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What do the tourist lament that our countryside looks like a giant golf course, general urban misunderstanding of our agriculture and the reality that we’re still food commodity players all have in common?

Failure to name our pastoral method fails New Zealand

Opinion by Peter Kerr

What do the tourist lament that our countryside looks like a giant golf course, general urban misunderstanding of our agriculture and the reality that we’re still food commodity players all have in common?

The answer: no name to describe what it is we do, what it is we’re good at.

The simple fact we’ve failed to give a name, or brand, to our pastoral farming method is the single biggest mistake we’ve made in 120 years of agricultural research and in selling our sheep, beef and dairy products to the world.

Why does failing to have a name matter?

Because every story has a title, from ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, to ‘Icebreaker’, ‘The Battle of Britain’ to ‘Watties’ .The name is shorthand for the idea, concept and values behind the headline. The brand is what the story can be woven around.

Meanwhile here’s little old New Zealand, the nation that effectively invented sustainable pastoralism, with an inherent, great, natural story……. but no name for it.

Without a name, without a brand that in a word or two conveys a much greater meaning, you can’t have a conversation. Just as you don’t start ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ halfway into the story, neither can you start a sustainable pastoralism story when it doesn’t have a title.

In New Zealand’s case it means we don’t have have a simple starting point for a conversation with tourists, explaining why our countryside has a type of manicured look to it.

It’s that more difficult, too, to have a conversation with urban New Zealanders, and demonstrate both agriculture’s worth and dynamism, and its potential as a career for young people.

And it’s not obvious, in a single phrase, why continuing research into making the sustainable pastoralism we do best even better is justified.

Most important of all, without a name, we can’t lift ourselves out of a commodity mentality and mindset; and instead continue to be victim-like price takers.

Instead, we flounder, can’t position ourselves at the top of consumers’ minds, can’t reward farmers for being guardians of the land, and inspire farmers to take that role.

For more than a century, New Zealand has been using and giving away the knowledge of controlled grazing regimes that is different from farming elsewhere. It’s not ranching, free-range or extensive/nomadic grazing.

By articulating that idea in a simple phrase, you start taking ownership of the values and images behind the story, and the natural story of how we work in partnership with nature is a great one.

In some ways, it’s as simple as the picture that a child draws of a farm. We all know that scene – the image where the sun is shining, the grass is green, the animals are happy. That picture doesn’t (yet) have a title. But it is a generic picture of a New Zealand farm.

That image not only needs naming, but it also needs protecting. Intensive dairying in barns in the Mackenzie Basin was not what New Zealanders have in mind when they think of farming, and the backlash was profound.

But there was a common understanding that getting our image and perception matched to the reality is as important now in a digital age as refrigeration was in an industrial one, and the image of cows being farmed inside didn’t fit.

Perhaps we’re still caught in a misconception we’re trying to feed the world. We can’t physically anyway, and neither can we afford to as a relatively expensive place to produce thanks to overly-inflated land prices.

However the people we need to sell to don’t just want a piece of meat or a lump of cheese. They want reasons why they should feel good about consuming it.

Be it for health, environment or self-validation, the affluent, aware consumer wants to tick all the right boxes when they’re choosing what to put in their bodies.

So far, we don’t give them a reason to choose us. We don’t provide them with a story that they can tell themselves, and more particularly others, when sitting down to eat a food item.

However, the moment we adopt a name or brand for sustainable pastoralism is the moment we can present a totally different picture to the world, and the moment we create a new conversation and have those consumers happy to pay more.

A sustainable pastoralism brand may seem ridiculous to some who only have a production, production, production, pile it high and flog it off mentality.

But the list of alternative suggestions is non-existent, especially as it looks more and more likely that we’re happy to flog off our land assets (and the knowledge behind it) to foreigners.

We owe it to our forebears, ourselves and our children to explore a sustainable pastoralism brand as an option, indeed the only viable option for a sustainable New Zealand agriculture.

(Peter Kerr is an agricultural writer and consultant)

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
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