Ag sector well prepared - expert

That's the view of the lead researcher of a 2020 study into farming system resilience.

Although there are no mandatory lockdowns under the traffic light system, AgResearch senior scientist Dr Val Snow says there are already anecdotal reports of people "self-locking" down.

Pretty much anyone visiting a farm now has to front up with a vaccination pass and comply with masks and social distancing, she says.

"The industry bodies have collaborated really well with their farmers and all the farms that I know of have got really strong health and safety plans in place with respect to Covid," Snow told Rural News.

"So, in terms of their operations they're restricted, but not nearly as badly as it was in 2020. Partly because people have learned how to work with it, whereas in 2020, there was a lot of 'how the hell do we do this?'"

The 2020 study found there was quite a lot of resilience in New Zealand and Australian farming systems and they handled the initial Covid wave better than many other countries.

"But it wasn't an easy ride for them," Snow says. "It took a lot of effort and a lot of figuring out."

It was also easier "or at least less difficult" for some industries compared to others.

Some industries struggled when their markets collapsed in lockdown because they were designed to have a really steady flow through production to processing to market.

The pig meat industry was the prime example of that, she says.

"Their major retail market, butchers and restaurants, was shut down, they had no capacity to store stuff within their supply chain because that's not something they usually do, and the biological processes just kept on going whether they liked it or not and the processing system became clogged quickly."

By contrast, wool and forestry systems had more built-in plasticity or flexibility in their supply and their production chains.

"They can't leave it on the sheep's back forever but they can decide within some parameters when to shear, and then once it's shorn it's got a reasonable shelf life in the warehouses."

Foresters could choose whether their trees or store them standing for quite a long time, she adds.

However, Snow says that for the pig industry, the 2020 lockdown turned into "a really nice story" about how pork producers negotiated a deal with the Government to buy pork at a set price from the processors and donate it to the foodbanks.

"That took a lot of negotiations because for some of these producers that was below cost of production but it avoided an animal welfare crisis by keeping things ticking over."

Supermarkets also came to the party and opened up more shelf space for New Zealand product.

While the 2020 study acknowledged overall negative effects, stress and pressures from the pandemic response, only 47% of New Zealand survey respondents viewed the effect on their farms or businesses as negative. A further 37% said the effect was neutral.

One New Zealand farmer talked about the necessity to home-school the kids "meant they were involved in farming life and saw the decision-making process and us discussing real life events".

Snow says the 2020 study wasn't funded but depended on the enthusiasm of some 26 researchers across multiple agencies who found the time to conduct interviews and crunch the data.

With the February 3 announcement of the borders progressively opening up it is probably a good time to start planning a follow-up study, she told Rural News.

"When Auckland locked down in the last third of last year, I did catch up with the guys in the pork industry and they said that the learnings from the first shutdown, the social networks and communication that they developed then, helped them absorb some of the shocks of that shutdown."

Resilience To The Fore

Another factor highlighted by the study was the impact on many industries of not having seasonal migrant and working holiday labour.

"We can see through news items and things like that, that's still a really major issue," Snow told Rural News.

She emphasised that the study looked into the resilience of farming systems rather than the stresses or mental impacts on the people caught up in it. "Although the industries were resilient and there were no major disasters or anything like that, it was incredibly stressful for all people, all through the industries.

"They made it work and figured out soluions through essentially the social capital within their industries and figuring out ways that people could cooperate to get what was needed done."

Snow says her "completely non-scientific" observation is that dealing with Omicron may be a little bit easier because of the social distancing and new processes and methods set up after the lessons of 2020 but the effects of absences of workers who become ill or who need to isolate might be problematic.