Challenges and opportunities impacting New Zealand’s economic foundation – pastoral agriculture

New Zealand is unique amongst OECD countries in its reliance on pastoral agriculture for generating export dollars that underpins its economy. However, this biologically based production system is open to an unprecedented level of challenge which includes maintaining a high level of productivity to ensure international competitiveness, the impact of regulations and compliance, a social license to operate, the development and uptake of new technologies, competition from non-animal sourced foods, ensuring an adequate and well directed level of R&D investment, acceptable impacts on the environment and conversely having mitigation strategies to ensure adaptation to changes in climate, farming continuity through supply of adequate skilled labour, land use change, biosecurity breaches, and enabling added value opportunities to be developed. The aim here is to review these challenges and identify options for alleviating, managing or mitigating them.