Researchers are looking for backups for if dairy exports shrink. Wheat, chestnuts, paua and blueberries are on the menu, but growing them is only half the battle, as Eloise Gibson reports.

Sink your teeth into that soft, wheaty hot cross bun. There’s a roughly 70% chance you just made an Australian farmer a little bit richer.

Given that New Zealand has excellent wheat-growers of its own, it seems odd that some New Zealand farmers sell their homegrown wheat for cattle feed, while we humans mainly eat the Australian stuff.

About 70% of our wheat comes from Aussie, according to Lee Matheson​, a farm consultant investigating the future of food-growing. Growing a good crop is only half the battle: it has to get to hungry people, at a price that makes farming it worthwhile.

And, right now, it is cheaper to get wheat to baked-good-munchers in the big North Island cities (like Auckland) by shipping it over the Tasman, than it is to transport it from the South Island to the North Island, Matheson said at a recent online seminar.

You could think of him and his collaborator Erica van Reenen​ as almost like doomsday preppers for the New Zealand food-growing sector, working on a project called Future Farm Systems for the NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre. Their task: looking into a future with less dairying.

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The centre is best known as the outfit that funds research into cutting methane from our multi-billion dollar dairy industry, but it has also funded Matheson and van Reenen to look at what happens if that methane-fighting technology doesn’t come off.

New Zealand’s supply chains and export markets are heavily built around dairy. But the Zero Carbon Act, as well as global consumer pressure, requires us to cut emissions. “In the event that we can’t crack this [methane], there will be quite a lot of disruption to our sector,” Matheson says. “[So] what are the barriers to changing land use to lower-emissions uses, at a big enough scale to make a significant difference?”

Farmers who want to cut back on livestock often think of the well-trodden path of moving land into kiwifruit or pine trees. But this project is looking wider: at wheat, blueberries, hemp, peas and totara. Each crop represents a different area of potential growth: a production timber that isn’t pine (totara), perishable nuts (chestnuts), white protein (peas), seeds with useful oil and fibre (hemp) and staple crops that could boost New Zealand’s domestic food security (wheat).

Each plant is farmed in New Zealand already, but none has fully taken off. The researchers want to know why. The barrier might be freight, or price, or having to build steel processing plants that might only be used for three weeks a year, or finding enough workers, Matheson told his audience.

“It’s easy to grow kiwifruit and assume that it will be picked and packed, stored and exported. And the reality is, as we’ve already seen, even now that’s not necessarily the case,” he said. “If we need to have more people in a region to pick crops in 50 years’ time, we need to start thinking about that now, not when the crops are ready.”

Climate change itself will spread pests and shift suitable growing regions for many crops. Cows will need more shade, some plants won’t get the frosts they need, grapes will flower at different times, and pesky kikuyu grass​ will spread further south as the climate shifts, according to various studies. Each region will have its own unique changes.

“You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that, if climate change keeps continuing the way it is, then there are going to be new horticultural areas in New Zealand with all of those infrastructural requirements [to get crops to buyers],” says Rob Hewett​, chair of the board of (major meat exporter) Silver Ferns Farms, and a member of the Chapter Zero group of climate-interested directors.

“You won’t get a Canterbury dairy farm that’s fully irrigated planting 20% of the farm in pine trees or whatever, because the land price is far too expensive to do that. So they’ll have to mitigate (their emissions) in other ways,” Hewett says.

But: “Fundamentally, just having paddock after paddock of centre pivots (irrigators) and black and whites (dairy cows) with intensive nitrification… is not sustainable and just cannot be going forward,” he says.

“Monoculture of anything ain’t that good.

“Over time, land migrates to the highest-value and best use,” he says. “So, there is an obvious migration over time from extensive agriculture to intensive agriculture, which sort of means there will be a transition for some land classes from sheep and beef to horticulture,” he says.

Making a mosaic

To Hewett, mixing up New Zealand’s heavy focus on farming livestock with crops and trees isn’t at all incompatible with still farming meat – or with New Zealand’s history of farming.

For farms with the right terrain and enough water, growing crops is already more profitable per hectare than meat, because animals take longer to grow and need a lot more space compared with, say, a cabbage, he says. That’s despite meat selling for more per kilo than your average brassica.

The trend on the land is already for a slow return to the old days, of mixing things up, he says.

“I think about the farm I grew up on,” he says. “We grew a bit of barley, we had some wheat, we had some peas, we had animals, we had forestry.

“We didn’t have much biodiversity, or at least there wasn’t any explicit focus on it, but there’s plenty of room for that.

“Roll it forward 40 years, and I’m planting part of my farm in production forestry… I’ve got 5% of my farm locked away in biodiversity reserves…we’ve got some land that could be crops…oat milk is of interest,” he says.

“When I go for a drive around the paddocks and I get up to my vantage point, I have a look over this land use mosaic where I’ve got natives over here and forestry over there, or paddocks here and cropping in another [part]. And that used to be really common in New Zealand.”

Studying snails

It’s not just land-based foods being studied for growth. At ANZ, sustainable finance head Dean Spicer​ is studying the future of paua. While paua is a seemingly odd sideline for a banker, Spicer is involved because the bank lends significant sums to the seafood industry, and can help by modelling impacts on profits from fishing quotas.

Spicer is part of a study led by Niwa, Terra Moana and others into how climate change will affect paua fisheries off the coast of Wairarapa. Being a fairly sedentary fish, paua is a good candidate to study the effects of climate change, because the sea snails don’t move far, making it easier to tease out environmental impacts, says Spicer.

Managed right, perhaps paua exports could grow (they’re estimated at $50m already), but there has to be good evidence about the impacts of the fishery on the environment, and the impact of the environment on the fishery, he says.

“It was interesting to see the recent free trade agreement with the EU focussing on sustainability… including the sustainability of [EU] imports,” says Spicer. “If we want to grow our export markets, then there is a lot of focus on the sustainability of the products that are consumed by a lot of these markets.”

Even dairy is doing it

You might think dairy farmers would be opposed to diversifying from dairy, even if their meat-farming brethren embraced it. After all, dairy land is worth more per hectare than sheep and beef land, and, as Hewett points out, owners may have taken on heavy debt in the expectation of milk price profits.

But that’s not necessarily true. Dairy farmers are already converting their land away from cows and milk at about 1% a year, Fonterra chair Peter McBride​ recently told a Fonterra Shareholders’ Fund meeting, and moving into solar panels, horticulture (avocados, hops and kiwifruit), and heifer or winter grazing. That was even before the recent milk price dip.

There are other risks on the horizon, too. Since much of New Zealand’s milk powder goes into ingredients for confectionery companies such as Nestle, there’s a risk of these products being made more cheaply in the future, using lab-grown or other proteins, even if methane inhibitors successfully lower dairy’s emissions.

Fonterra first dabbled a hoof in the alternative proteins market back in 2019, saying there was room for both cow and non-cow proteins in its future. Fonterra board director Scott St John​, another member of Chapter Zero, says the company is still fundamentally a cow milk business.

“Core to the strategy is New Zealand milk, we are proudly a New Zealand milk business,” he says. But “you want to keep your eyes wide open for new opportunities and information,” he adds.

“All businesses need to have a pretty broad lens on what’s happening,” St John says.

“In Europe, things are moving very fast, and so any business that has any exposure to Europe has seen this for some time – customers are looking for their suppliers to improve their products’ carbon footprint.

“At Fonterra, we are exploring the merits of alternatives as well as [investing in research to reduce the impact of milk],” he says.

“There might be opportunities for the business to work with alternatives, to say combine with milk to deliver a customer a product.”

The Future of Farm Systems project ends in the middle of 2023 but, as it’s a pilot, the team leading it hopes it will go further. They’re also looking at how farming climates will shift in Northland and Southland, and studying case studies of farmers who’ve already cut their emissions voluntarily.

“The methane vaccine may be five years away, and our future will be what we expect,” Matheson said in November.

“But in thinking about some of the more disruptive impacts, who knows what else might come up through that process, that might allow us to actually improve the resilience of our farm businesses and ultimately our communities.”

Maybe those communities can get behind blueberries, hemp or chestnuts as Kiwi products… or even buy more local wheat to make hot cross buns.