In this age of apparently unlimited opportunity to access advice and assistance, whether from consultants, bankers, accountants, lawyers, IT experts, processors or industry bodies, there’s almost too much choice.
The main challenge is choosing between products, services and advice that cover the range from the merely desirable or useful to the downright essential.
For individual farmers it is very important to keep it as simple as possible, taking care not to be distracted and diverted by all the outside noise, but remaining open to ideas and information that offer a genuine advance on current practice.
Businesses must keep up to date with trends to ensure their strategic planning is informed by the future, not just by history, but the problem here is deciding which trends will be short lived, therefore able to be discounted, and which will become future reality.
It doesn’t take too much foresight to predict environmental practice, healthier and higher-quality food, adapting to climate change and retaining a social licence to operate as four major challenges every agriculture related business must address in the near future.
But the big question is how to meet the wishes of an increasingly strident public whose expectations appear to be more demanding from one year to the next. Trends once measured in decades are now almost annual events which, puts huge pressure on planning.
For several years KPMG’s global head of agribusiness, Ian Proudfoot, has been spearheading the Agribusiness Agenda, which interviews industry leaders to canvas their opinion of the overriding issues affecting agriculture based on a particular theme.
Whereas the 2017 Agenda was outward-looking with a focus on world trade opportunities, the 2018 edition called on the sector to tell honest stories about how New Zealand’s food products are grown, processed and distributed, highlighting the many positive attributes in the products we grow and sell to the world.
That theme ties in with Beef + Lamb NZ’s Taste Pure Nature origin brand programme, which tells the story of NZ grass-fed beef, initially in two key markets, California and Shanghai.
While the programme is a great example of communicating the sustainability of our growing practices and high product quality to the world there will also be concern it might be too little too late.
B+LNZ deserves great credit for its tenacity, which has resulted in a solution to the perennial problem of convincing farmers and processors to commit to a programme but it runs the risk of being overtaken by other trends and events.
Wool provides a cautionary tale – a natural product with relevant properties for the modern world has lost all promotional support and, consequently, awareness to the detriment of farmers, processors and the economy.
If wool had maintained a 20% share of sheep farming income it is quite possible dairy production wouldn’t have taken over the amount of land it has, there wouldn’t have been the degree of milk price volatility in recent years and dairy wouldn’t have received so much bad press over water pollution.
Before Christmas Proudfoot identified three major agribusiness challenges: if we want to target the 40 million most sophisticated consumers worldwide we must learn to feed our own population with high-quality food instead of gaining a reputation for obesity; change is continuous so there will not be a transition to a new state of stability; and we have already used up a large proportion of the time advantage to own the grass-fed market position which mighty have only five years maximum left.
Our next challenge is to identify new opportunities to get ahead of the rest of the world in areas such as carbon zero or environmental restoration.
Others might not agree with this shortlist and I have a problem with agriculture being asked to assume a public health and social welfare responsibility for people’s eating habits but it’s difficult to argue with the speed of change and the need to identify new points of difference.
The biggest battle for agricultural production, especially dairy and meat in the next five years, will be maintaining share of expenditure against alternative and plant-based protein options.
The sector has to find a way to counteract the claimed health and environmental benefits and probably comparable, if not cheaper, price of the competition.
There is no doubt a growing proportion of first world consumers are reducing their animal protein consumption or becoming vegetarian while the third world is less financially able to eat meat and dairy or buy premium products.
Therefore, the only viable option is to sell as much of our production as possible to the world’s highest-paying consumers and to do this successfully we first have to convince them of its quality, sustainability, environmental credentials and animal welfare standards.
But we must also recognise they may not want the same things in five years.
