My study topic - Innovation Adoption

Over the year my reflection have revolved around why would a farmer go to the risk and hassle of changing their business to take on new ideas and technology. The availability of subsidies distorts this process, the free market seems to encourage it... I want to understand the why better, and how we can build on the positive drivers with our industry people building programmes. I am hoping the US will help build this picture .....

Off we go again-USA bound

Here we go again. I am off on my third and final leg of Nuffield scholarship. This trip focuses on gaining a better understanding of the drivers of the creation and adoption of innovation by farmers on and off farm. I will explain more soon..... I've gotta board a flight to the US.

Porky Torky: France

Porky Torky: France: This is a few more highlights from the Nuffield Global Focus while we were in France.

Porky Torky: California Dreaming

Porky Torky: California Dreaming: Here are some of the highlights from the Nuffield global Focus tour of California. Hope you enjoy.

Freedom is not free

We had a day and a half touring WW2 historical sites in the Somme, Belgium and Northern France. We had our tour guide Alan, a previous soldier now military historian provide commentary.

We visited many of the key battle sites in and around the Somme. This area is of particular significance to NZ and Australia. This included Passendale , Armien, Yves, Polygon Wood, Menin Gate to name a few.

There are over 1000 memorial sites in the area.

You cannot help but be moved by the sheer scale of destruction and loss of life in this area during both World Wars were around 3 million people were killed in action.

Farmers working the fields still take their own lives in their hands as unexploded shells are still brought to the surface during cultivation. In fact last year a farmer was killed when cultivating and he triggered a shell.

We all hoped this never happens again.

The Farm Bill is the hot topic

Washington DC took us to the global seat of power, Capitol Hill.

We met with a number of policy advisors, politicians, directors of various ag agencies and an senator over two days of meetings.

The Farm Bill is the hot topic as it is currently undergoing its six year makeover. This piece of legislation all the US policy for food production and surprisingly the Food Stamps policy.The Food Stamps policy is essentially the social welfare policy.

The Food Bill will account for $1 Trillion over the next ten years. Approximately 25% of this will be allocated to farm support.

When pressed why the farm production policy is combined with social welfare, it seems history and strong political lobbying have kept the two together. This seems to be a challenging way to develop policy but hey, who am I to judge.

Two of our most senior government officials who presented to us both (independent from each other) stated that they believe this is one o the most promising times to be involved in food production. Demand is outstripping supply, new technology, climate change and so on. This theme has been consistent

Move over Barrack Obama

I couldn't resist adding these photos to my blog....

California goodbye

 A few closing comments on California to wrap up.  I tweeted actively during the week so check out my tweets if you want to see more on California  - @richardfitzger6 - but see below my close and brave brush with a snake.  When my Australian collegues were sceaming like school girls, I moved in close for the money shot.   Not bad for a Kiwi

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 Harmony with nature is  theme I picked up in California (as I also did in South Korea late last year).  As food producers we need to find the sweet spot for our food, land and climate and work with them rather than against.  I am pleased to say we are underway with a reasonably large biodiversity programme om our farm in NZ.  Just as in the photo below at a Californian training farm, looking at a farming enterprise more widely than inputs and outputs is very important.  What is the impact of our business socially, environmentally and financially, and how does this occur proactively.  How do our businesses contribute positively, not just minimise our impact

California - fantastic food and great people

 We enjoyed great Californian hospitality and saw some amazing farm systems.  No doubt interest is skewed to organic systems.  Water and government regulations were the main topics of discussion.  It is going to be a challenging place to produce food in the future as urban demands on natural resources compete with farming interests.  Water, land, synthetic input use, expectations from food consumers influenced by poor understanding of farm and food systems. More stringent and demanding regulations  Sound farmiliar??

We were hosted by some wonderful people who are trying to make a go of farming in an increasingly tougher business environment.  It intrigues me that farm people mostly want to grow food, look after their stock and land well, and keep to themselves.  This is becoming harder to do and I heard and saw this clearly in California.

I have laboured the 'contradictions' we have seen in China and the US.  And again more contradictions.  Developed countries can look at less intense food systems such as organic farming and push back on GMO, but we will still need to feed 9 Billion people in 2050 on less land with less water.  I don't think we have the luxury to keep this line on a global scale.

Farewell to China - the final flashback

In the final leg of our China GFC and found ourselves in Beijing.

Visiting Tiananmen Square was quite moving. All the Nuffield team clearly recall the dramatic pictures of the tank and the defiant protestors; it was surreal to think that was the place it all happened. Surveylance cameras sat on the surrounding rooftops making them look like prickly hedgehogs and security personnel were prominent. I guess the Tiananmen Square represents western view of the struggle for freedom of speech in China. 

Interestingly, we spoke to a twenty three year old Chinese expat who had returned briefly to China. They knew nothing about the political unrest in Tiananmen Square until they travelled overseas recently. Right next to the Square there is the Forbidden City, an ancient fortress that speaks of the former glory days of previous Chinese Emperors and Dynasties. The City itself was build around the time that William and his invading Norman army won the Battle of Hastings. It is beautiful and impressive.

Speaking of impressive, we travelled to the Great Wall. It is hard to describe how magnificent it is; words do not do it justice. It is 21,000kms long with guard towers regularly dotted along the way, weaving and winding up steep mountain sides and along ridge lines. All I could think is that the Mongols must have been pretty bad neighbours to go to that extent to shut them out.

The next day we left for USA. China was fun, challenging, interesting, inspiring, frustrating and confusing. It didn't disappoint.

Porky Torky: Memories Of China

Porky Torky: Memories Of China: Have a look at a few short minutes from the Chinese leg of the Nuffield global focus.

Flashback - China needs people with skills

China's agricultural production is increasing dramatically and often, they are using cutting edge technology to help them.

We visited a tissue culture laboratory developing new potato strains, a 10,000ha vegetable farm with incredible computerised logistics systems, a state of the art milk processing plant, a cashmere mill using goat and camel fibre to produce high end knitware and duvets, to name a few places.

 China is investing heavily in infrastructure and there are some impressive farming operations however their farm performance, once you drilled down a bit, left something to be desired. The big gap that I saw is in the management capability area. There are plenty of workers and there are pretty advanced corporate management structures, but the interface between the two is lacking. This will take quite some time to address and offers an opportunity for NZ and our farm management expertise. China has many mouths to feed and people to clothe.

I don't see them being a threat as a agricultural exporter in the foreseeable future. In fact, there is a forecast labour shortage as the "One Child" policy works through the age brackets and China will soon become an aging population.

Buy local focus in California

We have visited a number of farm types in a busy schedule around central California.  There is alot of focus on the buy local story though one grower made an interesting comment that 'buy local' trumps 'organic' produce.

We had a long discussion about this and the consensus about both organic and buy local is about the flavour of the food; the freshness.  My view is that the organic supply chain tend to be shorter than conventional supply chains and therefor tend to be fresher and more flavoursome.

The conventional chains source fresh produce and fruit well before it is fully ripe in order to freight and have it on the shelf when it is ripe but this can be at the expense of the flavour; this is why we all like home grown food.  There are a number of lessons and opportunities in this.

Flashback - Hong Kong

An early start to Hong Kong saw us arrive for time for a few meetings. Rabobank hosted us on the 32nd floor of their down town building which gave us spectacular views and a high level understanding of China today and tomorrow.

It sets the scene nicely for the next ten days as we have travel across China. We were told that the focus of Chinese food and fibre policy is ' In Asia for Asia'. There are high levels of concern around food security amongst Chinese and saw some interesting consumer data of milk consumption after the San Lu milk scandal.

Flashback- Kaifeng

We spent a couple of days in central China at Kaifeng.Our first destination was a seed dressing manufaturer.  They import globally and have a tie up with one of our Nuffield team.  The scale of the operation was imprseeive with mass production of various items of seed dressing plant.  I can easily see how our manufacturing struggles against this scale of operation.  Once again, the use of labour instead of capital provided the competitive edge over  western based business.  The cost of wages are sneaking up within China so it will be interesting to see how long thi competitive edge can be maintained.

.We stopped off at a wheat cropping farm and had a look at the harvest in progress.  China prduces 90M tonnnes of wheat each year with most of it grown on small scall farms around 2 - 3 Mou (pronounced 'moo' and there are 15 Mou per hetare).  Every person in China has a small land holding and in the case of grain production get the harvest in by use of the local contractor who gathers the harvest by  small combine harvester.  The person then dries the grain on the side of the road (or in the middle of the road in some cases) .  It is amazing that 90M tonnes of grain are produced in this ay but it works somehow.  To give you a sense of scale, Australia produces around 25M tonnes of grain per year.

In the USA

A hop over the Pacific Ocean took us to Califiornia and the satrt of the US leg of our tour.  We started at a Farmers Market in Marin County.  There we saw a large and successful market which provides the opportunity for producers and consumers to meet face to face.  It triggered some further tining I have been working through since the March leg of the Nuffield tour.

 That is the role of the realtionship of the consumer with thier food.  Part of this is the relationship of the consumer with the person that grows their food; the farmer.  They have a few bumper stickers which I liked such as"Don't buy your food from a stranger" and 'I know my farmer, I know my food".  The provenance and the story associated with the food that people eat is becoming increasingly more important, especially to high end consumers.  This is where our food needs to be pitched and our marketing should tell that story.  There is an emerging challenge for NZ in this movement because it is also a buy local story too, so we need to think through what that could mean to NZ.

We also met and oyster farmer who is undertaking a bsiness venture with a new type of capital raising process called 'crowd funding'.  In essence it gets the local community to support the venture in a small way to get it off the ground and add to the social capital of the community.  It was a new concept that could have some merit. We ended the day with a visit to  melon farm near Santa Rosa.  A lovely husband and wife team run the family business which has been in the famliy for over 150 years.

Guanzhou, the real China

Thanks to the difficulties updating my blog I am now faced with a dilema, do I skip the China leg of the trip, run a week late with my entries or blend  current  and drip fed the chinese leg at the same time.  I will try the latter.  We travelled to Guangzhou in Southern China as saw the real China, one whre Westrners are uncommon, let alot e a minivan of them.  We  visited several vegetable farms, fruit markets and got immersed in the culture

 The Chinese have been global traders for Millennia and are very good at it.  Do not be fooled by any preconceptions about China being a third world.  The fact is there are so many of them and they need to interact with people regularly. Commerce is in their blood.

A funny story I must recount relating to the first photograph.  James, my Aussie counterpart from Longreach and I went to buy some bananas from a street vendor.  A young child, possible aged six or so was the salesman and we set about haggling with him for the price of six bananas.  To cut this part of the story short, he took us to the cleaners. As he was filing his six Yuan in his money belt, I caught him grinning ear from ear.  James and I walked ten or so meters before we realised we had been fleeced.  We burst out laughing and were in hysterics when we rejoined the group.  We recounted our trade and our illustrious leader, Jim Gelch sought to teach us youngsters a life lesson in bartering.

Jim went over to the trader, picked up a bunch of six bananas and offered him 5 Yuan, the trade counter offered with six, Jim stuck with five so the boy picked up the bunch and deftly cut off one banana.  This went on for some time till in the end Jim was poised with seven Yuan in one hand and four bananas in the other, with which the boy plucked out the seven Yuan and banked it.  Jim had sucessfully bought four bananas for seven Yuan, nearly twice the cost at which James and I had paid. James and I watched all this in hysterics and congratulated the boys with his brilliant work and photos were taken all round.  The sad part of this story is that the system is that this boy is likely to remain a fruit seller all his life.

 We stumbled accross a street market just behind out hotel and it was like entering a another world.  On side was a busy western shopping precinct and no more than fifty metres away was a market which sold some pretty intersting stuff; live snakes, turtles and toads....for eating.  It struck me here that the western face of China is somewhat like a thin veil.  Most of China is still steeped in tradition but we only see the modern face, which is mostly in pockets, particularly in the smaller centers of only ten million people.