“We support a lot of local rural businesses and nurseries and also train rural young people to be our field advisers, working alongside the more-than-755 landowners and groups we support to take action – protecting wetlands, planting riparian margins, fencing off remnant bush and waterways, and retiring and planting steep eroding hillsides.
“We would love to tell our story to others.”
If you would like to be part of The Country Fast Five series, get in touch with Kem at kem.ormond@nzme.co.nz. Or fill in the form here.
Justine Daw
What excites you about each day? What gets you up in the morning?
KMR supports farmers and landowners across a huge catchment to do the things they want to do – to leave a legacy for future generations, to take care of the land and waterways, to protect special places and to grow and diversify revenue on farm.
We are a voluntary programme – no one has to work with us – so KMR takes pride in really listening to the farmers, catchment groups, community groups, hapū and marae groups and families working with us.
Ultimately, everyone wins when the valuable soils on the land stay where they are meant to be – on the land.
Both Northland and Auckland have experienced such extreme weather (cyclones and floods) in 2023 and now with drought declared in Northland ...
KMR’s work is helping to build resilience to future weather events and also to connect communities through our work on protecting and restoring waterways.
What is your wish for agriculture?
NZ is the proud producer of food for over 40 million people around the world every year.
It is the envy of many parts of the world – including for the quality of our natural environment.
However, increasingly, it is the consumers of our food, the large global food companies that buy, market and sell our food, who will set our environmental standards.
We shouldn’t be afraid of this.
NZ has always had to meet changing market conditions and buyer preferences.
We have the capability and land and innovation to diversify our revenues and meet new and more stringent environmental requirements.
It is a challenge, but one that is possible if we have the right mindset – embracing new technology, focusing our environmental activities on farm to the areas on farm that really matter, and chipping away at meeting the coming standards.
Fonterra is a good example of that – helping its suppliers to meet global greenhouse gas emissions standards.
And initiatives like KMR can also support that – we invest in projects such as planting and native regeneration that can “count” towards meeting these standards.
It’s an exciting time and one NZ Inc probably needs to work together on to ensure we can maintain our market position.
I see a real opportunity for land uses (plural!) to provide diverse revenue to farmers – they are pastoral landowners running stock, they farm carbon (and hopefully biodiversity credits too), they have woodlots which provide regular income from timber, honey and native bioactives, they grow food and fibre on appropriate parts of the farm.
And Northland is well placed – we have an excellent growing climate for many fast-growing trees, our natives grow well here and we are increasingly trialling exciting subtropical crops such as dragonfruit, papaya, mango and hemp. The future is ours to create.
What is your most New Zealand moment/memory?
I grew up on the sea.
One time, I remember Dad taking us out to get pipi and spear flounder on the Kaipara Harbour.
I must have been very young, but I remember the smell of life, of seagrass in the sun, of shellfish and fish.
It was a hugely productive harbour in the past and will be again – the efforts of so many people the length and breadth of the Kaipara Moana harbour is so inspiring.
What’s the biggest challenge your industry is facing – right now or into the future?
Sometimes the uncertainty of our operating environment gets in the way.
Farmers want to do the right thing, but they also want to know that what they are doing meets regulations and environmental standards.
KMR has been operating without environmental backstops for over three years now and we look forward to the forthcoming clarity on Freshwater Farm Plans, carbon settings under the NZ Emissions Trading Scheme and, hopefully, settings for biodiversity credits.
All of these things will reward farmers for doing the right thing and KMR can help with this through our grant investments.
What does our landscape mean to you?
The New Zealand landscape is so variable.
Even in Northland and Auckland where I work, I can see vastly different types of landscapes in a short space of time – from tall, forested mountains through to wetlands, rivers and streams in pastoral valleys, through to steep gullies, right through to estuaries, plains and seashores of the Kaipara.
The landscape up here is super-diverse, with nine planting eco-districts across the Kaipara Moana catchment, including eco-districts that require highly salt and sand-adapted species.
In KMR, we often talk about a mosaic of land uses across the landscape – recognising that the landscape is super-diverse and that land use can echo the carrying capacity of the land in ways that support resilience on farm and in communities.
