They warned the crisis would start affecting farmers as science struggled to provide answers to challenges and technology to improve productivity.
AgResearch confirmed it would be talking to staff this week about a proposal that would affect staffing but would not comment further until that had happened.
Former science staff said AgResearch’s problems stemmed from a lack of funding, constantly changing science focus from senior management, flaws with the Crown research institute model, an inability to win funding bids and staff feeling disenfranchised from a top-heavy management structure.
They had also found staff morale was at rock bottom. One source said many staff were “farming for redundancy” and another said staff were betting rumoured redundancies would be confirmed by media leaks before they were told by management.
Two days after those leaks staff had not heard anything formally from management.
Former senior science manager Jock Allison said evidence AgResearch was in crisis was illustrated by staff numbers halving from about 1300 several years ago.
Half of AgResearch’s scientists had less than 10 years experience.
Senior scientist Ken McNatty, now a professor of reproduction and biotechnology at Victoria University, said in recent years 50 leading scientists had left the organisation taking with them an estimated 500 years of institutional knowledge.
“What disturbs me is that I don’t think many people in the agriculture community know about this.”
AgResearch had changed from a partnership between management and staff to a top-down system in which staff were told what was going to happen by managers who did not have a science background.
In 2008 McNatty led a world-respected team of up to 30 scientists and technicians specialising in reproduction based at Wallaceville near Wellington.
The unit was closed and moved to Invermay near Dunedin and McNatty said just three still worked for AgResearch.
The former staff questioned the wisdom of decisions such as investing in new buildings at Invermay only to have most of those staff relocate to a new science hub at Lincoln.
“There has been an incredible waste of people yet we have got new buildings at Invermay going to be empty and new buildings built at Lincoln,” McNatty said.
Allison said the Future Footprint strategy of consolidating AgResearch on hubs at Lincoln and Palmerston North should be abandoned because of the cost.
AgResearch’s problems also stemmed from a failure of the CRI system of contestable funding, with Allison believing CRIs should be bulk-funded.
Allison said as disillusioned senior scientists left the CRI they took with them the ability to put together projects that attracted funding.
“It has got to the situation that so many scientists have gone that they haven’t got the capability to attract funds.”
In the six months to December 2014 AgResearch’s accounts showed revenue was $8.3 million below budget.
AgResearch also no longer had the industry connections it did when he was a scientist.
“We thought about industry need all the time. We had good relations with the industry, we had technology transfer but today most farmers wouldn’t know what AgResearch does.”
Science funding was becoming more diffused with the Government’s identification of 10 national science challenges soaking up a static pool of funding.
“The problem is around the chronic underfunding of science in NZ, a system that is far too centrally managed and way over governed.”
Dr William Rolleston
Federated Farmers
Federated Farmers president William Rolleston said there were “far more fundamental and strategic problems” in NZ science than just AgResearch.
“AgResearch is the symptom not the problem.
“The problem is around the chronic underfunding of science in NZ, a system that is far too centrally managed and way over governed.”
He supported the findings of a review of CRIs that advocated bulk instead of contestable funding and a return to science that was aligned to our strengths, namely agriculture.
“It beggars belief that a Government would do that when NZ’s strength is biological science.”
Rolleston said investment was needed in blue sky research, what he called the building blocks from which new and innovative discoveries could emerge and where some of AgResearch’s problems stemmed because of a lack of funding.
