And Kiwi farmers faced a lack of competent rural professionals to deliver advice to execute change.
Farmers in the Rotorua Lakes catchment, who Morrell studied to give a comparison with her overseas observation, ranked rural consultants as their second highest influencer after their producers’ collective.
Morrell, the DairyNZ Bay of Plenty regional leader, did not believe NZ farmers were necessarily any worse than their overseas counterparts in adapting to change, just less equipped by the social context they operated in.
“For overseas farmers when something is required in how they fit into the environment, something is returned.
“They have more support and grants there to enable them to adapt to the change required.”
Perhaps ironically, a massive urban population in European countries Morrell visited meant there was greater sympathy for farmers.
There was greater willingness than she saw in NZ to support their continued existence while reducing compliance costs.
“For example, in Holland, there is a romanticism about farming, about seeing cows outside eating grass, as the Dutch believe their cows should.”
She believed there remained a “hearts and minds” challenge for farming in NZ to engender the same level of support and input.
Morrell had also finished her work believing there was more room for the “softer” sciences to help better understand the impact of change on farmers and how extension officers with the likes of DairyNZ could act as brokers of information for those farmers trying to cope with it.
She chose the issue of change and how successful farmers coped with it for her 2015 Nuffield Scholarship study.
In the course of her travels through Australia and Europe she took international farmers’ experiences and capacity to cope with different degrees of change and compared them to how NZ farmers do or don’t cope.
The key drivers forcing change on farmers in Rotorua were greater recognition of the need for cleaner water and nutrient management and how, after 10 years of gradual adjustment, many now faced a sharper, regulatory-enforced “step change” to their farming patterns.
Morrell brought both a practical farming perspective to her study, having sharemilked in the region, and a consultative view given her experiences as a team leader with DairyNZ.
She investigated the wide variety of ways producers addressed constraints and environmental limits, including the process of “resilience thinking”.
“This involved assuming that change was normal, not the exception or unusual, and considers the adaptive capacity of people in the system.”
The four elements of responding to change involved exploiting, absorbing, adjusting and transforming (EAAT).
Morrell’s study of international farmers through her Nuffield travels found the successful adapters were the ones who worked with change, accepting its “normality” and viewing their existence as dynamic rather than static.
Typically, farmers would have to respond to “expected” change that came gradually, in the way initial water quality demands did in Rotorua, by exploiting or adjusting onfarm in the process.
“Exploit” would simply involve “more of the same” to compensate for stress in other areas, for example making more milk when prices were low.
“Adjust” required some changes to production processes or growing new crops and both responses were clear in the farms and other industries Morrell visited.
They included two French brothers farming in Brittany and their response to increasing compliance costs for effluent storage and fertiliser application.
To keep the operation viable they had enlarged the farm, bought a runoff, switched to once-a-day milking and fitted their production to their seasonal grass supply.
Old farm buildings were leased to artisan producers, some land to an organic vegetable business and Belgium Blue bulls were used to produce beef calves.
The farmers had pushed from the “exploit” phase in response to change through to the “adjust” stage.
To provide a comparison Morrell surveyed Rotorua farmers facing similar challenges and found farmers there to date had largely adopted an “exploit” approach to dealing with change in the face of a nutrient cap.
A high proportion, 64%, were positive about their farm’s future and gave their involvement in the lake’s stakeholder group as being the single most valuable influence on their response to the changes.
