As the use of Overseer shifts away from solely decision support for fertiliser management and into other areas like the regulatory environment, the owners of the model – the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), AgResearch, and the Fertiliser Association of New Zealand – have asked her to improve the transparency of the model.
“There’s much more visibility on the impact that agriculture has on water quality in NZ, so that has meant everyone has been looking for ways to understand diffuse pollution – to understand how you measure it and what you can do about it,” she said.
“Part of that picture is looking at tools that are available that estimate the nutrients coming off farmland – Overseer is essentially the only tool at the moment that allows for a farm-scale analysis of nitrogen leaching and phosphorous run-off from a wide range of farm systems. What that means for the owners of Overseer is that there is now a need to be more transparent about the modelling in Overseer, and a need to consult more broadly around its development.”
Currently chapters of the technical manual explaining how it works are available on the Overseer website. A short-term goal is to complete the technical manual and make it all available.
Read’s appointment late last year as the first general manager of Overseer has been the catalyst for a phase of strategic review around the model. She’s a geologist who previously worked for the Ministry for the Environment in the water directorate, and in the secretariat of the Land and Water forum focusing on water allocation.
“My role came out of a re-think by the owners of Overseer around how Overseer was engaging with its users, and how management and direction decisions were being managed in terms of the fact that the owners are three completely distinct organisations that have different drivers,” she said.
She hopes to drive engagement with users and stakeholders, which in turn will help shape the direction of development for Overseer. She’ll be talking with a wide range of current and potential stakeholders to help this happen.
One initiative will be to set up a panel of experts, local and international, to undertake an independent analysis of the critical aspects of the model for further development.
Longer term, there may be links with other tools available to farmers so they can have real-time support to improve practices and profitability.
There is also likely to be reconsideration of the business model for Overseer, with an appropriate funding model needed because of the development needed to meet future needs.
“In the medium term we have got a lot of work that we could seek partnership funding for, and then there is potentially other ways we could run the business into the future,” Read said.
“The Government and taxpayers through MPI have put money into developing this tool, with the goal to ensure that NZ Inc is benefitting from better nutrient management and being able to demonstrate better nutrient management. This requires the right tools to be available to those who need them.”
