Cam Henderson, a dairy farmer from Oxford, North Canterbury, wears a number of different hats. He is the Director on the Ballance Agri-nutrients Board, and a Federated Farmers representative on the He Waka Eke Noa Partnership, as well as being a Kellogg and a Nuffield Scholar. Cam grew up on a dairy farm in the Waikatō and is from a multi-generational farming family. He’s always loved problem solving and the technical side of farming, and after a few years in the corporate sector for Fonterra, he quit the corporate life and settled in Canterbury on a dairy farm.
For Cam, sustainability is all about balance. This balance is increasingly important as the complexity of the issues we are facing becomes more apparent and we understand how agriculture impacts issues and how the issues impact agriculture in return.
“I guess taking the sustainability goals as an example that you can really work hard in achieving one of those. But arguably, unless you have a consideration of the whole lot, then you’re arguably not sustainable because you’re imbalanced one way or the other and I guess farming has probably been through that same path that we’ve been very production orientated and then very profit orientated and now it’s trying to balance actually what do we wanna be doing to ensure that we can achieve many things all at the same time and for a long time. I know myself, I’ve been on that journey, especially as a young farmer of production and profitability and trying to make money and we don’t wanna not do those things, but if we wanna be in this game for a long time, that we do need to balance all the aspects of farming from people, animals, the planet, environment as well. I don’t know if that’s something it just takes time to understand how all those aspects interact, but you certainly learn very quickly that if you don’t have things in balance, then things can go off the rails pretty quickly, so yeah to me sustainability is all about balance.”
Cam’s involvement in the He Waka Eke Noa Partnership process
Cam has had the unique position of being a representative for Federated Farmers as one of the 13 industry partners in the development of the He Waka Eke Noa Partnership policies. He jumped at the chance to be involved as he saw it as a great chance to have a sizable impact in the industry and bring a farmer’s perspective to it because there was a lot of levy bodies, scientists and policy analysts involved in the conversation, but actually very few on the ground farmers.
“I think we’ve seen probably more recently when the farmer voice disappears from that decision making, that we end up with a lot of perverse outcomes and it just sets the whole process back. I think for good, robust policy making that’s gonna stand the test of time that farmers do need to be involved in this conversation the whole way through.”
Cam joined the steering committee about halfway through the process, and found it challenging, rewarding and depressing, all at the same time, but he also found it interesting to be behind the scenes and see how it’s played out at that level. However, Cam sees this area regarding climate action as a hidden opportunity if we can get our mindset in the right space with climate change. The approach was unique in the way in which it got 13 industry partners around a table to come up with a solution to a problem and is something that Cam hopes the industry is given the opportunity to do again in the future. Cam also highlights that the process allowed the partners to move from an ‘us versus them’ mindset towards the other partners, to a ‘us versus the problem’ approach – reframing from an individual-centric to collective-centric approach.
“I mean, it was ground-breaking, really. We’ve never, the industry has never done that and it’s passed, you know, arguably there was a lot of criticism that the various partners worked against each other, particularly in environmental policy, that there would be a particular law change and each of the partners would jump in there with their own people and argue their own case and as farmers we might have been paying levy or membership to most of them and seeing it as being quite a destructive process. So I don’t know whether you want to give the government credit for putting us all in the room and saying right, you sort out, argue.
It’d be great if we got this opportunity again in any upcoming policy issues to say, look, how about we sit down as a team and try and come up with their own solution. It wasn’t easy, at all. You know, there was a lot of a lot of, I guess, understanding or listening going on in the early stages to understand where each partner was coming from, what they saw as important and to learn from each other. But that’s amazing watching looking back and watching how that happened and how you build a team, I guess between the 13 partners to say, look, it’s not about us versus them within the partnership, it’s us versus the problem and that really helped I guess develop the set of policies that that we came to in the end.
My hope is that we would get this opportunity again. I know that there’s been a rough ride for everyone that’s been involved, but I think the outcome is better for it than just setting a whole lot of policy buffs to work to come up with a solution. Anyone that’s still that’s involved in these processes, I think for all the pain that it’s that it’s brought, I think it still ultimately delivers the best outcome.”
SDG # 13: Climate Action
SDG #13 is all about taking urent action to combat climate change and its impacts. Targets under this goal relate to:
- Strengthening resilience and adaptive capaciy to climate-related hazards and natural disasters
- Integrating climate change measures into national policies, strategies and planning
- Improving eduction, awareness, and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning
When it comes to agriculture, in New Zealand we are in a unique position where 50% of our greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. The He Waka Eke Noa Partnership was born out a a response to the Government in 2019 wanting to start pricing agricultrual emissions in order to drive some emissions reductions over time. The agricultural industry itself put its hand up and said how about we as an industry come up with the best option to do that, and that was the basis of the 2 ½ years of work leading up to May 2022.
“The government come out with its own response to that proposal, which has caused some angst, rightly so, based on some modelling and their policy recommendations, and that discussion is ongoing, but it’s only part, I guess, of a wider programme of work around mitigation options and what agriculture can do to help achieve those outcomes so part of that is mitigation research, and we’ve got a number of great institutions working on options for emissions reductions.
Some of those are probably more short term and some of them the bigger ones are probably more long term, particularly you know relating to methane reduction. But there is a lot of things we can be doing on farm in the meantime around trying to do more with less essentially, you know, how can we increase our lambing rates, so we don’t need as many breeding ewes, reduce our number of replacements on dairy farms so we’re just not carrying as many head of stock. How can we get more production out of each animal, so we just don’t need as many. Feeding high quality feeds.
You know there’s a lot of things we can be doing now with our farm management options to reduce our emissions profile. It doesn’t need to be ground-breaking. It doesn’t need to, you know, be cutting 20-30-40% of our emissions. It’s just little accumulations of half a percent here and 1% there. You know all add up to make a really big difference. I think despite all the angst that’s come out of He Waka Eke Noa, there is a lot of hope too around technology and options available to help us achieve these goals.”
The agriculture industry has a great opportunity to be part of the solution to climate change and take a lead role in creating solutions.
“And that comes down to mindset change like I’ve been through the seven stages of grief. You know, the anger, the denial, my impact on the climate and have come round to the point of right, we know there’s a problem. Let’s just get on and make something happen and do what we can to fix it. My hope is that agriculture in general will reach that same point, you know the mindset will be, look, where are the opportunities and the space rather than seeing it as a challenge, so whether it’s alternative things we do with our land, and I know like I’m based here in Canterbury, there’s been incredible land use change over the last 30 years and that’s not to say that we’re not going to see, you know, different options come out that mean that the landscape might look quite different and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think land use change has been painted a little bit negatively over the last few years and that doesn’t necessarily need to be the way, and it could be growing something it could be building something. There are a number of options that are in development that could hopefully provide a smorgasbord of options for farmers to pick and choose from.”
Cam also makes a very important point about the impact of climate change on agriculture, and why that should lead us to take up the opportunity to be champions around climate change mitigation and adaptation.
“Arguably agriculture will be hit first by climate change and will be hit hardest by climate change of all the productive sectors, so if we’re looking long term, we should be some of the greatest champions for climate change mitigation because we’re really gonna feel some serious impacts if the world as a whole is not able to alter its behaviour and mitigate some of these things. I know there might be a bit of a stretch, but long term, yeah, I would love to see agriculture as a champion for climate change mitigation and adaptation, which I guess is the other part that doesn’t really get a lot of airtime these days.”
Cam’s take on the biggest challenge facing agriculture
For Cam, the immediate challenge facing agriculture in regards to sustainability is around climate action, and it’s something he keeps coming back to due to the placing that it sits in societies hierarchy at the moment, and in the policy setting.
“I mean its environmental action, I think for agriculture is its greatest challenge followed very closely by its impact on animals and people. But I think within that we’ve got a phenomenal ability to problem solve in the industry…So, like, I think that sometimes we do need tough but achievable challenge or target put in front of us to really make us innovate and change the way that we act. We’ve seen again and again that actually we’ve become better farmers for it, more profitable, more sustainable, better for people and planet, all at the same time. So, once you get over potentially some of the initial angst and initial reaction, emotional reaction to some of these changes and targets that we have a phenomenal ability to adapt and to make it work for us and to be better for it ultimately. So, I kind of rely on that. I see examples of that all the time.”
“Our collaborative and cooperative nature within New Zealand and agriculture means that we’re not competing with ourselves on this and arguably we’ve got a lot to learn from what’s happening internationally as well. But there’s a great community of knowledge and sharing and science and funding that understand how important this is. People may not agree, but all political parties understand how important this is to New Zealand, not just agriculture, but to New Zealand to solve this problem so I think people can take heart that, you know, as an individual business owner, not in this alone and it’s not just you and your neighbours, you know, there is an entire community of very smart people working on this problem. The options will come, and I guess it’s just up to us to pick them up and run with them.”
When it comes to practical actions for farming businesses to take to contribute to sustainability, Cam states that they key thing that has helped him is taking a longer term view.
“And so, I guess key advice would be just lift your horizon. Look long term, you don’t wanna forget about the short-term decisions, but don’t focus on those solely and forget about the long-term impact of what you were doing. Because ultimately, you know when we’re on our deathbeds, that’s not gonna matter. You know how much milk production we made in a certain year. It’s gonna be that that legacy of the long-term gradual work that we’ve done on our farms and what we’ve built that will make us most proud that stage in life.
So yeah, just take a longer-term view.”
Listen to Cam’s podcast episode here: