Designing agricultural policy for a future in farming.

Recent policies designed to influence land management have failed to fully comprehend the influence of deregulation on farm systems and culture in New Zealand. This oversight, and increasingly academic language, in addition to ‘intention gaps’ limiting the monetary value of improved environmental attributes have fostered a widening gulf between how policy makers and farmers perceive the potential for change.

This failure to understand one another can be resolved if public policy and agricultural leadership advance a consensus to develop common language, invest in systems which prioritise people and foster trust, and lastly by defending the time, resources and space required to embed such a shift.