Envisaging future New Zealand dairy farm systems: A scenario analysis approach

Designing future farming systems which are resilient in an increasingly volatile and uncertain environment can be challenging. Scenario planning to inform farm systems design can help address this challenge. In the first phase of this wider scenario planning project, three distinct future world scenarios were developed. In this second phase of the scenario planning project, dairy farm systems for these future scenarios were developed over two workshops: a farmer workshop followed by an industry workshop where participants used mental models to conceptualise the future farm systems for each scenario. In general, the farm systems were most diverse under the consumer-driven Consumer is King (CK) scenario, and least diverse under the Government Dictates (GD) scenario (political chaos with trade dictated by governments). There was considerable overlap between farm systems under the CK and the highly regulatory Regulation Rules (RR) scenarios, but very little farm system overlap between the GD scenario and the other two scenarios. These future farm systems descriptions will play an important role in informing the quantitative modelling phase of this project. The approaches used to identify and describe the conceptual future farm systems were considered to be effective.