Under recent Transforming the Dairy Value Chain Primary Growth Partnership – funding, One Farm (Centre of Excellence in Farm Business Management), a joint venture between Massey and Lincoln Universities, drew together farmers and industry participants to help develop an insight into farming systems in 2025 that would be best suited to volatile business environments and changing farmer circumstances.
Called Dairy Future Farm Systems, the group used scenario planning, a strategic planning tool, designed to make flexible long-term plans.
Adapted from the military, and popularised by Royal Dutch Shell, the technique draws together known factors about the industry with existing uncertainties and soft signals of things beginning to happen in terms of social, technical, economic, environmental, and political trends to develop possible future scenarios that can provide a landscape for developing models at industry and farm level.
The project lead was Professor Nicola Shadbolt of Massey University and the project was facilitated by Simon Hunter of KPMG, both of whom brought valuable scenario planning expertise.
Project manager DJ Apparao from Massey University’s One Farm group said farm systems modelling had been undertaken in the past, but the Future Farm Systems project encompassed a more robust and wider landscape for modelling, hence scenario planning was phase one.
“We held a series of workshops with people from across the dairy industry to get a broad view of the trends and uncertainties so we could use them to drive the loose scenarios – from which we landed four distinct scenarios,” he said.
The consensus was although all four scenarios were possible and plausible, the future was most likely to be a mix of them.
Phase two was where modellers tested possible strategies for farm systems against the scenarios and identified which were resilient regardless of the scenario that played out in the next 10-15 years, Apparao said.
“Over the next 12 months modellers will ask – what has to change in existing farm systems to meet the constraints and requirements of each scenario?
“If I were a betting man I would put my money on elements from the regulation to rule scenario playing out in the future.”
The group found the key uncertainties of that scenario were the imposition of more restrictive rules on resources, consumers and the community, which could cause a decrease in volume produced, but increase the value because of the rules adding value and reduced volume pushing up prices.
The cost and complexity of production would also increase but volatility should be reduced.
The scenario challenged the farmers in the group, Apparao said.
That was the option they all feared, thinking only the best farmers would cope, but they decided they were up for the challenge and one farmer member of the group turned it around and called it “a privilege to serve”.
Other countries have done similar exercises but on a smaller scale. The next step was presenting the study to the industry to start getting awareness among farmers and rural professionals to think outside the square.
More information: www.onefarm.co.nz
