RaboTalk – Growing our future

In this episode of RaboTalk, Growing Our Future, Blake Holgate talks with Matt Highway, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Association of Resource Management (NZARM) who shares practical advice on managing environmental challenges without getting caught up in changing regulations. He explains why focusing on outcomes, tackling your biggest on-farm risks, and connecting with local catchment groups can deliver better results for both the environment and your bottom line.
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Show notes:
In this episode, Blake speaks with Matt Highway, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Association of Resource Management (NZARM), to explore sector capability and strategic land management. With over 25 years of experience across regional councils, the dairy sector, and industry consultancy, Matt highlights how the profession has evolved from its early roots in soil conservation to a modern focus on integrated catchment management and neutral, nature-based business solutions.
The conversation focuses on how land managers can navigate regulatory uncertainty by concentrating entirely on environmental outcomes rather than changing compliance policies. By identifying on-farm risks and leveraging collective community frameworks, Matt explains how farmers can utilise emerging technologies and localised networks to make pragmatic decisions that protect both their landscapes and their business profitability.
Discussion Topics
Building Sector Capability
Established in 1953, NZARM has shifted its modern strategy away from political advocacy to focus completely on capability building and professional connection. Matt highlights their collaborative capability project, which features an online skill mapping database that allows land professionals, catchment coordinators, and organisations to track environmental skill sets and connect expertise across regions.
Accessing Cheap Data over Silver Bullets
While technological advancements like AI and weekly satellite passes provide massive, low-cost datasets, the primary challenge remains applying these tools practically on the ground. Matt warns against chasing silver bullets, explaining that popular edge of field widgets like constructive wetlands and detention bunds must be deployed selectively within the right landscape context to avoid major financial inefficiencies.
A Structured Approach to Farm Risk
When farmers look to step up their environmental performance, Matt advises them to treat the process like managing financial risk. Landowners should systematically evaluate which areas of their property are most vulnerable to flooding, drought, or critical source area runoff. Prioritising action means choosing the single biggest risk that can be mitigated for the lowest relative investment cost.
Context-Driven Measuring and Monitoring
Water quality testing is a slow brew that can take five years to deliver meaningful trends. Rather than taking on heavy individual monitoring costs, producers should ensure their farm plans align with their wider catchment context. If a downstream lake is driven by phosphorus, targeted investments on the farm floor should address that specific asset rather than tracking irrelevant metrics.
Outcomes Over Policy Announcements
Although environmental regulations have experienced significant political shifts, the fundamental goals of land management have not changed. Healthy soils, clean drinking water, and profitable businesses remain the constant baseline. By scenario testing strategies against these permanent objectives, farmers can insulate their operations against future policy cycles.
The Power of Catchment Collectives
Reflecting on regional networks, Matt notes that effective land management relies far more on community cohesion than on pure science. Regionally focused catchment collectives have grown into powerful, supportive entities that build vast local databases. These groups provide a safe space for peer learning, channel funding, and serve as a collective voice for isolated producers.
Final Advice: Connect for a Higher Return
Matt encourages farmers to look past technological widgets over the next twelve months and focus entirely on connecting with their local catchment group. Joining a collective offers a high return on investment by providing direct access to shared expertise, plant funding, and regulatory updates. Aligning with a community framework allows producers to target exciting, tangible goals, like restoring local native species, while naturally fulfilling their wider environmental obligations.

In this second episode of RaboTalk Growing our Future’s new Catchment Catch-Ups series, host Blake Holgate speaks with Alexis Wadworth a central Southland farmer and director for both Thriving Southland and Catchment Communities Aotearoa.
Their conversation focuses on how the Makarewa Headwaters Catchment Group shifted from a baseline study of water quality to tackling a massive wild pest problem. Alexis shares the economic and environmental realities of managing over 7,500 wild deer and pigs across their 42,000 hectare catchment, demonstrating how robust, farmer-led data can open doors to funding, attracting expert advice and engaging government agencies.
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Show notes:
The Makarewa Headwaters Origin
Formed in 2019 during a period of intense regulatory pressure around winter grazing and water quality, the group began as a way for local farmers to band together and clear the muddy waters of compliance. Supported by Thriving Southland, their core objective has always been to leave a swimmable, drinkable waterway that future generations can be proud of.
Overcoming the Administrative Burden
Alexis highlights that asking busy, volunteer farmers to run community organisations is a major hurdle. Accessing dedicated support, like a catchment coordinator from Thriving Southland, is fundamental. It removes the administrative weight, allowing farmers to focus on strategic direction rather than getting bogged down in the day-to-day paperwork.
The Shift to Pest Management
While the group started with water quality science through their LUCI-Ag project, testing quickly revealed a surprising risk: the degradation of the native bush at the headwaters. In 2023, they launched a revival project to understand, control, and monitor the severe pressure caused by wild deer and pigs.
The 2 Million Dollar Annual Cost
A comprehensive survey combining farmer feedback, ecological assessments, and aerial thermal imaging revealed over 7,500 wild animals living in the surveyed area. Alexis notes the economic impact was calculated at over 2 million dollars annually due to destroyed winter crops, pasture rooting, weed tracking, and the fact that the pest population consumed enough feed to carry an additional 5,000 ewes.
Exclusion Plots and Regina Generation
To combat the snowballing pest numbers, landowners are working with commercial venison harvesters and opening gates to recreational hunters. To measure the exact impact of these efforts, the group is establishing 10 exclusion plots across varying forest canopies to see how quickly the forest floor can regenerate when all browsing pests are removed.

The Power of Ground-Up Data
Alexis admits that taking time to study and package a formal report went against the farming instinct to just get out and do the doing. However, having a polished, fact-based document has been an absolute game changer for unlocking funding, attracting expert advice, and engaging government agencies.
Final Advice: Voice Your Hesitations
Alexis encourages anyone sitting on the fence to get involved. If you have reservations about time or direction, those exact hesitations are what the group needs to hear to shape its focus. Progress is rarely linear when driven from the ground up, but the shared knowledge gained along the way is just as valuable as the end goal.

In this episode of RaboTalk Growing our Future episode, host Blake Holgate speaks with Suzie Greenhalgh, Project Lead for the Moving the Middle programme, a research project aimed at giving farmers the confidence to voluntarily improve their environmental performance on farms.
Suzie discusses the findings from this multi-partner research project, which launched in 2020, to understand how to support the large group of farmers in the middle, who sit between the early adopters and those resistant to change.
By analysing the complex network of pressures surrounding farmers, Suzie explains how industry bodies and policy makers can adjust their approach to support farmers and growers who want to make positive change but often feel constrained by competing pressures.
Suzie challenges farmers to identify one positive environmental action they would not regret doing even if compliance rules changed tomorrow.
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Show Notes
The Moving the Middle Concept
The program aims to give the majority of farmers the confidence to voluntarily improve their environmental performance. Suzie explains that many producers want to make positive changes but feel disempowered by competing industry pressures. The research focuses on how to intervene in the surrounding system to give farmers the headspace needed to move forward.

A Systems Approach to Change
Launched during high regulatory uncertainty in 2020, the program covers four deep pressure points identified by farmers: policy interventions, debt and investment practices, trusted agents of change, and community narratives. An overarching systems piece ensures researchers capture how these distinct areas intersect to impact daily decision making.

Moving Beyond Cookie-Cutter Extension
New Zealand has a habit of over-relying on single extension models, like flooding the sector with demonstration field days when they become popular. Suzie emphasises that a practice that is simple for one farm system can be incredibly difficult for another. Extension must be tailored to a farmer’s specific context rather than assuming non-adoption is simply a lack of willingness.

Insights from Māori Agribusiness
The research highlights that Māori agribusiness cannot be treated as a single block. By mapping the distinct stages of the journey from emerging to thriving, the program identifies the exact resources needed at different times. Collaborative work on 100-year farm plans demonstrated how long-term thinking completely shifts short-term operational decisions.

Shallow vs. Deep System Levers
The sector naturally defaults to shallow system interventions, like tweaking an advisory tool, because they offer quick wins. However, transformational change happens deeper in the system. The program works with schools, next-generation change makers, and banks to develop deep levers, such as cheap loans for on-farm environmental trials.

Shifting from Policy to Farmer-Led Action
Looking ahead, Suzie envisions a sector where environmental progress is driven entirely by farmers rather than policy. For this to happen, technology providers and researchers must ensure new innovations actually fit existing farm systems, rather than blaming producers when uptake is slow.

Final Advice: Make No-Regrets Decisions
Suzie challenges farmers to step back from the daily operational noise and give themselves the luxury of long-term planning. To regain agency in an uncertain regulatory environment, producers should identify one positive environmental action that they would not regret doing even if compliance rules changed tomorrow. Starting with a single, secure choice is the best way to build lasting confidence.

In the first episode of RaboTalk Growing our Future’s new Catchment Catch-Ups series, host Blake Holgate sits down with Thriving Southland Project Lead, Richard Kyte to explore how farmer-led catchment groups are creating practical, locally driven solutions for some of the biggest challenges facing New Zealand farming today.
From improving water quality and managing sediment, to building climate resilience and strengthening farm profitability, Richard shares why localised science, peer-to-peer learning and voluntary community action are so powerful. Featuring insights from New Zealand’s largest catchment collective, this episode is a valuable listen for farmers and growers wanting real-world ideas, optimism and inspiration from people making a difference on the ground.
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Show Notes:
From the Lake District to Southland Collective
Richard shares his background moving from mixed farming in the UK to the New Zealand dairy sector and his extension work with DairyNZ. Now leading Thriving Southland, he helps provide 37 independent catchment groups with the information and funding resources they need to own and drive their own environmental projects.
The Power of Localised Science
Generic environmental rules often miss the mark, so Thriving Southland focuses on sub-catchments. Richard explains how using radiometric data to understand specific soil and water dynamics helped one community identify mobile soils as the root cause of an E. coli issue, allowing them to precisely target their sediment management and maximise their return on investment.
Integrating Water Quality and Climate Resilience
While greenhouse gas emissions can feel like a harder sell on a day-to-day basis, Richard emphasises that climate resilience, farm profitability, and water quality are completely interlinked. Projects like Carbon Neutral Dipton allow sheep, beef, and dairy farmers to collaborate on emissions mitigations and land use optimisation without separate legislative mandates.
The Extension Model and Peer Learning
The historic success of New Zealand agriculture relies on farmers talking to farmers. Catchment groups foster this extension model, allowing early adopters to pave the way while others observe and catch up. This peer-to-peer approach builds genuine confidence and drives world leading change at a manageable pace.
The Value of a Cheese Roll
Building wide community engagement is less about rigid dictation and more about social connection. Richard notes that the real wins often happen over a cup of tea and a cheese roll, providing a vital social wellness forum for isolated farmers to realise they are not facing seasonal or regulatory challenges alone.
Final Advice: Look Back to Move Forward
Richard encourages any farmer curious about their local catchment group to simply put their head in the door without fear of a heavy commitment. True progress is voluntary and takes time. By reflecting on how far practices like winter grazing have transformed the Southland landscape over the last decade, farmers can find the optimism needed to face today's challenges.

With power prices and weather disruptions putting new pressure on farm operations, this RaboTalk Growing our Future episode explores practical ways New Zealand farmers and growers can build energy resilience while improving the bottom line.
Blake Holgate is joined by EECA’s Chris McArthur to discuss what the Solar on Farms programme is seeing across demonstration farms nationwide, including how today’s solar stacks up on cost and performance.
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Show Notes:
EECA and the Energy Transition
Chris explains the role of EECA in promoting energy efficiency and renewables. Growing up on a sheep and beef farm, he has seen solar technology become cheaper and more powerful, making it a practical choice for modern agriculture. The organisation focuses on providing impartial information to help farmers make strategic decisions.
The Solar on Farms Programme
To provide producers with up-to-date data, EECA has established 37 demonstration farms across various sectors and regions. These farms monitor performance and share the unvarnished truth about the installation process, helping other growers understand the benefits and barriers without the typical marketing noise.
Building Resilience with Batteries
While solar saves money from day one, batteries provide critical resilience. Chris notes that a battery can prevent the chaos of power cuts during milking and highlights a 2025 Southland case study where a farm continued operating through major storms. While the upfront cost is higher, the ability to milk through an outage is a major risk mitigant.
Sizing and System Costs
Investment levels vary significantly based on farm type. Systems range from small 10,000 dollar setups for sheep and beef units to large 500,000 dollar investments for high-use dairy and irrigation sheds. The goal is to right-size the system to match on-farm usage, as exporting excess power to the grid often yields lower financial returns.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Farmers must consider dust management on panels, especially near unsealed roads, as it can significantly affect output. Another key consideration is the complexity of multiple electricity connections (ICPs). Chris recommends ensuring solar is installed on the meter with the highest load to maximise the return on investment.
The Future: Electrification by 2035
Looking ahead, Chris predicts a major shift toward the electrification of farm vehicles and heavy machinery. This transition will reduce reliance on long, volatile supply chains for liquid fuels, replacing them with locally produced on-farm energy that is visualised and managed through smart apps.
Final Advice: Start Saving Today
Chris encourages farmers not to wait for the next big technological leap. Solar technology is already at a compelling price point, and as soon as a system is switched on, it begins paying for itself. The best time to start locking in energy costs and building operational resilience is now.