Adapting to a Changing Climate: Gareth Edgecombe on the Future of New Zealand’s Horticulture.

by Gareth Edgecombe Chief Executive, T&G Global Limited, New Zealand.

For you personally, what keeps you awake at night when you start thinking about the climate risks and the threats to nature that we face in New Zealand?

We're a significant grower in New Zealand – growing apples, tomatoes, citrus and berries, and we work with over 700 independent growers helping feed Kiwis and consumers around the world. Looking at our own growing operations, our premium apples business is our largest and the risk there is climate change.

There are the more immediate and visible aspects - more volatile weather events, such as floods, heavy rain and hail, that are happening more often in a more turbocharged environment, with more heat in the system. In adapting to this, it may also influence what is grown where, including opening up new growing locations. Over the medium to long term, that means we need to be cognizant of how that impacts on our strategy around optimal growing systems and diversified growing regions.

Those are two of the main features in terms of the impact of climate change, one's quite immediate and one's more long term. It takes 5 years for an apple tree to produce commercial volumes, and with a lifespan of 25 years, it’s a long term commitment that requires significant planning and investment. 
From our insights and analysis, we see New Zealand, relative to other countries, being less impacted than other areas, both from a water availability and general climate point of view.

To help minimise the physical impacts of climate change, we’re putting more protective measures in place such as hail netting, tunnels, optimised drainage and irrigation systems, we’re also diversifying our growing regions, and through our Venturefruit business, developing and commercialising new plant varieties – such as our work with the Hot Climate Partnership which has developed the world’s first specifically bred apple for hot and warming climates.

Then there is how we are working to mitigate climate change. We are on a pathway towards significantly reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and we’ve recently had our near-term Science Based Targets for scopes 1-3 validated.

The Circle recently published a report on Modern Genetic Technology: Applications in the Aotearoa Food and Fibre System.  I'm really interested to know your view on that technology, because up till now everything that New Zealand does has been conventional breeding of some type, with some very small lab-restricted exceptions. Where do you think the future is for Aotearoa around the question of modern genetic technologies?

I think it's an area with a lot of potential opportunity and as a business we support leaning into it positively to understand more in a safe way.

Advanced breeding technologies have improved dramatically over recent years, and we're seeing other countries, the US, UK and Europe in particular, moving to adopt these technologies to help solve consumer, grower, economic and environmental needs, such as enhanced disease protection, improved yield, reduced sprays, better nutritional content, climate adaptation and a whole range of other areas.

Our view is that with these new breeding technologies, the distinction between traditional genetic modification and newer gene editing techniques is really important, as it’s within-species enhancement - essentially the outcome of the plant is the same as if it had been bred traditionally.

It will take a whole of society approach to carefully work through this space. We need to have open conversations and look to the evidence to guide decisions, with the outcome being the adoption of smart regulations which have carefully considered food and environmental safety, consumer acceptance and stakeholder impact.

Tell us please, about what happened during Cyclone Gabrielle. What was that like for you guys?

It was massive. The first focus was the safety of our team, their families, our growers and the wider community. A lot of work went into supporting them – some of our people, including some of our Pasifika RSE team, lost their houses and all of their belongings, so there was a massive scramble to create safety around that.

And then we turned pretty quickly towards the clean up and the salvaging of a number of apple orchards, because it was so important to start that early to save the trees that were able to be saved. I’m pleased to say that the vast majority of those orchards were salvageable, and while there’s been some challenges with apple sizing this year, in general our orchards have come back very strongly.

At the same time, though, we did lose a number of orchards – around 13% of our Hawke’s Bay planted hectares – where everything was either taken down the river or covered under silt.

In a couple of circumstances where the risk looked high for starting completely over again, we've opted to not replace those orchards and instead that volume will be replanted elsewhere. The work from the team, both in that short term and the medium to long term has been heroic. And that's been the case across the industry. It's great to see the industry and region bounce back.

It has however put us back physically and financially – reducing our apple volumes and profit. We've had to be more careful and prudent whilst we restore the business and our balance sheet.

You're in a really interesting position because you run a company that is so exposed to nature and you're very advanced in your thinking around adaptation and mitigation. But I'm also interested to know what kind of conversations you're having with other CEOs?  Because not everyone is in your position, where they are at the frontline and seeing the real impacts of climate change in the way you are. Do you think other New Zealand CEOs get it?

Businesses in the food and fibre sector are very much at the forefront of experiencing the impacts of a changing climate.  That means we face risks to mitigate and adapt to, but also opportunities. Speaking to many other exporters, they too are actively leaning into this.

If you look at our customer base and the markets we sell into, we’re very globally exposed. We see firsthand the evolving environmental and social expectations and requirements from our UK and EU customers, and their consumers and regulators, for example. 

We can see that New Zealand's export community will be required to meet certain climate goals, because increasingly our global partners are mandating that now.

There's going to be debate about the speed and how close they stay to those targets. But generally that direction of travel of meeting very strict environmental goals and decarbonisation goals is an expectation with the customers and markets that we sell to.