Thursday, March 28, 2024

A voice at the global table

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While most New Zealanders sleep, the Federated Farmers president is working round the clock to ensure Kiwi farmers have a voice on the international stage.
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Andrew Hoggard has gone from representing just Kiwi farmers to farmers across the globe after being elected to the board of the International Dairy Federation (IDF).

The Federated Farmers president is the IDF board’s sole farmer representative on which it develops robust, science and evidence-based international standards for dairy products.

It also uses its global network to expand industry and undertakes research on issues important to the sector.

All the different groups involved in all the things in getting milk from a cow to a dairy product was represented in the organisation, Hoggard says.

It will mean the Manawatu dairy farmer has to get up in the early hours of the morning to attend online meetings with his mostly northern hemisphere colleagues.

“It’s not like I was doing anything at midnight apart from sleeping,” he jokes.

“In terms of an organisation it covers everything from farming through to the product ending up in the consumers’ hands.”

Hoggard is not new to the IDF, having served on the animal health, farm management and environment standing committees, and has just finished his second two-year stint on the IDF’s scientific programme coordination committee. 

This is the body that decides which scores of potential work streams – covering everything from research to nutrition, processing, marketing and more  – should be the priority for IDF resources.

The standard-setting takes up much of the IDF’s work. 

The work is vital because it lays the groundwork for future trade negotiations between countries.

“When you work through and think that we are very reliant on trade and without standards, trade doesn’t work very well,” he says.

“It’s about laying the framework for where trade can occur. The arguments are over  things other than science.”

Once established, groups such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) can then use the standards as a guideline if trade disputes between countries arise.

“The simplest way to put it is that a lot of these standards are about enabling trade globally and without these, it would be pretty hard to do trade,” he says.

“While a lot of it seems technical to the average farmer, when we export 95% of what we produce, actually having these robust standards across the globe is vitally important to us.”

He says the discussions and decisions around the board table are collaborative largely because trade issues are parked at the door.

“At the start of every meeting they read out an anti-trust statement, so we’re not allowed to talk about trade and dividing up markets between us,” he says.

“It’s not the sorts of things that promote competition. It’s about everyone collaborating on stuff that’s for the greater good.”

The main organisations the IDF works closely with are the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, which is part of the United Nations (UN).

Hoggard says he’ll be pushing the same principle he’s used to argue on behalf of farmers across the sectors in New Zealand: that policies, regulations and proposals need to pass the SPA test: is it sensible, it is practical, is it affordable?

“An emerging opportunity for the IDF is the UN food systems dialogue. It’s a focus of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other bodies and individuals all around the world, not just in NZ, to try and describe what a sustainable food system looks like,” he says.

“This dialogue is the opportunity to move beyond the sometimes emotive views gaining traction on how we should farm, and what we should produce, to ensure it is grounded in science, is practical and rational in terms of the global challenge to ensure nutritionally adequate diets, while also maintaining sufficient food production for future generations.

“My aim is to make sure the farmer voice and knowledge base is heard loud and clear among the other voices.” 

The IDF has also done a lot of work looking at dairy nutrition, which has been prompted by the emergence of plant-based dairy alternatives and its claims around having a lower greenhouse gases footprint.

He says that work broke down the protein of these plant-based products and compared them to milk. It found that cow dairy had a better emissions footprint than some plant-based milks.

“The amount of nutrients it’s providing is far greater, so the actual footprint per gram is much better,” he says

The organisation has also looked at the impact on the industry these alternative milks have when they leverage their products off cow’s milk in the retail space.

IDF research also showed that claims by plant-based milk companies that using the term milk or meat was done so on a generic basis and had no influence on consumers was not the case.

“There’s a vast amount of people … that showed that actually they did think this was real milk flavoured with almonds and for all the claims made that consumers understand, they didn’t understand,” he says.

“That’s why they want to keep using the descriptions of our products so they can basically get a free ride on our brand.”

There had also been discussions looking at the effect diseases such as bovine viral diarrhoea and Johne’s have on animal emissions. Initial work shows those emissions are reduced if those diseases are eliminated.

This was an example of an aspect where the IDF role complemented his position at Federated Farmers, and where some of the discussions added knowledge and value to NZ farmers.

“What I find with a lot of these things that I go to, is that there are little threads that tie everything together and useful titbits from one that I can apply to another that helps it all come together in terms of providing good outcomes to farmers,” he says.

Kiwi dairy farmers bring a lot of expertise to the IDF because NZ has a lot of good, knowledgeable people in the industry thanks to agriculture being so important to the economy.

It was also generally a very collaborative sector with groups such as Massey and Lincoln universities, and AgResearch working together.

Retired Fonterra research technologist Keith Johnston, for example, has won two IDF prizes for excellence. 

NZ also has a history of being appointed to positions on the IDF with Fonterra chief science and technology officer Jeremy Hill being the group’s former president.

Apart from a handful of staff, the IDF positions are largely voluntary and are secondary to the participant’s main job, which in his case is a dairy farmer and Federated Farmers president.

Andrew and wife Audra have two daughters aged 11 and nine.

He never expected to end up running the farm, nor did he think he would be in a national Federated Farmers role.

Instead, he thought he would be sitting behind a desk analysing policies or managing a bank.

Leaving school, he enrolled at Massey University where he studied economics. His brother Chad and sister Kimberly both completed agricultural degrees. Ironically, Chad ended up as a bank manager and Kimberly a policy manager, which made for some interesting debates around the dinner table.

After graduating in 1996, he went to Canada where he spent a year farming in the snow.

Returning home, he went 50:50 sharemilking on the family farm at Kaitoke.

In 1998, the family moved to Manawatu after buying the 300ha farm at Kiwitea farm north of Fielding.

He spent several years 50:50 sharemilking on the property, initially milking 440 cows.  During this time the family bought the block across the road and increased the herd to 560 cows.  

In 2008, the farming operation was expanded and the structure changed to a company. In that same year, he was the runner-up in the Manawatu Sharemilker of the Year.

At the time, his family had four different companies owning several different blocks of land. A decision was made to put in an underpass and merge the companies into one. 

He joined Young Farmers early on and went on to become the district and regional chair. In 2003, he got into the grand final of the Young Farmer of the Year competition.

Chairing Young Farmers meant he used to go along to the federation’s provincial meetings.

“From there, I just migrated across to roles in Feds when I hit the ripe old age of 31 and got booted out of young farmers for being too old.  The rest is history,” he says.

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