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Combined with outdated policy-making structures that limited dissenting views – like monarchs who overrode their foreign diplomatic efforts – these mindsets tethered nations to the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.
