Interviews with 20 farmers in Southland and Canterbury showed significant tensions between what farmers think is good practice and what regulators, corporations, industry bodies, and auditors see as good practice. This becomes important when non-farmer entities regulate or audit parts of farm systems or particular practices (e.g. freshwater or biodiversity or staff safety) rather than thinking about the relationships between the different parts of a farm system and the wider system the farm sits in. Optimisation and efficiency gains are also often tackled as parts.
Farmers, on the other hand, must balance whole-of-farm health, prosperity, and resilience. Resilience is an ‘emergent property’ of a system, whereby the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Resilience comes from functional relationships between the parts (e.g. freshwater and animal welfare). Importantly, there is often some trade-off between efficiency and resilience, because resilience requires a degree of redundancy or fat in the system.
Our interviews with farmers showed mixed views on regulation and auditing. Some claimed these processes had driven the sector to ‘lift their game’. Others claimed they drove farmers to focus on profit, trim the fat, and ‘farm to the number’, thereby compromising farmer, staff, animal and environmental well-being. Regulation and auditing processes can prompt innovation on the farm, but because these are often parts-based rather than system-based, innovation may be bitty or superficial. Regulatory and auditing processes may therefore promote ‘disjointed incrementalism’ (Lindblom 1959 ) and a loss of resilience. Regulo-auditing processes aimed at efficiency-in-parts may be making farming – and farmers – more fragile than agile.
All the farmers interviewed for this research agreed that improving water quality, biodiversity, animal welfare, etc. is critical. Nonetheless, stitching these together is a systemic challenge for everyone connected to the farming system, not just for farmers.
An example is catch-cropping, where excess nitrogen is ‘caught’ and the crop is fed to stock. However, achieving a win-win depends on a science sector undertaking long-term research into nitrogen capture in different settings with different crops; affordable and timely access to finance and labour; and software that ‘sees’ nitrogen capture for compliance purposes. Reliable and credible intermediaries (such as Thriving Southland, which supports catchment groups) and stable policy settings would make systemic approaches – and a resilient agricultural sector – more viable.
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