What are we doing for farmers?
The focus of this research area is to develop a trustworthy hill country farming story of continual improvement in the environment, animals, and people. It will showcase how hill country farmers are demonstrating resilient and sustainable farming practices and stewardship of the land, animals and people. This work is being led by Katherine Dixon (Nature Positive) and Angela McFetridge (B+LNZ).
The 3 key achievements of this research to date are:
- The approach taken by the research team has built trust in the process for farmers and wider stakeholders.
- Our farmer stakeholders have expressed that they want their authentic stories of progress to be told so that their communities, wider society, and consumers understand their progress and future aspirations of farming with resilience and in a sustainable way.
- There has been a keen interest in this research. As such, opportunities to publicly speak and build relationships have increased, as the methods used, and discovery of deep insight have provided workable pathways for collaboration with new partners.
Ongoing and planned research
- Stories will be developed to engage and describe successful, resilient hill country farming. These stories will also illustrate how some of the obstacles to resilience can be overcome. Stories will be centred around individuals and groups (e.g. catchment groups, Māori trusts) and incorporate aspects of work done within the other research areas (e.g. success story of using legumes on hill country farms, benefits of growing native plants). The stories are likely to take the shape of case studies and be presented as articles, podcasts, videos etc.
- The stories developed above will be circulated to farmers, stakeholders and the public using several different platforms (e.g. HCF website, social media, etc.).