94 | Growing leaders in food and fibre 2022 Nuffield Scholars Anthony Taueki, Lucie Douma and Parmindar Singh. Rural Leaders CEO Chris Parsons (below). Creating eighty-two percent of New Zealand’s earnings, the food and fibre sector, which includes producers right through to exporters, is the country’s most consequential sector; lest we forget. Chris Parsons from Rural Leaders, the organisation delivering the primary industry’s most prestigious leadership programmes, says the food and fibre sector is also consequential in terms of its relationship and reciprocity with the land and water to our environment. He says, looking ahead, the intersection between global population growth and environmental stewardship is our food system. “If we’re going to genuinely get to a point of balance between global population growth and environmental stewardship, we’re going to need strong leadership. That is really important right now because there are changes that are increasing in their rapidity, and which are complex and interconnected. We’re not going to be able to manage our way through that without strong leaders who can re-think how we’re doing things and redesign our food system for a new era.” Those changes traverse every facet – not the least of which are environmental change, technological change and geopolitical change. Chris points to rising tensions in the South China Sea, around the Taiwan Straits. “Over 50% of our produce is exported to countries that are adjacent to that piece of water. We genuinely need to be thinking about what our future markets are going to be like and how we build relationships with countries we might not have spent a lot of time building relationships with before, if we’re going to diversify in sufficient time.” Rural Leaders is a registered charitable trust, strongly supported by industry-good organisations and industry backers who provide key investment back into leadership. Rural Leaders delivers the longstanding Kellogg Rural Leadership programme and Nuffield New Zealand Farming scholarship and, from this year, Lincoln University and Rural Leaders will deliver the Value Chain Innovation Programme. “Both the Kellogg and Nuffield programmes are aimed at developing strategic leaders. Food and fibre is one of the most undereducated sectors in New Zealand and so, in addition to building their strategic leadership skills, we also want to increase the qualifications we have as a sector. The more rapid the change, the more complex the environment, the more we need to think through RURAL SERVICES » Rural Leaders the puzzle. Rural Scholarship is different to an academic scholarship in the sense that academic scholarship is about discipline, knowledge and the ability for critical analysis. Rural Scholarship is about creating impact. Having done their research projects on our courses people often go on to live them, or, they team up with other scholars and build businesses or social enterprises.” Chris says, post-Rogernomics the ag sector was focused on efficiency, and New Zealand has some of the most efficient farmers in the world. “I’ve been told that the average sheep and beef farm has 1.5 FTE and that’s a testament to our efficiency. But that makes it really hard to manage all the things coming down the pike in terms of integrated farm planning, etcetera, etcetera. “We’ve been lucky that we’ve had the baby boomers and millennials, but that big pool of workers has gone and Generation Z (Zoomers) is not a very big cohort. We can no longer think about people as human resources. We have to genuinely think about them as ‘people’ otherwise they will get up and leave. “Right now, the statistics in our sector are terrible. For every ten people who join our sector, in three years seven will have left. Richard Loader Rural Leaders delivers the longstanding Kellogg Rural Leadership programme and Nuffield New Zealand Farming scholarship. Through good leadership and engaging with your teams, there is a material benefit to profitability. Gallup estimates a 23% lift in profitability. But there’s also the wellness of your team, and the community is materially impacted.” Leadership is central to treating people as humans and dealing with the complex problems that are coming, and coming fast, and to build profit that will benefit our communities and nation.
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