Balance is important!
OPINION: Irrespective of where you fall on the human-induced-global-warming spectrum - alarmist or sceptic - there is one thing we should all be 100% sure about.
The Rogernomics reforms of the 1990s swept away what was possibly the best agricultural research and extension system in the world. We were first class. Visitors came from all over the world to learn from us.
The reformers, blinded by the mood of the day and not understanding what they had at their feet, decided to create – you guessed it – ‘a world class agricultural research and extension system’!
In the process, they destroyed the very thing they had planned to create!
The wreckage is now obvious. For example, I recently attended the annual Grasslands Association Conference held at Rotorua. The quality of the papers presented was, in my opinion and with a few exceptions, poor.
The research pot appears empty. This in an organisation that once prided itself on its connection with farmers and farm consultants. Another example, to press home the point – there are now no plant breeders left in the CRI AgResearch.
This in a country whose biggest industry is pastoral agriculture!
It occurred to me, as I was venting my spleen at the reformers’ stupidity, that one day a new Johnthe- Baptist figure would arise and pave our way back to sanity. That day I sense may have arrived.
Ministry for Primary Industries boss Ray Smith has, it appears, recently rediscovered the Holy Grail (Rural News, November 7). He was visiting Teagasc (the main Irish Agricultural Research Centre) and was amazed with “what the Irish are doing in bringing applied science to and engaging with farmers” and “believes New Zealand could learn a lot from that”.
Teagasc, we are told, is like the old MAF before the reforms. Back then “MAF provided advisory services to farmers, did actual research and provided policy advice to government. There was a direct line between farmers, researchers and policy makers”.
Teagasc we are told “does all these things including running field days all around Ireland, which regularly attract thousands of farmers and rural professions”!
While I am delighted to think that some common sense is slowly seeping back into the Wellington bureaucracy, nevertheless, I find this all so galling. Galling because we have had 30 years of reforms in agricultural science and extension, only to find ourselves back where we started – bereft now of years of institutional wisdom, generations of intellectual knowledge, insufficient experienced scientists, plus several decades of wasted research dollars.
It was all unnecessary, if only the reformers had taken time to pause and consider the needs and purpose of science!
I left institutional science 20 years ago, concerned about the direction of science, and studied business management for 12 months.
My question was: Is the commercial model appropriate for science? My answer, a categorical ‘no!’ (see dougedmeades. com/Is the Commercial Model Appropriate for Science?).
Sure, the public service model required over-hauling, but there are other organisational models better suited to the management of science. The optimal was, and still is in my opinion, the not-for-profit model – because it best protects the purpose, impartiality and integrity of public good science.
Perhaps, just perhaps, there is now a belated mood in MPI to re-reform agricultural science and the related extension services in New Zealand. MPI has recently launched its “free-toair” farm advisory service - OnFarm - to help farmers navigate their way through the miasma of regulations that now besets the rural sector.
Doug Edmeades spent 20 years as a soil scientist at Ruakura. In 1997 he established his own science consulting business, which has evolved into agKnowledge.
