Climate change action needed quickly

Carden was speaking at the ‘Facing Disruption’, the recent Australia-New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference in Auckland.

Carden said the 2050 deadline is too far away for him because it gives rise to a lot of reluctance to do much in the short term; the farming sector needs to move much more quickly.

“My biggest concern is that as an organisation we have a 130 year history of being very good at intensifying and driving production to high levels. It is hard to shift an entire farming system nationally to an entirely new model.

“We need to do that very, very quickly, but if we set ourselves targets for 2050 most people are just going to hope some solution will arise down the track.”

He says Landcorp’s Pamu Farms brand means the company is thinking hard about how it can dramatically change its farming footprint, but there are constraints.

“We need fewer animals and more trees and somehow we have to find a way to make more money off our farms.”

Carden says Landcorp has hundreds of millions of dollars of assets in dairy sheds designed and built for intensive animal production. These are fit-for-purpose and have one use – to produce as much milk from cows as possible.

“So we will have all these stranded assets when we start to reduce our animal numbers significantly below a certain threshold.”

Carden says another challenge is to find customers around the world prepared to pay for different products.

“These are expensive, they are hard to produce and these consumers are hard to find; it’s not easy to do that.”

He says a completely different set of skills and knowledge is required to shift to different farming systems.