network for data exchange in agriculture

Yesterday, I joined an introductory field trip of first year students AgriCommerce and AgriScience from Massey University.

Foodstuffs
We first went to the local distribution centre (DC) of Foodstuffs (http://www.foodstuffs.co.nz/), which is one of the important wholesalers of NZ (57% market share in 2010; http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=1063...). It's a "proudly 100% New Zealand owned and operated organisation", made up of three regional co-operatives. Its main retail brands are Pak'n'Save, New World and FourSquare. Main competitor is Progressive Enterprises Ltd., which is Australian owned (Woolworth's Ltd) but NZ operated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Enterprises). Main retail brands of Progressive are Countdown, Woolworth's and Foodtown. I couldn't find an exact figure, but the market share is around 40%. So you could say that there is a kind of duopoly, sometimes characterized as the 'Aussies vs. Kiwis' battle, as is the case in several other sectors in NZ.
The distribution centre was relatively new (I thought 2006) and as far as I could judge it was a DC like many other. One thing which is nice to mention is that there was a direct transport connection with the neighbouring factory of Fonterra. So dairy products were directly transported to the centre on conveyor belts. Unfortunately, it was not allowed to enter the centre with open footwear and since I was wearing my sandals, I couldn't take a look inside. However, that gave me the opportunity to have some more discussion one of the operations managers, who was our host. I asked if they used advanced (ICT) technologies e.g. for tracking and tracing and if the trucks were able to divide in different compartments with different temperatures. But he couldn’t confirm this, although he had heard that there were some experiments going on. In comparison to my own country, The Netherlands, the logistic challenge for this DC is probably not that huge. There are not so many people and the transport area is relatively small. Nevertheless, he told us that it is necessary to look for opportunities to cut costs because of the aforementioned competition. So trainings and experiments are being conducted to see for example how damages and movements within the DC could be minimized. I would be interested to find out how big these costs are and how they are passed on to the price you pay as a consumer, because my own observations as a temporary NZ consumer are, that the food prices are quite high in comparison to Europe even though NZ is a main producer of most of these products. So I would expect it to be cheaper. It seems to be hot issue at the moment, because I saw many discussions on television and in the newspapers, mainly focusing on the price of milk.

Kitchener Park
Kitchener park is a 11.3 hectares of native bush reserve, a few minutes south of Fielding (see e.g. http://www.dayout.co.nz/attractions/attraction.aspx?attractionId=515). We visited this park to make the students more aware that we have a responsibility to care take our biophysical environment. An introduction was given by an employee of the regional council (Horizons). He emphasized the large impact of agriculture on the native ecosystem. The day before I was in the neighbourhood of Mangaweka and read an information sign of the Dept. of Conservation (DOC) which said that over the last 150 years 75% of the original rainforest was devastated and 97% (!) of the wetlands. Now that's huge. At the same time I should be aware of the same thing happened in Europe and several other places in the world already some centuries ago. The result is a patchy landscape with isolated pieces of bush, which can make it hard for several species (e.g. birds) to survive in. Another important issue is that the current agricultural ecosystem differs in many ways from the original forest ecosystem. Carbon and other nutrients were mainly stored aboveground in the forest and now they are mainly stored in the soil with potential risks of leaching and run-off. Or, in another dimension, the energy flow rate is much higher in the current agricultural system. It is also plausible that the water flow rate is much higher nowadays because it is less hampered by dense forests and swamp areas, potentially leading to problems with erosion and floods. The latter problem could possibly become more important in combination with current climate changes. A concomitant problem is the spreading of weeds form one area to the other, especially those (exotic) weeds that are unwanted. 'Wandering jew' was one of the most annoying weeds which is difficult to control.
The next question is what to do about this 'classical' competition between economy and ecology? Although quite some efforts are undertaken by the council, it seems that the budgets are not enough to work on real structural changes. And because most people are still tightly connected with the agricultural sector in NZ, it is difficult to make some real tough decisions in politics. One possible scenario is that there will be pressure from the market, i.e. the supermarkets and consumers. NZ is quite dependent on export and with the rising concern from consumers that want to have food production that is taking care of sound ecosystem management, this might make a change. The other scenario, which happened for example in The Netherlands, is that an increasing part of the population is not so tightly connected anymore with agricultural production and more drastic decisions can be taken by the government. I don’t want to say that the production systems in The Netherlands are much more sustainable, but governments are much more able to take effective regulatory decisions. How long either scenario in NZ will take, I don't know. At least this visit has made me think a bit different about '100% pure New Zealand', the slogan used by the NZ Tourism sector to attract tourists. Because, how pure is NZ still actually?

Dairy Farmer
Finally we paid a short visit to a dairy farmer. I forgot to write down the exact figures, but I understood it was quite a big dairy farmer by NZ's standards. It was clear that he was very proud on his farm and the production increase he had reached. It became clear to me that dairy farming was - and probably still is - booming business in NZ. What stroke me, was the way he talked about his cows when he was saying that he was looking for bigger cows to obtain a higher efficiency and therefore he was merely looking at them as 'fermentation barrels'. This is of course a common rational way of thinking, especially from the farmer's point of view, but it is a very industrialized way of looking at animals. You can question if a cow is not more than just a production factor.
When I asked about the big challenges that he was facing, he mentioned two things:
1) staffing: get well-educated and experienced staff
2) environmental issues, mainly related to effluent
Related to 1, he didn't mention a lot about new technology like automation, which will be an important issue for me to go more in-depth in future visits. What he did mention is that he expected a lot more from overseas technology to further increase production efficiency. He said that point 2 would become a big driver for the future, which is interesting, but we didn’t discuss in-depth what he was going to do about it. Although I heard already that there’s a lot going on in this area, I am still more interested how farmers deal with these environmental issues.

I would like to conclude with some main questions, which may provoke some discussion:

1. Are the food prices in NZ really that much higher in comparison with e.g. Western Europe? And if yes, what is the main factor causing this?
2. How far is NZ food production taking care of sound environmental management?
3. In relation to the previous point, is there already any external market pressure on the system to produce more environmentally sound and/or is the public opinion changing?
4. Also related: how high are these environmental issues actually on the agenda of producers?

I hope to find some answers myself, but if other can help me, please, comments are welcome and maybe we can have some good discussion.