By Richard Jones
Each year KPMG puts out the Agribusiness Agenda report. The report gives an interesting snapshot of the agriculture industry including challenges and opportunities and a look at what is coming up.
The industry tends to ‘iterate’ on what is already in existence. You can think of ‘iteration’ as what Global Innovation Evangelist Brian Solis says is like your TV remote, it has been around for near on 60 years and just keeps getting added to and improved. But fundamentally it is still a remote, that you forget where you have put it and do not really make full use of. That is ‘iteration’. There is nothing ‘revolutionary’ about the TV remote, if there was we would not have one, would we? Maybe though that is where the likes of Google Home and Amazon’s Alexia are leading us.
The point is that although our agribusiness sector is good at ‘iterating’ and ‘evolvement’, being ‘revolutionary’ is much harder. Sure we can be smarter with use of resources, good at land use change, we applaud dairy shifting to milking goats, sheep, and deer but once again this is just ‘iterating’ there’s not much ‘revolution’ going on here. Maybe this is beginning to happen though, for instance Happy Cow Milk instead of exporting milk powder or cheese, this business exports a software and hardware package. Is that ‘evolutionary’ leading to ‘revolutionary’?
Perhaps futurist Peter Diamandis in his kōrero on Megatrends Shaping our Future offers insight to where things are heading by saying that “This next decade will witness the birth of the most ethical, nutritious, and environmentally sustainable protein production system devised by humankind. Stem cell-based ‘cellular agriculture’ will allow the production of beef, chicken and fish anywhere, on-demand, with far higher nutritional contact, and a vastly lower environmental footprint than traditional livestock options”. Diamandis says that this megatrend is being driven by the convergence of biotechnology, materials science, machine learning and agritech.
Now that sounds ‘revolutionary’ but hello, Aotearoa let alone Māori agribusiness leaders where are you when it comes to this sort of thinking? Sure some are but they are few and far between and the dots are not being connected. Silo thinking still applies here rather than open source and free-range thinking. Because it is going to take that sort of thinking for agribusiness across Aotearoa to move from ‘evolutionary’ to ‘revolutionary’.
One of the co-authors of the Agribusiness Agenda report, Jack Keeys, offers his reflections since the release of the report in June. His key point is “Let’s stop waiting for others to develop the future of food and start creating it ourselves”…..read on here.
