be consider popularity, global reach, heritage and the sport’s long-term trajectory as an Olympic code. Also relatively straightforward. 

It’s the last requirement that got tongues wagging. New Olympic sports need to “uphold the integrity and enhance the image of the Olympics” and “adhere to the Olympic values”. Open another bottle. We’ll be here a while.

So the duel begins, each of us taking aim at the many inconsistencies that make up the modern Games. 

Like, how is basketball an Olympic sport? It has its own World Cup (which itself lives in the shadow of the NBA), so doesn’t need the Olympics to serve as the pinnacle of the sport. That said, it’s pretty hard to look past the 20-million Americans who watched this year’s final – more than double United States viewership for the men’s 100m final. Or the game’s massive and growing popularity around the world. The Olympics is big bucks – not just for the IOC, sponsors and host cities, but the media and hospitality spots who depend on it.

Or sport climbing. Although only started in the 1980s and has a small following even today, it was a surprise fan favourite, beating out long-time stars like athletics and sailing in Google search traffic. So much for heritage and popularity, but in this case a risk worth taking. 

Or pistol shooting or archery. Can you have athletic integrity without raising your heart rate? Does that matter when both codes generated two of the most meme-worthy stars of the 2024 games – making the competition more relevant for the TikTok generation? 

Cricket is set to return in 2028 in the T20 format. I’m not sure how the KFC Big Bash fits with Olympic integrity, but we’ll see. 

Heard of flag football? I hadn’t until now. Set to debut in 2028, this non-contact version of American gridiron has only US and Canadian professional leagues, but is growing rapidly in other Western countries. It actually looks like a lot of fun, but is soured by whispers that NFL lobbying efforts have put it in play for 2028. Not great for “enhancing the image” of the hallowed Games. 

As we parried arguments, and attempted to draw longer and longer bows, the family finally synchronised. No one wants the extremes. The Games shouldn’t stay tethered wholly to the ancient traditions – frankly, that would be boring and devalue the human achievement in new sports. But there must be limits too – no one wants a repeat of the 1912-1948 years when painting, sculpture, and architecture were medal-worthy pursuits. That’s just weird. 

It was decided that the IOC’s approach to new sports is probably about right. Accept that the process is going to be messy but keep trying bold new stuff with the original values firmly in view. Retaining the right to U-turn helps in a pinch too. If there is a lesson for NZ ag in Olympic sport selection, it’s probably that. 

So what about e-sports (competitive video gaming)? Our parting shot of the evening was to evaluate this strange new contender for the Olympic spotlight. Surprisingly, e-sports ticks a lot of Olympic boxes. It’s massively popular and globally accessible – promising to expand the Olympic pull to younger generations. It has a qualification and rules structure that could fit the Games, but lacks a pinnacle event that the Olympics could well provide. 

It feels counter-intuitive, but the code has plenty of traditional athletic achievement elements – player’s heart-rates hit 180+ beats per minute (on par with motor-racing drivers and necessitating plenty of gym time) – and teamwork, training and hand-eye reflexes are paramount. While it lacks a long-standing heritage, it’s not much younger than sport climbing, BMXing or skateboarding. 

On paper, it’s hard to argue that e-sports doesn’t deserve a spot. But it doesn’t quite feel “Olympicy”, does it? Maybe the next generation will argue differently.

In this series, the team find a lesson in history for NZ ag.

First up, some Eating the Elephant housekeeping. After a year of articles, you’ll start to notice a few changes around here. We say farewell to Ben Anderson as a regular writer –  although he’ll drop in again whenever an issue gets his back enough to pull him away from his new farm and other misadventures. Thanks for your contribution, mate. Replacing Ben will be a crew of guest writers, each writing to a particular monthly topic with supporting prattle from Phil Weir, David Eade and myself. We have some interesting topics and NZ ag folks lined up. As we go through the change, any and all feedback to eating.the.elephant.nz@gmail.com is always valued. Thanks again for reading.

Now onto this month’s theme – a lesson from history for NZ ag. I’ve chosen a light-hearted and straightforward historical period: the lead-up to the First World War. 

The pre-war era was a fast-moving tangle of old and new technology, political movements, ideologies and rapidly shifting social norms. It was a time of tension, friction and a pervasive sense that the order of things was changing fast.   

I think that makes it a good place to find lessons for today’s challenges. Lessons like how the momentum of big systems makes it difficult for individual nations or organisations to do things differently. Or knowing how to spot the few occasions when the general rule that “past performance predicts future performance” doesn’t work so well. But in choosing one lesson from the era for NZ ag, I think the best is a cautionary tale about how rigid decision-making structures fare in a time of rapid upheaval. 

While alliances and arms races were key drivers of the war, it was a collective mindset and the rejection of contrarian opinions that ultimately drove the world over the threshold. It was accepted wisdom in the halls of power that war was inevitable, that war would be short and decisive (like previous wars), that war was a good thing or that the things that won previous wars (like morale and aggressive spirit) would win this war too.  

Combined with outdated policy-making structures that limited dissenting views – like monarchs who overrode their foreign diplomatic efforts – these mindsets tethered nations to the warpath and powered the alliances and arms races. Social scientists would call this path dependency. 

It’s telling that the unsung hero of the war who pioneered combined arms warfare (using troops, artillery, tanks & air-power simultaneously) to break the deadlock of the trenches, didn’t come from the European military or political elite at all. Sir John Monash – “the only creative general produced by the First World War” – was an engineer from a state school in Melbourne with zero interest in organised sport. 

We’ve come a long way and the dedication of food & fibre boards to carve out and protect space for diverse perspectives across gender, age, ethnicity and background is commendable. I anticipate it will go further, with future board seats held specifically for environmental or even AI perspectives. 

Out of the boardroom, the rise of practices like reverse mentoring (where older leaders enlist the support of younger entrants to keep up with trends, technology and other changes) and the breadth of alternative views across rural media, shows the progress we’ve made on valuing the contrary. 

But that said, we need to continue to ask hard, sometimes uncomfortable questions about how our sector makes decisions as conditions change. The Commodity Levies Act is now 34 years old – enacted two years before the first SMS text message was sent, a dairy boom or much mention of climate change. It set up the sector bodies that navigated the turbulence of subsidy-removal and enabled New Zealand farmers to become among the best in the world. 

But nothing lasts forever. Looking back, many of the leadership structures that went into the war didn’t come out. Be they monarchies, civil government or social movements, the sweeping changes around them in liberty, equality, industry, media, national identity and more, were often beyond their abilities to adapt to. 

Today, we face new challenges on a similar, if not greater scale: geopolitical and trade insecurity, climate change, shifting consumption patterns, rampant technological change to name a few. We are fast approaching a historical turning point, where stability is far from guaranteed. At times like these, it is fair and right to explore how our decision-making structures might adapt through change. Nothing should be left off the table. 

AGMARDT’s soon-to-be-released report on recommendations for industry structure will make for interesting reading indeed. 

In this series, the lads reflect on a year of Eating the Elephant.
eating.the.elephant@gmail.com

For four weeks in May-June 2023, my Nuffield farming scholarship sling-shotted me and 11 other scholars across Singapore, Japan, Israel, the Netherlands and the United States. In a jet-lagged blur of skyscraper gardens, rice paddies, desert kibbutzes, hi-tech greenhouses, family farms, government boardrooms and endless almond trees, we saw, touched and tasted our way through an incredible menu of food and farming systems. 

On reflection, it probably wasn’t the best time to start a Farmers Weekly column. But, like most things, this one also righted from a wobbly start and a year later, here we are. Thanks for sticking with us. 

For me, that Nuffield global experience and Eating the Elephant are inextricably linked. Much of the fodder for this column started life as scribbles in page margins and “aha” moments in some farm, factory or hotel lobby abroad. In looking back on a year of Eating the Elephant, I thought I would share my two big takeouts from that once-in-a-lifetime food and farming experience. 

The first take-out struck as we ambled the 50 metres between a 16 hectare greenhouse capsicum operation and a small artisan goat cheese farm and café. Thank you Holland. Both of these places are farms and both farms are profitable. But their core features, strengths and challenges couldn’t be more different. I started using the terms “calorie farms” and “connection farms” as a rough mental model to investigate these side by side, but worlds apart operations. 

“Calorie farms” generally innovate through hard skills (for example, technology), can be reliant on immigrant labour, thrived through covid, run high capital, high energy, high return business models and sell into long supply chains. 

“Connection farms” generally innovate through soft skills (community collaboration,, for example), can attract volunteers, were very exposed to covid and seasonal downturns, operate low capital, low energy, low returns models and capture value with direct to customer sales. 

Coming from a young country geared toward Calorie models, it was interesting to see how older societies value these smaller, citizen-orientated Connection farms.  These nations had generally developed policy frameworks (some better than others and never without pushback) that tried to strike a balance between the two.   

We’ll need both types of farms as we hit the environmental, social and economic challenges ahead. Calorie farms keep food affordable, can resist shocks and support global food security needs. Connection farms serve as places for citizens to learn, recreate and engage with nature – driving the cultural transformations we desperately need like redesigning waste, deriving wellbeing through community and nature and seasonal eating.

In New Zealand, our leadership structures, support systems, policy frameworks and infrastructure are all set up for the export-oriented Calorie systems. We are pretty unbalanced here. 

My second big take-out came under the beating sun of the Sinai desert. At Neot Samadar, hundreds of people have farmed together for 50 years in some of the toughest conditions on earth. Like other kibbutzes across Israel, this community collectively manage their land. Their greatest challenge isn’t water, heat, markets or disease. It’s each other. They understand that their business and way of life run on soft skills.

Members are hyper aware for signs of conflict, faction building, loneliness or other signs of tension. When these do arise, members intervene softly – only progressing to formal interventions like meetings as a last resort. Leadership roles change regularly to give emerging members opportunities to grow. Time together as a group is prioritised above anything that happens on farm. Big decisions are made only with full consensus, necessitating long periods of discussion and perspective sharing. 

Their culture is the engine of their business success. They talk little of corporate strategy. Instead, individuals are encouraged to explore new diversifications, with their business case reviewed from every perspective through the long consensus decision making. When they move, they move with the full weight of the community. Today the kibbutz’s business stretches across hospitality, tourism, renewable energy, horticulture, art & design education and a thriving consumer health drink brand. All done in the heat of the desert, two hours away from nearest major town. 

We love a strategy in food and fibre in New Zealand. We tend to focus our time trying to understand our markets, design products or refine our systems – and we’re pretty good at it. 

We’re less adept at reflecting on our teams or sector culture and dedicating resources specifically to nurturing it. Indeed the places where culture forms – field days, one-to-one time, team and community forums, catchment meetings, open days, days off – can be some of the first things to slip in favour of more “productive” work. 

With its relentless, unapologetic, structured prioritisation of relationships and people, Kibbutz Neot Samadar demonstrates what relentlessly focusing on culture looks like, and what it can achieve.

A huge thank you to Nuffield New Zealand for this incredible opportunity. I highly encourage anyone considering it to have a go. The 2025 deadline for registrations closes August 18. Get among it. 

When I was born, in 1987, global GDP was US$17 billion. This year, we’ll likely top US$104 trillion ($172 trillion). Like the majority of people reading this article, I’ve lived my whole life under this umbrella of steady economic growth. 

What’s caused it? Depending on who you talk to, this boundless economic growth is a thanks to great leaps forward in technology (like the container ship and internet), exploitation of the Global South, globalisation and free trade, dodgy accounting, mass education, cheap money, nitrogen fertiliser, untethering currency from the gold reserve, contraception or the presence of the United States Navy in the world’s shipping lanes. 

Let me throw one more into the mix – a mindset that lurks behind each of those factors: the drive for efficiency.

“Doing more from less” is pretty much a religion these days. It’s taken as given that the best strategy is the one that uses the least amount of resources (usually money) to achieve the goal. Generally, we like things cheap and fast and clearly it’s worked. 

It’s only now, still reeling from covid supply chain issues, climate-charged cyclones and destabilising wars abroad, that our confidence in the efficiency mantra is starting to falter. 

Instead, we hear a lot more talk about designing for the flipside of efficiency – resilience. On the tin, it says that resilience is about building adaptability into a system. Ensuring that when the conditions change, the farm, business or family can make it through by drawing on saved resources, pivoting to new ways of doing things and banding together with people they trust. 

The problem with resilient systems is that they appear extravagant in the good times. Piles of spare parts, unprofitable side hustles and neighbourhood meetings look like waste. And efficiency hates waste. 

Once you start looking for it, this choice between efficiency and resilience is everywhere – with resilience usually losing. It’s playing out across our screens and papers right now via the government’s redesign of the Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunch programme. 

In finding $107 million in savings and expanding to another 10,000 kids, the redevelopment is classic “do more with less”. The savings will be found by bulk procuring basic food through corporate caterers for intermediate and secondary schools, rather than having more diverse food prepared on site, often by locals. 

What sparks of resilience are we losing for that $107m? Heaps. Like opportunities to connect local farms, food and farmers directly to the school cafeteria. Or thriving on-site kitchens where kids can learn about nutrition and different food cultures, and practise community service. Reduced waste from less plastic and transport needs. The ability for schools to transform into centres for wider community care in the wake of disasters. And don’t forget the upfront nutritional gains for kids from eating diverse, fresh and unprocessed food. 

In choosing to chase a paltry 0.06% of efficiency savings in government expenses, we’ve lost sight of the uncosted benefits that designing for resilience in a place as foundational as the classroom can deliver. We’ve chosen a simple, brittle system, for peanuts. 

The efficiency vs resiliency battle isn’t confined to the classroom. It’s in a government’s reluctance to fund New Zealand’s coastal shipping network because it can’t compete with the bulk liners – until a cyclone washes away our highways and it’s all we’ve got to keep communities supplied. 

Or how a decision by the Chinese to accept only dried velvet now threatens an industry that ended domestic drying decades ago. 

Or hospitals that outsourced catering to a dodgy multinational, only to reintegrate the service years later following patient complaints about food quality, allegations of workplace misconduct and a rethinking of the role of good food in healing. 

The efficiency vs resiliency battle also underpins the debate about regenerative agriculture, which flared up again in last week’s Farmers Weekly story “Gas and dollars at odds in regen ag’. 

The report rightly raises some tough questions about how farmers struggle to stay profitable while implementing landscape resilience practices. Considering these tight economic times, that’s a hard ask. I would have preferred the report to take a more holistic view of the competing needs of efficiency and resilience in farming systems – also evaluating the unseen, uncosted factors that really matter in a crisis, like farmer health and wellbeing, soil moisture retention, animal health and energy use. 

Thankfully, though, there is sometimes a no-man’s land where efficiency and resilience do meet on the farm. Like the Beef + Lamb NZ and Quorum Sense Catching the Rain soil moisture retention programme, for example.

 On our farm, we have “insurance blocks” – niggly bits or steep slopes that will be taken out of production and planted in forage trees like tagasaste and poplars. 

One hot day in a hot March, we’ll drop the fence on these blocks, give the stock a much-needed feed and buy ourselves a few more days through the dry. 

eating.the.elephant@gmail.com

For a brief spell in my twenties, I hiked parts of the Appalachian Trail, stretching 3500km along the United States’s east coast mountain spine. I was fortunate to spend a few months dawdling through the woods from Georgia to Virginia, and again from Vermont to Maine. A good adventure. 

Throughout that first leg, I stood out from my fellow hikers: I visibly lacked a key bit of distance-hiking kit – walking poles. 

Up and down mountains and over ridges, I passed bemused looks and probing questions almost daily. “Why not?” 

Folks fired the stats and anecdotes at me, but I didn’t care. “Walking poles reduce the load on your knees by 25%” they said. “It’s a lot safer, faster and more fun on steep descents,” they told me. 

Being the fit, strong 25-year-old who was always right about everything, I told them gently but firmly that I simply didn’t need them. I had some well-rehearsed lines to help laugh off the looks. Like that “(famed US explorers) Lewis and Clark didn’t have walking poles” and “if the good Lord wanted me to have long arms, I would have been made a spider”. Hilarious I know. 

After 1000km, three states and countless soaring peaks, a friend made me take her poles for a short evening leg into town – just for a try. I relented. 

I sailed that walk. Gliding all the way to town, into a cab and through the doors of the local sports store to buy a pair. My trademark trudge saw its last metre there and then.  

What an ignorant buffoon I had been. I had missed out on something great, and done wholly unnecessary damage to myself, by doggedly holding on to some delusion about my own toughness. 

I had outright refused to hear the facts and stories so many people had told me about the other, better way. And for what?

A decade, a wedding and a child later I had another opportunity to learn the lesson of the hiking poles. This one was much harder. 

A few years ago, cancer found my young family. In the shock of diagnosis and whirlwind of my wife’s surgery, chemo and radiation I was generally okay.

Then the problems started. I’ve never been a particularly angry person, so I noticed when I started becoming the kind of husband and dad I didn’t want to be – an angry one. I got frustrated too fast. Was too slow to calm down. I started to shout. 

I’m someone who needs to feel in control. So I went about doggedly trying to get things back under control. I would try harder to breathe through the anger, exercise harder to moderate my mood and work harder to get my lost focus back at work. After all, I was tough. 

I defaulted to the ignorant buffoon again. But with the lesson of the hiking poles replaying in my mind, I relented and acknowledged the problems. I listened to the experts and the advice of loved ones. I decided to put my wellbeing and the needs of my family above my egotistical ideas of toughness. I went to therapy. 

The results were as predictably positive as the walking poles. In my case, I was helped to recognise that my anger was the result of trying to control-away the fear and sadness of our health battle. 

I did several sessions with homework – a little daily emotional check-in journal. It helped me realise that all emotions pass. That in general I was pretty happy. That the toughness my family actually needed was for me to be a dad and husband mature enough to cry in front of them when the moment called for it.  

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have waited for some acute crisis to go. Like recalling the mountains and ridges I trudged over, I look back with embarrassment on the relationships that suffered and people I unnecessarily hurt with my toughness-control reflex. 

I write this article now, because I feel like we’re close to the next step on our collective mental wellbeing journey. Most people are now aware that this stuff matters. But at some point, awareness must turn into action. Having been so helped by therapy, I feel duty bound to publicly call out the main excuse – the well-rehearsed line I hid behind and hear regularly from others. 

It’s this idea that some people need therapy and some don’t. Frankly, that’s bullshit. It’s like saying some cars need servicing and others don’t. Often that’s tied up with something like “I’ve got mates I can talk to” – as if Friday night beers can stand in for the technical expertise, experience and patience of a professional. 

I’m proud that I dropped the excuses and made the decision to go to therapy. I was brave when my family needed me to be. 

In this series, the lads go woke.
eating.the.elephant@gmail.com

Mum often tells the story of how she used to argue politics with her dad. It’s one of my favourites – because I also like to argue politics. 

The story starts with Mum at Uni, coming home to family dinner and enlightening a fervently capitalist Grandad about the finer points of class warfare and the role of the petite bourgeoisie. The story ends with broken plates and a midnight drive back to uni. 

Amid all the talk of woke agendas and identity politics today, I find the story comforting. This is normal. 

So normal, in fact, you could argue that history is even built on it. At its core, the human story is one of revolution and reaction. The spectrum of this endless yin and yang struggle is vast – from bloody political revolutions that sow continent-wide chaos, to social revolutions where the battlefield is a gender-neutral bathroom.

Through the big picture lens of history, woke isn’t new. It’s just a new name for the same old struggle. Twenty years ago we called it the nanny state and political correctness – with its talk of workplace safety, anti-smacking legislation and a vision for a smoke-free generation. 

If the forces of reaction had the term “woke” at the time, I imagine it would have been applied to everything from the gay marriage debate to the anti-apartheid protests, the Māori renaissance and resurgence movement of the 1970s-’90s, self-expression and counter-culture in the 1960s, the Suffragette movement and even the old-school social troublemakers who had the gall to disparage the king and suggest the people rule themselves. 

While each of these chapters of history is different, the same underlying clash runs through them. The surging force of social change meeting the stationary force of the way things are. 

This is normal. This is how societies feel change – one loud, angry clash between revolution and reaction at a time.

These days, this age-old clash is supercharged through the darker sides of the digital era – social media algorithms upweighting outrage, digital echo chambers and soundbite media being the main culprits. 

This amplifies the extreme voices in each clash, lifting minor episodes from irrelevance into the cultural battlespace. 

Case in point – 20 years ago, my single sex school switched to co-ed with zero controversy. A boy’s school in Sydney recently did the same and landed on the frontlines of the culture war with accusations of woke agendas and out-of-touch mindsets flying across no-person’s land. 

Other mundane episodes elevated to “woke” clashes include outrage at a United States military recruitment ad targeting young women with a message about social justice, Blackrock CEO and god of corporate capitalism Larry Fink giving the nod to environmental-social-governance investing, the Wiggles adding more racially diverse troupe members and the removal of the term “fieldwork” from some universities for its association with slavery. 

When you’re only dealing in the extremes, it can all get ridiculous pretty quickly – and is best left ignored. 

It seems that the two big woke issues are race and gender. These clashes can be harder to laugh off. The names we give our ministries (Māori or not), what age and how we teach kids about sex, how our museums integrate (or don’t) te ao Māori principles into their work and what kind of support we offer for gender-affirming care are controversial because they matter. 

I don’t have the word count to debate each of these in turn – so instead I offer a rule of thumb: demographics. 

Generation Z (those born between the 1990s and 2010s) are now the largest generation in the history of our species. Generally, they’re okay with multiculturalism and gender diversity. 

Just like the Boomers – who bent history’s long arc of justice towards female empowerment, racial tolerance and counter-culture – numbers and time will turn today’s woke clashes into tomorrow’s so-whats.

No doubt new issues will rise to take their place. Maybe technological body implants, AI spouses or second lives lived virtually. If those turn into the social revolutions of tomorrow, sign me up for Team Reaction!   

In short, it’s good that some of us feel uncomfortable about change. It means things are normal – that we are on standard operating procedure. Franky I would be more worried if we weren’t lurching from one woke clash to another – that would signal that we’re not changing as a society. Because things that don’t change, generally don’t last. 

In this series, the lads discuss levers.  
eating.the.elephant@gmail.com

This month, for the first time in half a decade, I took a regular job. 

Up until now, I’ve been fortunate enough to run my own little agri-comms business. Like most owner-operator outfits, it runs lean. Clients sign on with a two-page contract and a handshake – knowing full well that if I don’t deliver, they can (and should) drop me. It’s not for everyone, but this lack of administrative oversight suits me down to the ground. I like being able to just focus on the work.

Landing on a payroll recently was a bit of a shock. I chafed under the first few days of induction manuals, HR systems and health and safety briefings. I was hired do the work, and all this extra stuff felt like it was just getting in the way. I found myself empathising with a lot of farmers out there who look at the mounting pile of regulations the same way. It’s slowing down the real work. 

In the same way that a tennis player or golfer might struggle to take up a team sport, it’s been harder than I thought to give up some of that autonomy and self-direction. Like most things done day after day after day, that way of working has become part of my identity. 

Having to abruptly start following someone else’s rules – however commonsense and well intentioned they are – just hasn’t felt right. 

But something has balanced out the paperwork chafing. Something that I can already tell is worth it:  joining a team. Dropping into the weekly scrum with half a dozen people who are equally obsessed with transforming food systems for human and environmental resilience has been a welcome change.

The opportunity to learn from people who have been doing the hard yards of system change in food and farming for decades, is worth the price in admin hours. Being able to build off their reputation and hard lessons learnt will be worth giving up a little autonomy. 

With all the talk of “Team Ag” recently, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on what collective work can achieve – even if it costs the individual time, money and effort. The food New Zealand farmers produce is rated as the world’s safest because of the assurance and monitoring schemes that run on boring paperwork. 

New Zealanders overwhelming trust farmers to properly care for their livestock because the rules generally keep pace with social expectations, the vast majority of farmers comply and breaches are enforced. We are slowly (probably a bit too slowly) building a firewall against a future biosecurity threat through increasing NAIT compliance. 

No individual farmer, however talented, can achieve these things. Instead, everyone pays the price in paperwork.

This isn’t full-throated support for all regulations. Many of the recent batch lacked farmer input and quickly evolved into political footballs. They relied far too much on the stick (for example, tax) instead of the carrot (new market development – like biodiversity or robust carbon sequestration credits). 

Worse, they put the stick and the carrot at the wrong end – leading with threats of punishment, instead of splashing some cash to incentivise farmers to experiment with the new markets first, before showing the stick. 

Data duplication remains an unnecessary time-waster and policymakers failed to account for the weight of so many regulations being imposed so quickly – particularly at a time when weather and economic shocks were straining farm balance sheets and the wellbeing of those on the land. 

Those intending to add to the paperwork load have a responsibility to design it well. 

But the high-value future of the food and fibre sector will inevitably come at a paperwork price that is greater than today’s. Our ability to sell into high-standard markets like the European Union, or prove the environmental claims that the world’s most discerning customers are looking for, will be built on endless farm environment plan updates, GHG number calculations, online catchment meetings, new supply chain assurance reports and real-time water, animal health or other sensor monitoring. 

Even when designed perfectly, it will mean chafing under paperwork at 10pm in the farm office or at the kitchen table. 

But that’s why we have red wine. 

There are countries that punch above their weight. They stand out because they either grow fast, do things differently or earn respect and admiration.  

Despite many examples across history, there is no “how to” book on punching up. You would think that there were some prerequisites – like valuable natural resources, defensible borders or comfortable climates. But it seems that small countries really only need one thing to achieve greatness: political courage.  

Take, for instance, those countries that hit rock-bottom and rise. By 1953, South Korea had suffered almost a million civilian casualties and had an economy on par with sub-Saharan Africa. The Forgotten War was brutal. Lacking natural resources, the nation relied on a frankly schizophrenic mix of economic policies to recover. These were often at odds with the doctrines of the day and even each other. 

World-leading R&D investment (at around 4% of GDP) was dished out by a government that also blatantly picked winners – giving preferential treatment to the often-inefficient mega national businesses called Chaebols (Samsung being the most recognisable of these). 

There was a massive education drive, but few provisions for worker rights or social safety nets. A focus on exports alongside deep protectionism for the Chaebols. Post-war South Korea didn’t have the luxury of ideological consistency. Free-market capitalism, centrally-planned socialism, dictatorial powers – it didn’t matter. They just needed stuff to work. And work it did. Their transformation from utter destruction to regional powerhouse in just a few decades is nothing short of a miracle.

Existential crisis is an incredible national motivator, but it isn’t a prerequisite for punching-up. Bold strategy works too. Estonia is now the third-fastest growing tech centre in the world. This is by design – the result of a 30-year digitisation strategy to build e-Estonia. Think of it as an online society. Through the digital platform, citizens can vote, learn, pay tax or start businesses. A paramedic can access your medical records instantly. Birth and child benefits are registered automatically. Parliament runs an e-cabinet meeting system to cut out bureaucracy. Anyone, anywhere in the world can become an e-resident of Estonia – thus the influx of tech entrepreneurs. This is what punching above your weight through digital transformation looks like. 

A country can even punch above its weight by just being the first to do the right thing. Costa Rica is considered a world leader in the green transition. By pioneering an ecosystem services scheme that pays farmers to protect watersheds, conserve biodiversity or capture carbon, it became the first tropical country to reverse deforestation. Today, more than a third of its land is permanent, regenerating forest – protected by the 18,000 farming families who participate in the scheme. 

Costa Rica’s commitment to its natural world has opened up new opportunities in eco-tourism (now 8% of GDP) and emerging carbon and ecosystem services global capital markets. It even developed a debt-for-nature swap – agreeing with intentional lenders to re-direct their debts to nature conservation with third-party oversight. It pays to be the first mover. 

Does New Zealand punch above its weight? There are many things we do well and should be proud of – kicking a rugby ball and stunning landscapes notwithstanding. The world saw leadership in our health- and people-first covid response. It sees inspiration in our race relations. It admired our commitment to justice in the nuclear-free and anti-apartheid eras. It learns from Te ao Māori’s relationship with nature and our mission to be predator free by 20250. It likes the low key form of soft power that is uniquely us – that mix of John Key self-deprecating confidence, Jacinda Ardern assertive kindness, Sir Ed humble courage, Lorde creativity and Taiki Waititi offbeat humour.  We’re known around the world for great farming and nourishing food. 

But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re playing our excellent hand pretty safe. For a nation with a great climate, well-educated people, geopolitical safety, a stable government and strong social cohesion, we lack the political courage and vision to do the truly extraordinary. 

The world didn’t admire John F Kennedy because of his focus on trimming government spending and tax cuts. We remember him because he asked his countrymen to do the impossible and go to the moon. His challenge kicked off the kind of mass government investment and picking of winners (made possible by a top income tax rate of 91%) that would give today’s neo-liberal politicians a heart attack. The economic rewards for that vision are still being reaped today and the moon landing stands as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. 

In the interest of providing solutions, here are a few great missions NZ could pathfind for humanity. A nature-positive economy. Eliminating diet and lifestyle health conditions. Achieving genuine equity for indigenous citizens. Pioneering democracy 2.0 reforms like citizen assemblies. A zero-waste economy. Universal access to mental health services. Mainstream ecology and farming in the school curriculum. Building more soil than we lose.  

As a blessed nation, I think we have a responsibility to take some risks – to set seemingly impossible goals, and galvanise our people to find the way for the world can follow. 

eating.the.elephant@gmail.com

I was shooting clays recently. There were five traps firing. From four of these, the clay followed a simple, consistent trajectory – left to right, high to low or near to far. But the fifth did something strange. It fired almost directly upwards, hung for a moment and fell awkwardly back to earth. 

Compared with the others, there was just more to it. Acceleration and deceleration. A weird gravity-defying pause that demanded a different type of patience and timing from the shooter. In corporate speak, you would call it “dynamic”.  

That clay feels like a good metaphor for the year we’ve had. 

After years of lockdowns and economic instability, I think we all wanted something normal from 2023. We looked forward to a normal summer, normal markets, normal politics, normal interest rates, normal workloads, normal grocery prices and normal news. We wanted a go at one of the ordinary targets for a change.

Instead, we got the wettest first half of the year on record and Cyclone Gabrielle, successive interest rate rises, a divisive election season, shock foreign wars and a little recession to top it off. 

For thousands of Kiwis, this was the year the house was lost in a flood, the farm was overwhelmed, debt became scary, redundancy loomed or the visits to the foodbank became too regular. 

That’s not to say there weren’t wins and moments of pride among the setbacks. We saw communities and the nation come together in the face of disaster. Political power was transferred peacefully after a fair, clean election (an increasing rarity globally). We continued to slowly turn the corner on several key national indicators like ram raids, emergency housing gaps, public transport use and even child poverty. 

Like the rise, pause and fall of that clay, 2023 was complex and hard to read. It felt weird, messy and full of contradictions. Climate change is a good example. We suffered back-to-back extreme weather events that upended the lives of thousands of New Zealanders and kick-started serious and hopeful discussions about our response to climate change. 

Half a year later, climate action was conspicuously absent from the election campaign. In the same year that our quarterly greenhouse gas emissions finally fell, a new government is halting a raft of climate action policies with no replacements in sight. 

Drilling down further into agricultural emissions, who can say what trajectory we find ourselves on now? We started the year expecting something, anything, to come from the unprecedented sector collaboration that was He Waka Eke Noa, only for it to fall over almost entirely. 

Fonterra’s long-awaited Scope 3 emissions plan was released, alongside increasingly strong signals from global customers for deep reductions on the farm. At the same time, the new government has punted farm emissions and other environmental regulations down the road. We continue to invest heavily in long foretold technological breakthroughs to fix an issue that new science suggests might not be that big of an issue after all.  

In a more personal example of 2023’s contradictions, I spent time experimenting with ChatGPT, the new artificial intelligence platform capable of writing passable responses on any topic you ask it, and on a course for values- and vision-based communication. Which is it? Will AI do my copywriting for me or do I need to keep studying the art of empathetic storytelling? 

If there is a lesson to be learnt from 2023, it’s that contradiction, false starts, crisis and upheaval are our new reality. The normal years are gone and they’re not coming back.

So how do we adapt to a future full of years like 2023? I can only speak for my own experience, but I think the crux of it is accepting that the mega forces that will impact my family’s life are increasingly chaotic. I need to get comfortable with the fact that economic growth, social cohesion, a stable environment, affordable groceries or a need for my skill set aren’t actually guaranteed anymore. 

Because I’m expecting more instability, not less, my focus for 2024 is twofold. First up is building my capacity to weather chaotic times by focusing on personal health, family wellbeing, a lower energy and consumption lifestyle and swapping social media doomscrolling for more real learning (aka books). 

Secondly, I want to do more work that builds our collective capacity to keep going despite the upheavals and challenges we find ourselves in. For me, that work looks like food security, ecological and farming education for our young people and supporting regenerative farming systems.

In the end, hitting that chaotic clay came down to two things – recognising that the old strategy wasn’t going to work anymore, and slowing down to get the basics right.