RaboTalk – Growing our future

In the first episode of RaboTalk Growing our Future’s new Succession 2050 series, host Blake Holgate speaks with Ray Smith, Director General of the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), to explore his contribution to Rabobank’s Succession 2050 Gearing up for New Zealand’s food and agri future white paper. Drawing on his extensive experience leading major public sector departments alongside a family background in agriculture, Ray provides a strategic perspective on how New Zealand’s primary sector is entering a new era of sustainable productivity.
Ray discusses how New Zealand producers can leverage their natural advantages to capture growing global demand for high-value protein and nature-positive products. He outlines how unlocking productivity, investing in regional water storage, adopting emerging precision technologies, and maintaining rigorous biosecurity and farm assurance schemes will secure the sector’s long-term global competitiveness out to 2050.

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In this fifth episode of RaboTalk’s Growing Our Future Catchment Catch-Up series, host Blake Holgate speaks with Mark Chrystall, a northern Rangitikei sheep and beef farmer and founding member and current Vice Chairman of the Rangitikei Rivers Catchment Collective (RRCC). Mark shares how the collective formed in 2017 to tackle localised riverbank feed-lotting issues and evolved into an expansive, data-driven entity. Today, the RRCC coordinates 125 monthly water testing sites and manages projects spanning sub-catchments across the Rangitīkei, Turakina, and Whangaehu rivers.
The conversation explores how catchment collectives can build regional trust, transition from raw water testing to advanced ecological indices, and address emerging environmental challenges. Mark highlights how spatial mapping, collaborative university research, and unified pest control projects help hill-country farmers take ownership of their landscapes, protect local freshwater quality, and build resilient rural communities.
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Show Notes:
Empowering Farmers Through Local Water Testing
Rather than relying solely on regional council monitoring, the RRCC established 125 monthly water testing sites across its sub-catchments. Testing for nitrogen, phosphorus, E. coli, and turbidity provides producers with transparent, localised data. Placing these real-time results directly in front of landowners creates instant buy-in and inspires peer-driven environmental improvement.
Uncovering Environmental Context via Science
In the Waikākahi tributary, monthly testing revealed phosphate levels nearly 20 times higher than expected. Rather than assuming agricultural runoff was the cause, the collective partnered with Massey University and Horizons Regional Council on a three-year PhD project. Geologic analysis revealed the elevated phosphate stemmed from natural rock formations rather than farming practices, illustrating the power of raw data over assumptions.
Moving Beyond Single-Metric Water Testing
The collective has expanded its environmental monitoring to include Macro-invertebrate Community Index (MCI) testing and habitat assessments across 80 sites. By training local coordinators to evaluate stream life, silting, and aquatic plants alongside regional council teams, the RRCC creates a complete, long-term picture of freshwater health across hill-country catchments.
Transitioning from Farm Plans to Integrated Catchment Plans
Building on individual Sustainable Land Use Initiative (SLUI) maps, the collective is aggregating farm data into comprehensive digital catchment plans. Layering spatial data for winter grazing, biodiversity, slope, and critical source areas allows the group to move past a scattered approach and direct environmental funding straight to high-priority hotspots.
Targeting Hotspots with Infrastructure and Pest Control
The RRCC actively tackles non-traditional environmental risks across the region. Projects range from fencing and planting native vegetation below gully wool-sheds to capture nutrient runoff, to launching a multi-regional thermal drone survey to map wild deer populations. Quantifying pest damage on winter forage crops allows the collective to design coordinated, landscape-scale control strategies.
Final Advice: Understand Your Footprint and Stay Connected
Mark encourages farmers and community leaders to proactively understand their environmental footprint rather than waiting for regulatory mandates. Keeping local sub-catchment groups active, sharing spatial data, and gathering at the local hall for a cup of tea or a sausage sizzle creates the social cohesion needed to navigate future land management challenges together.

This RaboTalk Growing our Future’s episode explores one of the biggest questions facing New Zealand agriculture: how farmers and growers can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while protecting profitability and long-term business resilience.
Blake Holgate is joined by Lee Matheson, Managing Director at Perrin Ag and co-author of The Path to 2050 white paper, for a practical discussion on why Lee believes the sector cannot rely on future technology alone, and why he considers emissions planning needs to sit at the heart of farm strategy.
In the podcast Lee talks about the importance of improving efficiency, understanding each farm’s emissions profile, making land-use decisions based on sound economics, and working collectively through peer groups, processors, industry bodies and policy settings.
The Path to 2050 white paper can be accessed here.
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Show Notes
Planning Beyond Technological Silver Bullets
The white paper poses a critical question: what if a methane vaccine or bolus is delayed, cost-prohibitive, or rejected by global markets? While technology remains an important focus, sector strategy must address how farm systems can lower emissions through practical land management, structured risk allocation, and commercially viable business models.
Capturing Value Through Efficient Management
Farming more efficiently and productively reduces both emissions intensity and gross footprint. While improved management practice cannot achieve deep national reduction targets on its own, optimising farm inputs and identifying underperforming land areas provides an immediate, practical starting point that strengthens overall business resilience.
The Necessity of Clear Market and Policy Signals
Producers are not inherently resistant to change, but they require unambiguous signals to justify shifting established farm systems. Meaningful behaviour change relies on clear economic incentives from processing companies, aligned messaging across industry bodies, and supportive government policy that de-risks innovative land-use transitions.
Overcoming Constraints on Alternative Land Uses
Replacing traditional ruminant systems with alternative land uses is not as simple as drawing up a blueprint. Expanding novel crops or horticulture requires substantial capital, specialised processing infrastructure, established supply chains, and proven export demand. Land-use change must remain driven by underlying economics rather than top-down directives.
Systemic Co-Benefits and Peer Collaboration
Emissions reduction cannot occur in isolation from wider environmental challenges like water quality and biodiversity. Addressing freshwater management often yields direct emissions co-benefits. Furthermore, navigating these complex choices in local peer groups allows farmers to share data, evaluate risk, and accelerate practical adoption.
Final Advice: Measure Your Profile and Start the Conversation
Lee encourages every producer to begin by accurately calculating their farm's emissions profile and discussing the results with local peers. Treating emissions as a key 10 to 15 year strategic business risk ensures that future land use and capital investment decisions keep the business resilient, competitive, and well-positioned for shifting market expectations.

In this fourth episode, of RaboTalk Growing our Future’s Catchment Catch-Ups series Blake Holgate speaks with Paul Turner from Taranaki Catchment Communities about how farmer-led catchment groups are helping rural communities take practical, locally driven action on water quality, biodiversity and environmental resilience.
Paul shares how 18 independent sub-catchment groups across Taranaki are working together to balance on-farm priorities with wider environmental goals, using tools such as 3D Lidar mapping to better understand water flow, identify risk areas and plan effective mitigations like riparian planting, wetlands and detention bunds.
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Show Notes:
The Farmer-Led Umbrella Structure
Formed five years ago to get ahead of complex water quality legislation, TCC acts as the governance and funding vehicle for 18 independent catchment groups. Paul emphasises that the entity remains strictly farmer-led, operating as a politically neutral conduit that translates council compliance rules into practical, stress-free options for the rural sector.
Managing the Mountain-to-Sea Landscape
Taranaki features a highly unique geography, with water flowing rapidly from the central maunga across the ring plain and out to the coast. This steep terrain creates short, high-altitude catchments. Rather than attempting a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach, TCC accommodates the distinct environmental profiles of local dairy, sheep, and beef producers.
Slowing the Movement of On-Farm Water
With intense weather events driving large, unpredictable volumes of rain across the region, creating permanent environmental mitigations is challenging. TCC focuses on training farmers to naturally slow water paths by utilising extended grass filter strips, deep riparian plantings, constructed wetlands, and strategically placed detention bunds that filter sediment and lower nutrient loadings.
Unlocking Spatial Precision with 3D Lidar
Through a collaborative project with the regional council and MPI, TCC has made detailed 3D Lidar contour mapping freely available to every landowner in Taranaki. This advanced remote sensing data highlights exact farm topography, ephemeral streams, flood zones, and critical source areas, putting producers well ahead of the freshwater farm planning game.
Connecting Native Eco-Corridors
Biodiversity projects achieve far higher community buy-in when they are tied to a collective regional narrative. Paul highlights the Pātea River Catchment Group’s massive landscape trapping network, which aims to bring native kiwi back to the local bush. By establishing green pathways alongside active weed and predator control, farmers are actively creating sustainable breeding grounds for vulnerable species like the Australasian bittern.
Silos Broken Down Through Regional Integration
Taranaki’s environmental success relies heavily on breaking down institutional silos. An active monthly integration group brings together rural support networks, regional council officers, and major dairy cooperatives to synchronise resources. This collaborative framework ensures training programs are shared efficiently, preventing community fatigue and maximising the return on investment.
Final Advice: Capitalise on the Power of the Group
Paul challenges farmers and growers to step out from their individual properties and actively join their local sub-catchment collective. Collective action is inherently empowering, providing isolated producers with shared access to plant funding, spatial data, and regulatory support. By working together within a unified catchment framework, communities can move past isolation, support their peers, and deliver visible environmental improvements across the entire landscape.

In this RaboTalk, Growing Our Future episode, Blake Holgate sits down with experienced governance leader, current AgriZeroNZ Chair, former Silver Fern Farms Chair and sixth-generation South Otago farmer Rob Hewett to discuss what resilient, future-focused farming looks like inside the farm gate.
Drawing on his farming background alongside his senior executive roles at Shell and directorships across major agribusinesses, Rob shares practical insights on applying boardroom discipline to farm decision-making, matching land classes to their highest-value use, managing market and climate risk, and positioning New Zealand’s premium protein for discerning global consumers.
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Show Notes
Applying Governance Principles to the Farm Floor
Rob outlines how farm-level governance centres on systematic risk management. Whether evaluating weather cycles, interest rate movements, or debt structures, farmers constantly implement risk mitigation strategies. Moving toward a formal governance structure helps producers evaluate their balance sheet capacity, make deliberate capital allocation choices, and run their properties with boardroom discipline.
Aligning Land Class with Highest Value Use
Successful long-term planning requires assessing each land class across a property to determine its highest and best use. Rob shares his simple farm philosophy: setting up efficient paddock and lane layouts while establishing trees on country that is too steep for tractors. Balancing hill-country forestry, carbon, wind generation, and intensive livestock systems diversifies income and optimises overall land utility.
Serving the Discerning Protein Consumer
Rob highlights the stark efficiency gap between poultry and sheep production. A single hen can yield 400 kilograms of meat per year, whereas a high-performing ewe produces roughly 25 kilograms. Because New Zealand red meat cannot compete as a low-cost, high-volume commodity, producers must treat it as a premium product. Farm practices around emissions, animal welfare, and water quality must align directly with the expectations of high-end international consumers.
Mitigating Climate Risk Through Integrated Feed Systems
To build drought resilience and protect soil structure during wet southern winters, Rob implemented a fodder beet and Raphno forage system paired with a techno-finishing design. By moving small cattle mobs across rotational grazing wedges, the farm achieves high feed utilisation and finishes all cattle by 18 months. This eliminates the expense and land impact of carrying stock through a second winter.
Unlocking Precision Productivity with Smart Tech
Agri-tech provides substantial bottom-line gains when paired with clear operational goals. Rob highlights how utilising smart shepherd collaring systems on 7,000 ewes tracks individual mother-to-lamb relationships as accurately as a DNA test. By measuring actual lambing performance through to weaning, the farm achieved a 15% compounding growth rate between its elite and commercial flocks.
Final Advice: The Process Drives Execution
Rob shares a central governance rule for every business owner: the process of reaching an end result is just as important as the result itself. High-value strategies fail without total buy-in. To execute plans effectively, particularly during intergenerational farm succession, business leaders must actively communicate, listen to new ideas, and build genuine engagement with everyone involved.