Resilient pastures

High value animal products from New Zealand’s pasture-based livestock systems have consistently earned $25-$30B in export earnings per year for the country over the past 5 years (Ministry for Primary Industries 2021). Total earnings from dairy and meat of $30.5B in 2020 equate to 35% of New Zealand’s total goods and services export earnings of $86.4B. The importance of this revenue to the national economy has been shown in stark relief recently with the Covid-19 pandemic substantially reducing the earnings generated by other key export sectors such as tourism and international education. While our pasture-based livestock industries have ridden the coronavirus wave well compared with other sectors of the economy, they are facing change at a scale and pace not seen since the far-reaching reforms to the economic settings for agriculture introduced by the Lange Government in the early 1980s. Locally, the ramping-up of government environmental policies beginning c. 2011 has resulted in stringent regulations controlling the amounts of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and sediment that can be discharged into freshwater from farm systems. The most recent iteration in this policy sequence includes new National Environmental Standards for Freshwater, and the new National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPS-FW), which came into force in September 2020.    These policies reverse the trends of the past two decades when agricultural productivity grew substantially in the virtual absence of regulation to control the environmental externalities of systems intensification. While the initial impacts on land use and farming practices have been localised (e.g., in the lake districts of Rotorua and Taupo), disruption to the farm systems that have emerged over the past two decades, especially intensive dairy systems, will be widespread in the future. For example, Doole et al. (2021) estimated that the new standards introduced in 2020 will require about 40% of New Zealand’s 11400 dairy farms to reduce nitrate leaching by an average of around 42% relative to requirements in previous iterations of the NPS-FW. The most significant global force driving change in New Zealand agriculture is climate change, via New Zealand’s commitment to the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon (C) emissions to net zero by 2050, C-neutral strategies being implemented by some of our largest customers (e.g., Nestle 2020), and the physical impacts of climate change on conditions for plant growth (e.g., Keller et al. 2021). Of direct and significant relevance to the livestock industries are the methane emission reduction targets proposed by government, of between 27% and 47% below 2017 levels by 2050. Meanwhile our international competitors have been steadily closing the gap in costs of production with New Zealand, and now have other fields on which to out-compete us (e.g., in C footprint) unless we can keep pace.