Volume 2 of the 2013 KPMG Agribusiness Agenda titled “Maintaining our people-powered performance”, tackles some of the issues and challenges associated with people in the primary sector.

• Public perception – The sector needs to re-position agriculture as an attractive profession offering rewarding, global exciting careers – and move beyond the “just a farmer” perception.

• Education lacking – Agriculture is not sufficiently recognized within our school curriculums, given its importance to the New Zealand economy.

• Science at risk – The rapidly approaching ‘retirement wave’ in our national science community will start to seriously impact our competitive capability in the next five years.

• Farm ownership – The increasing scale and cost of farming business are raising the barriers for young people wanting to gain a foot-hold to ownership. One proposed solution includes providing tax incentives for exiting farm owners to leave capital in the business over a transition period.

• Attractive remuneration – Farm employee remuneration is attractive when compared to the average graduate salary (with a dairy farm manager earning $15k more, and an arable farm manager earning $11 more).

• Iwi land – Increasing the productivity of Maori land would potentially contribute $3.7 billion to GDP over 10 years. This would be fostered by greater interaction between iwi and the mainstream primary sector, in order to share best practices and perspectives.

• Urban employment – Attracting people from regions with structural surplus unemployment (including urban areas like Auckland) to rural jobs should be a priority for the sector.

• Immigrant potential – Government and industry organisations need to work on initiatives to help with the successful integration of immigrant workers and farmers into our rural communities.