Tuesday, March 19, 2024

They just don’t care

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Taranaki farmer and 2019 Dairy Woman of the Year Trish Rankin recently attended the annual agribusiness seminar at Harvard Business School in the United States. What she heard was astonishing. What she said shocked them.
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New Zealand can be the possible solution for the impossible customer. 

That was my key takeaway from Harvard Business School’s agribusiness seminar.

The impossible customer wants food that is better for the planet, their health, animals and people. NZ products can be the answer.

The seminar used business case studies including family farms, that own thousands of hectares in America and Brazil, supermarket chains,  logistics companies transporting from Brazil’s growing areas to their ports, some big food companies and one that  was the biggest eye-opener for me, an alternative protein/plant-based protein company.  

A NZ sauvignon blanc was the white wine every night. We are famous for our good wine there. What surprised me is we are much less famous for the fact our cows live on the land and aren’t barn-reared.

Many of these high-flying, top-notch foreign farmers and agribusiness leaders have no idea we are pasture based. They don’t live under a rock but have no idea we have cows grazing at a good stocking rate to suit the land they live on. 

I sat next to so many interesting people who thought we are so lucky to be able to produce low-emission, high animal health cows and milk. 

When I said we don’t use GMO feed or growth hormone they couldn’t believe it. 

A dairy farmer said they have big Holstein Friesians in a barn and milk three times a day with a focus on production and extended lactation. They want only a 20% in-calf rate to replace the 20% that will eventually drop out of the system and don’t want to have to stop milking a cow each year for them to calve. They just keep piling the feed in front of the cow along with ad-lib antibiotics in the GMO feed and growth hormone enriched diets.

The focus of most companies studied is solely on profit. When one youngish, very large family farmer was asked if he was worried demand for his GMO soy bean, corn, caged hormone-fed pigs would decline because people want better standards for their meat instead of GMO, hormone, antibiotic fed caged animals, his reply was almost a snigger. Nope. He thought it was crazy to worry about the environment. 

“If someone will pay me to worry about it then I might start to,” was his stance. You can imagine the reaction of the three Kiwis in the room. We were horrified. Imagine saying or even believing. that. And it was indicative of many of the other companies. The train company didn’t think extending the railway into Brazilian rainforest cleared for crops is a problem for the environment. The supermarket chain has no plans to reduce packaging or think about its emission profile or sourcing sustainable food. Cage-reared chickens fed to be fattened quickly with a high mortality rate are not a concern.

Now, that’s not to say there weren’t some good social, environmental, community-based, not-just-for-profit businesses studied. But The this is the first time in 60 years Harvard has presented them. People who have attended multiple times said this was the first year to study any businesses other than bottom-line, profit-focused ones.

We had a social-good company building expertise in chicken farming to feed malnourished children in Africa. It was super interesting to see the good it could do. The business-minded, dollar-focused people just shook their heads – how could you make money? The owner said “You don’t. You make a difference and that’s richer than any bank balance.” 

NZ is the Possible. 

We care equally about our environment, our consumers, our people, our animals and hope to make enough profit to keep going again next year. 

We are genuinely world leading in our approach. 

We are not doing it easy. 

We are worrying about water, emissions, climate change, animal welfare. 

Keep going fellow farmers. Keep your heads up. Connect to the urbanites you live by. 

We have a massive opportunity to place NZ as the world’s best protein producer but it starts at home. We need to show our urban neighbours we are the best in the world and let them tell our story for us.

Trish Rankin is a Taranaki sharemilker, an agripreneur and owner of porohita.com, a circular economy company.

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