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The challenge of economic growth for sustainable production landscapes

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Abstract

The New Zealand government narrowly frames farming policy to exert pressure on farmers to increase their contribution to the national economy by producing more agricultural products for export through adopting on-farm ‘best practice’. Simultaneously, farmers are under pressure by the government and the public to protect, if not enhance, the sustainability of their farming landscapes. These expectations are to be met in an environment of changing extreme weather patterns, increasing costs and financial uncertainty. Farmers’ response to their context was studied by analysis of what farmers actually do—their practices and outcomes of those practices—enabled through the collection of data from sheep/beef family farms undertaken over 8 years by the Agriculture Research Group on Sustainability. The outcomes of their practices, while sometimes visible in the landscape, became more apparent through a nuanced analysis of multiple data sources (quantitative and qualitative) which revealed the complexity involved in sustaining families, animals and landscapes. Farmers could be grouped into categories labelled developers or low performers, adaptable risk takers, organic conservers, extensive farmers and stable, continuous improvers, indicating the range of choices farmers make to meet their goals while carefully adapting their management of the natural resource base. Pressure to ‘change’ to fit politically driven agendas that overemphasise economic growth runs the risk of undervaluing what farmers already do and may limit the different ways they are able to balance their management of the sustainability, resilience and productivity of their production landscapes and farming businesses.

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Notes

  1. http://www.mpi.govt.nz/agriculture/funding-programmes/primary-growth-partnership.aspx.

  2. Three per cent of New Zealand’s total land area changed between 1990 and 2008, most of it from grassland to plantation forestry. https://www.mfe.govt.nz/environmental-reporting/land/land-use-indicator/land-use.pdf. In this period, there was a 41 per cent decline in the number of commercial sheep/beef farms and a rise in the average number of stock units per farm as farms have been consolidated. However, productivity gains through the increase in lambing percentages, and the finishing of lambs to a heavier weight has not significantly reduced the sector’s production (Deloitte 2011).

  3. These categories were chosen with the hope that some indices of intensification, capital value, efficiency and financial sustainability would be found, but in the end, this was not possible as there was not a sufficient correlation between the variables associated with each category (see Table 1).

  4. The full analysis can be found in Hunt (2011).

  5. A mixed approach was used to calculate the stock units. There was sufficient information on sheep production levels to estimate individual values for each farm based on the approach defined by Cornforth and Sinclair (1984). The cattle and deer were valued using standard conversion factors as per the Lincoln University Farm Technical Manual (Fleming 2003).

  6. These variables are also used by the Ministry of Primary Industries in its annual farm monitoring reports.

  7. The PCs after the first four dropped off significantly in the proportions of variance covered.

  8. SPSS one-way ANOVA, using least significant difference (LSD) for the posthoc multiple comparison tests.

  9. A farm which was missing a core variable was able to added at this stage, making 24 farms altogether.

  10. When cropping farms were included in this analysis, there was a smaller significant increase.

  11. Pers. comm. Glen Greer who managed the collection and analysis of the ARGOS financial statistics where she saw evidence of these practices. However, no one confesses to this, and there is little written about it though the issue is raised from time to time as in an election year—http://www.interest.co.nz/rural-news/53495/dairy-farmers-pay-lower-tax-couple-pension-ird-says-fonterra-gets-tax-credits-fair.

  12. On average, these farms were at least twice the size of those in the other groups (see Table 4).

  13. http://www.stuff.co.nz/archived-stuff-sections/archived-business-sections/business/opinion-1865/799919/i-Farmers-we-are-backbone-of-New-Zealand-i

  14. A run-off property is one where animals can be sent in times when feed is short on the home farm, usually in the summer and autumn. In New Zealand, it is usually closer to the mountains where there is a higher rainfall in the summer.

  15. An emphasis on efficiency has resulted in some unexpected environmental benefits (Hunt et al. 2013).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the referees and the editors, Iris Bohnet and Ruth Beilin, of this special issue, for their support and helpful comments which have undoubtedly made this a better article. Thanks also to Chris Rosin (CSAFE, University of Otago) for his insightful comments, Dave Lucock (The Agribusiness Group, Christchurch) for his continuing education of the author in farming matters and his intimate knowledge of the ARGOS farmers gained through his work as Field Research Manager, Jon Manhire (ARGOS Programme Leader, The Agribusiness Group, Christchurch) and to the rest of the ARGOS team for their support and the use of their collected data. This work has been funded by the New Zealand Government, with other financial assistance from an anonymous meat packing company, Merino NZ and the Organic Association of Aotearoa NZ (OANZ).

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Correspondence to Lesley Hunt.

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Handled by Iris C. Bohnet, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia.

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Hunt, L. The challenge of economic growth for sustainable production landscapes. Sustain Sci 10, 219–230 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0276-2

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