Dr Jacqueline Rowarth is an Adjunct Professor at Lincoln University, and on the board of directors of DairyNZ, Deer Industry NZ and Ravensdown. She is also a judge for the National Fieldays Innovation Awards.
OPINION
New Zealand farmers have always been innovative but NationalFieldays is a chance to harness those ideas through collaboration and conversation, Dr Jacqueline Rowarth writes.
Innovation changes people’s behaviour.
The boom box on a shoulder with everybody hearing the noise changed to a Walkman and then to earbuds that can be heard only by the person wearing them – to the relief of people in the next-door seat.
Spreading seed by hand from an apron sack followed by a flock of sheep (the hoof and tooth method of establishment) turned into GPS-aligned air-seeders inserting seed at a precise depth, sometimes with fertiliser.
Sitting on a stool to milk cows by hand in a field changed to cows at eye level with pulsators assisting milk collection and now robotic milking with cows choosing their own pace while humans watch from afar.
At its heart, innovation is the ability to influence behaviour change through the creation or unlocking of new value.
At its heart, National Fieldays, held at Mystery Creek in mid-June, is about innovation - as well as meeting up with friends, exchanging news and ideas, and seeing and hearing the latest developments in everything rural and lifestyle.
Fun for all the family?
Absolutely.
From fencing demonstrations, through big machinery and tractor pulling to rural bachelors; and the finalists of the Young Farmer of the Year will be learning all they can in preparation for an innovation challenge in July.
Innovation is not easy.
McKinsey reports that 84 per cent of chief executives regard innovation as critical for business growth, but only 6 per cent are satisfied with their innovation success.
Last year Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, co-authors of Humanocracy (challenging the traditional ways of organising and managing companies), wrote about the power of experimentation and what boils down to considerable difficulty in picking winners, even for the experienced.
Dr Jacqueline Rowarth.
They explained that from a thousand prospective business plans examined over a year, a typical venture capitalist might interview a hundred or so would-be entrepreneurs before investing in a dozen startups. Of these, most will return nothing to the venture capitalist.
The authors confirmed the numbers with a study of 1098 startups that gained their first round of funding between 2008 and 2010.
By 2017, 70 per cent of the new ventures were out of business or barely self-sustaining.
Only 5 per cent had been acquired or gone public with a valuation of US$100 million or more, and just five businesses, or 0.45 per cent of the total, had achieved a valuation of US$1 billion or more.
Listen to Jamie Mackay interview Dr Jacqueline Rowarth on The Country below:
While people dream of striking the innovation jackpot, the reality is that small innovations make a difference in people’s behaviours every day.
For the most part, this is what happens in the water cooler effect (the power of an office amenity to bring together acquaintances from different departments and spark eureka! moments).
For farmers and growers, the National Fieldays can operate in the same way.
They can talk to scientists, researchers and industry professionals, gathering ideas they can test in their minds and with each other before testing on-farm.
In large companies, Hamel and Zanini found that over 60 per cent of respondents said it was “very difficult” for frontline employees to try something new when doing so requires a small team and a bit of seed funding.
Another 34 per cent said that bottom-up experiments are possible only when an employee has the right connections or a lot of courage. But in farming where the boss is also the worker in many cases, experimentation is common.
Further, it works on top of the most innovative and resilient thing on the planet – nature.
Hamel and Zanini opened their 2023 article with the statement “There is nothing more innovative and resilient on our planet than life. Despite meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions, extreme climate shifts, and wandering tectonic plates, life has not only persisted, it has flourished.”
New Zealand farmers have developed ways of managing their land within the changes in markets, climate and regulation.
It is a struggle when the weather is bad and the commodity cycle low – particularly with the current high interest rates and the regulations change and require yet more paperwork. But they continue.
“Life doesn’t sit still,” said Hamel and Zanini, “it doesn’t wait for a catastrophe, it doesn’t ask permission, it doesn’t plan - it just tries stuff. The same needs to be true of your organisation. That means letting people be as experimental at work as they are in the rest of their lives.”
The rollback of some regulations will enable farmers to make progress. Ongoing research will assist in making that progress in a positive direction.
Hamel and Zanini ended their article with the words of ‘the great management theorist Elvis Presley’, it’s time for “a little less conversation and a little more action”.
But make time for conversation at National Fieldays so that the action can be innovative.
