Sarah's Country

What has been polarising the New Zealand farming community for some time is a word!

Yep, that's right. The word 'regenerative'. Unable to be pigeonhole or tamed by certification. So why do we care so much about it?

It's because the principles of regenerative resonate so deeply with New Zealand's essence of how we naturally care for the environment that we have become so passionate about our identity being under threat.

In the Regenerative Agriculture Market Scan & Consumer Insights report released this week, showed here is a significant opportunity for New Zealand to position itself to take advantage of the global regenerative agriculture trend, according to research commissioned by Beef + Lamb New Zealand (B+LNZ) and New Zealand Winegrowers (NZW).

In this week's Opinion Maker, Sarah discusses how we can lead the world with our farming practices on the groundswell surrounding the word, 'regenerative.'

This episode features the report's author, Mike Lee from Alpha Food Labs (USA), Steve Smith, Chair of Primary Sector Council and representing the NZ Winegrowers as well as Beef + Lamb NZ's Market Development Manager, Nick Beeby.

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Thank you so much to our mates at Farmlands for supporting us this season!

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Did you know over 200,000 treated and broken timber vineyard posts every year discarded wood destined for landfills?

Greg Coppell found himself looking to fence off his farm on a shoestring budget and Stu Dudley his mate works in the viticulture industry which was the onus for creating REPOST, this great company in Marlborough recycling what has been a waste product for the vineyard industry into a new life of farms repurposing posts as a cheap, no-fuss fencing solution for fencing off waterways on farms across the country.

This truly is saving money and the environment as Sarah's Country's Change Maker this week!

For more information on REPOST visit, https://repost.co.nz/about/

Thanks to our mates at Farmlands for partnering with us this Spring. As NZ's largest farmer-owned co-operative head to shop.farmlands.co.nz for your knowledge & advice across the country.

visit www.sarahscountry.com

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She oozes passion for our food storytellers to lead the next generation of New Zealand's identity as a proud food-producing nation. But she says there is no time to rest on our laurels and we must come together around our proposed national food strategy, Mana Kai, for which she is on the steering group for.

"We have had the moral and environment high ground for so long. The push back that we are better than the rest of the world is really dangerous as other countries can frog-jump us with our complacency," Angela Clifford, Eat NZ.

This week's Change Maker is Angela Clifford, founder of Eat New Zealand, a non-profit organisation on a mission to be the bridge of the New Zealand food movement dedicated to connecting people to our land, through our food. 

Eat New NZ is a collective of chefs, producers, media, tourism, and event operators, who have all been inspired to create a national platform to promote and champion our best food, drink, and culinary tourism opportunities.

Sarah & Angela discuss opportunities to capture our national & indigenous values with our own form of geographical indicators, provenance & terroir. 

Angela, along with her wine-maker husband spent 15 years in the Barossa Valley, Australia deeply involved in the storytelling through wine events & farmer markets. When they returned home to North Canterbury, where Nick was involved in the establishment of Greystone Wines, Angela spread her wings to wrap the food of the region together with the wine involving chefs, tourism, and media.

Now in 2021, Eat New Zealand is holding the next installment of the Food Hui in Christchurch 1-2 November to discuss how we can incorporate a values-based framework or national food strategy into our food system, the development of food communities through local food networks, and regenerative food tourism to understand how they’ll play an important role in our food security and food celebration moving forwards.

Thanks to our mates at Farmlands for partnering with us this Spring. As NZ's largest farmer-owned co-operative head to shop.farmlands.co.nz for your knowledge & advice across the country.

visit www.sarahscountry.com

Subscribe to Sarah’s Country on the podcast and if you love us, please leave a review!

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We are heavily assuming if you are reading this article you are already well educated on the nutrition and climate science that supports grass-fed, pasture-raised beef and lamb from New Zealand.

But to also go on to assume that just because consumers may be wealthy and educated, doesn't necessarily mean they will choose to purchase red meat as often as they once did. They have been afforded the privilege of having a food identity.

You can throw all of the complex science at the human health vs planetary health debate or the plant vs meat debate, but it will mean nothing without cohesive global storytelling as this week's guests from around the world highlight.

Over the course of 3 months, Sarah Perriam has been collecting interviews from experts across the globe for this very special Opinion Maker episode to try and answer the burning question for New Zealand's sheep & beef farmers, "How does meat compete with the negative narrative globally?"

This episode features :

• Prof. Frederic Leroy, Professor of Food Science and Biotechnology Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, presented at both the 2019 Red Meat Sector Conference (NZ) and presented at Multiscapes, the international virtual conference in 2021 (NZ) and explains the complex, binary discussion surrounding meat. 

• Fiona Windle, Head Nutritionist at Beef + Lamb NZ who highlights the ever-evolving narrative towards meat that lacks nutritional importance when discussing climate change off the back of the Barnsley report published in 2021 that illustrates substituting meat from the average diet would lead to only a 3-4% decrease in an individual's lifetime global warming impact.

• Anne Mottet, Sustainable livestock development at United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation, France, discusses balancing the Sustainable Development Goals of nutritional needs as discussed at the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit with the climate needs on the table at 2021 UN COP26.  

• Kate Gower-James, Aitkens Ranch based in San Francisco about the US Wholefoods consumer, the trends of food identity, trusting your meat marketer to keep up with the latest consumer trends, and how positioning accredited storytelling on meat is important.

• Laura Ryan, the co-founder of the Global Meat Alliance, has rallied the global red meat community to work together on the common challenges, collaborating through COVID in the lead-up to COP26.

• Dave Courtney, Silver Fern Farms chief customer officer discussing their research and pilot for carbon-neutral meat and regenerative agriculture and how NZ sheep & beef farmers can prepare themselves for these trends.

From farm to fork, food is the least digitized supply chain. However, with the recent advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics, and for the first time in human history, it’s now practical to digitize agriculture and its supply chain.

The billion-dollar space race is allowing connectivity to sensors like never before which will transform how we collect data in areas without cellphone coverage.

 This week's Change Maker is Dr. Sara Spangelo, Founder & CEO of Swarm who are rumored to have just sold their company to Elon Musk's SpaceX, about how New Zealand is leading the pack in buying up low-cost satellite technology.

Rural connectivity in New Zealand, but also globally, is renowned for being unreliable and frequently nonexistent. Ground-based network solutions like cellular and point-to-point networks have limited range, where their signals only travel a few dozens of kilometers. But then satellite has been really expensive, until now. Swarm created the world’s tiniest satellites in orbit which you can purchase a small compact low-power tile to collect data from any sensor.

"There are so many wonderful companies in New Zealand doing agriculture and IoT. New Zealand is the one country that we have sold the most devices so far. There is a huge interest because you are forward-thinking towards innovation and technology," Sara Spangelo, Swarm 

By deploying internet-connected sensors and robotics into the field data can be continuously collected to monitor crop and soil health, detect pests, and automate tasks like irrigation, fertilizing, and harvesting.

Growers can now make data-informed decisions about production to optimize for profitability and market-driven volume. These technologies also significantly reduce the waste of precious resources like water. 

Dr. Sara Spangelo worked on small satellites and autonomous aircraft at the University of Michigan and was a lead systems engineer at both NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and Google X. She holds a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan and in 2017 was a Top 32 Canadian astronaut candidate.

For more information on how Swarm is being used in agriculture, visit https://swarm.space/applications/agriculture

This is the one episode in nearly 900 episodes where I teared up editing it!

Meet one of my great mates, Anna. As an open-minded, intelligent, technologically advanced sheep & beef farmer in her 30's she is trumped, not at why change is needed, but how.

Anna Fisher, a passionate farming mother of 2-under-5 gives an authentic insight into life on farm navigating the rise in demands from every level and why farmers took to the streets in protest. 

"Most of our friends in the farming industry are pretty upbeat sort of people. You don't ever see them angry or down and out but now they are saying, geez, I've had enough. There are just so many pressures on farming, you feel like a minority that people just hate you," explains Anna.

Want to understand the proposed changes to the freshwater farm plan and intensive winter grazing rules? Are these changes more workable for land-owners, how will improvements be measured and audited, what on-farm tools will be used?

Bryan Smith, Chief Advisor for Freshwater from the Ministry for the Environment presented as part of this Livestream Q & A on Sarah's Country about the proposed changes to the freshwater regulations on Wednesday 22nd September 2021, prior to submissions closing on 7th October 2021.

The panel featured Sam McIvor (CEO - Beef + Lamb NZ), Sam Lucas (Head of Agronomy at Farmlands), and Kate Scott (Director - Landpro) to dive into if the new changes.

Watch the show on Sarah's Country on YouTube.

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Sarah is super excited about the future of wool after this episode - it is truly wool reimagined!

New Zealand scientists at the Wool Research Insitute (WRONZ) have been exploring new uses for strong wool - nature's miracle fibre that is costing farmers to shear for animal health reasons.

The game-changing development is the patented technology to break down the fibre into unique particles, powders and pigments with global export potential for applications as diverse as cosmetics, printing, luxury goods, and personal care.

"One of the massive advantages is by taking wool down to a particle level, we can create a particle that frankly feels fantastic against your skin, still has moisture absorption capability and still takes colour really well. We've attempted to maximise the strengths and the unique properties of wool whilst getting rid of maybe some of the things that have made it a challenge and in modern markets,"explains Tom Hooper, Wool Source.

This week's Change Maker is the CEO of the newly formed Wool Source, Tom Hooper who will lead the WRONZ initiative with the goal of the three-year programme aims to prove the commercial viability of the new deconstructed wool particle products.

For more information on the show, visit www.sarahscountry.com

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Curious about how 'those bureaucrats in Wellington' think? Sarah Perriam, host of Sarah's Country uncovers the nurturing nature of the woman with one of the hardest jobs in the primary sector right now.

With policy flying out the door at pace from Minister Parker, her team has been elevated within the Ministry for the Environment as they have realized to achieve the outcomes they need to work with farmers and growers on the ground and provide better feedback loops.

Sarah has an in-depth yarn to Sara Clarke, Director - Policy Implementation and Delivery at MfE understand the humanity behind the women tasked with implementing climate and freshwater, the Overseer review, and intensive winter grazing regulations being rolled out and she wants to do this with relationships across the sector to work together to see progress. 

"We need to have all parties in the room leading this change in order to design something that's going to land well and be implementable at the end of the process, potentially to something like emissions pricing, which ultimately will affect 20 to 30 thousand farms across New Zealand," says Sara Clarke.

To learn more about the show, visit www.sarahscountry.com

Subscribe to Sarah’s Country on the podcast and if you love us, please leave a review!

Contact the show: [email protected]

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It goes without saying when you are in a relationship, the ultimate glue to the longevity of that relationship is trust.

New Zealand is a trading nation exporting 95% of our products and is the largest industry geographically so there are multiple relationships to keep the trust to the highest possible level to continue to exist.

In this week's Opinion Maker series, Sarah dives into the world of technology that has the potential to digitally connect with all farms in New Zealand, ultimately returning more value to food & fibre produced to high standards.

Alongside that, there is fatigue on-farm and across the supply chain in ticking boxes for compliance barriers, duplication is strangling innovation and siloed powerhouses of data have refused to allow farmers data to talk to other devices.

Sarah talks across the primary sector to unearth the progress being made to answer the looming question "How do we turn compliance into value with trust & transparency?"

This episode features :

• Maury Leyland Penno, Chair of Trust Codes and former Fonterra executive who handled the crisis management of the botulism scare in infant formula
• Greg McSkimming, in his role with the newly incorporated NZ Farm Assurance Plan body that his company, Silver Fern Farms works alongside dozens of other red meat & wool companies to bring a cohesive single assurance to consumers of on-farm practices
• Brent Paterson, founder of My Enviro and Hawke's Bay farmer and agri-business professional on the launch of his digital farm environment plan that will simplify information required by regulators
• Jefferson Harcourt, founder of Eco Detection, a real-time automated water quality monitoring tool.
• Semaine Cato, co-founder of Trust Alliance NZ, with Chris Claridge where she works in the blockchain with her company Trackback to validate the data across the supply chain.

Watch the presentation about the Trust Alliance NZ from the 2021 Primary Industries Summit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1c5xRslgg8

To learn more about Sarah's Country and listen to past episodes, visit www.sarahscountry.com

Subscribe to Sarah’s Country on the podcast and if you love us, please leave a review!

Contact the show: [email protected]

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