Farming in the New Age

By: Peter Floyd

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Source: Rural News - 19 August 2008

Preparing for the ‘Rural Banking, Financial & Professional Service Summit’ being held this week has been an interesting challenge. I was asked to speak on ‘Preparing for a New Age of Agriculture’, and you can imagine the fun I have had writing my address  

Of course I have lots to say! The future of farming is something I am very passionate about because I believe there is a firmer foundation to build on now than I have ever seen before in my lifetime. Farmers now have the technologies to measure what they are doing and predict profits accurately, and this leads to highly profitable management strategies. With such tools at their fingertips, how can they go wrong?  

To meet the needs of the new age of agriculture and a new generation of farm business managers there are going to have to be a number of changes in rural marketing. Anyone marketing farm products will need to be sure they feed back the right signals to their suppliers because farmers can respond to them much more rapidly now. The meat and wool industries, for example, give woefully inadequate information to farmers, and it is no wonder they are losing confidence in the sustainability of marketing companies.

Farmer focus is turning increasingly to sustainability of business systems and of profits. The age of the quick fertiliser fix with soluble phosphate and nitrogen is coming to an end. Its cost to the farmer and the environment is becoming too high. High nitrogen use produces high nitrogen fodder, and over winter and spring it is expensive to harvest in terms of both soil and pasture damage and losses to the environment. It is not just the pollution of ground water by nitrates and the increase in NO2 greenhouse gas, it is the sheer waste of money that need not have been spent if profit-based decisions had been made.  

And don’t believe for a moment that expensive nitrification inhibitors are the answer. What is the point in buying and applying expensive chemicals to try to counteract the problems caused by overuse of other expensive chemicals? The whole idea of high input farming based on more and more chemicals is nonsense, and unsustainable.eCOGENT farmers have already come to  

The New Age of Agriculture will forget about frequent cultivation and short-term monoculture grass cropping. Permanent pastures with a diverse range of species, perhaps using cultivars adapted to particular soil types and microclimates, are the future of pastoral farming. Metabolisable energy as a measure of pasture feed value will go out the window, and Brix levels will take its place as a more accurate and certainly more convenient management tool. .

There will also be much more experimentation with mineral mixes and farming practices that encourage diversity in soil biology too. Ok, I know some died-in-the-wool soil chemists will shout “snake oil”, but farmers are not stupid. Many that I have contact with are basing their unorthodox fertiliser decisions on profit and sustainability, and are laughing all the way to the bank

I The New Age farmer will depend less on supplementary feeds. Many eCOGENT members have calculated the cost of non-grass feed inputs and, when the analyses have been done, have found that reducing herd or flock size and matching stock numbers more closely to feed availability is more profitable and much less hassle. It is also more sustainable.

Much more will be understood in the New Age about soil structure, soil biology and soil management and its effect on pasture quality. Farmers will be aware of building topsoil depth to provide a more productive matrix for plant roots and also to sequester substantial amounts of atmospheric carbon. ‘Carbon farming’ will become a viable way of helping the country meet its Kyoto Protocol obligations, and farmers that meet the criteria will be able to sell carbon credits on the international carbon markets as some Australian farmers are already doing.

In anticipation of this, eCOGENT farmers will be benchmarking their soil carbon levels next month. While some industries in New Zealand are aiming to become carbon neutral, farmers will be able to go one better – they will become carbon positive, locking up more carbon than they emit. Just imagine the marketing advantage of being able to say with confidence that your farm products are “carbon positive”!

Finally, in terms of financial services the New Age of Agriculture will usher in a new type of manager in financial institutions. No longer will he or she be obsessed with cash flow, EFS and other lazy, rule-of-thumb calculations that mean nothing. Lending criteria will be based on accurate profit predictions generated from sophisticated analyses tailored to each individual farm business. This is already happening, it’s just that some in the finance industry haven’t quite caught up with it.

Yes, I will have a lot of fun at the Summit, and I will impress on delegates that every farmer has the challenge and the opportunity to make the decisions that will exploit the competitive market advantages now available to them. The most successful service providers will be the ones that help farmers seize that opportunity.

Peter Floyd is the Managing Director of eCOGENT.biz
www.ecogent.biz ph 0800 433 276

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