Federated Farmers: Farming about resilience

Dr William Rolleston

The looming drought in the central South Island and beyond reminds us that nature can be unpredictable and farmers face many risks as they go about their business.

Climate is one aspect but biosecurity threats and market uncertainty all play their part.

This, of course, is part of the stimulating challenge of agriculture and overcoming these adversities, or surviving in the face of them, contributes to the immense satisfaction a career in agriculture can bring.

We don't face these adversities alone and while many of us work in relative isolation, it is often the communal effort that gets us through -- be it through cooperative action in the market, joint investment in beneficial projects or joint funding of research and development.

Competition also plays its part and in some aspects, farming is a competition of survival of the fittest as we each strive to do things better tomorrow than we did yesterday.

All of this creates an industry that is resilient to those external risks. If I think back to the droughts of the '70s and '80s in South Canterbury, I realise we were not as resilient as we are now.

We have more robust pasture species, we use water more efficiently and we have developed storage projects like the Opuha Dam, which has postponed the drought crunch point by many weeks.

We have also used technology to manipulate information to our advantage. This is particularly evident in better weather forecasting, allowing farmers to make high quality decisions much earlier.

The digital revolution has given us these tools but it has also given us the tools to tap into the ultimate information system for life -- genetics.

While the biotechnology revolution is new in agriculture, we are already benefiting from accelerated breeding through gene identification.

The PSA outbreak in kiwifruit has been mitigated due to our knowledge of genes and disease resistance.

Resilience is born of diversity, but also through the creation of infrastructure such as irrigation and water storage and by continuing to improve our productivity and product quality by harnessing the power of information and science for the benefit of a demanding customer base.