Can a clear identity shape your farm’s future?

We got on a plane from London heading for Auckland.

Within an hour, we cleared the UK, gone over Denmark, Netherlands, Poland.

And then it took us six hours to cross Russia and three hours to cross a part of China.

And then the conference that I was at, there were guys from Australia, Brazil, Canada, U.S., And there was a lady from Saskatchewan and she grew four crops.

One of them, the deer and wheat, she could produce 100 million bowls of pasta from.

And her spring barley went off her farm from her train station in four 150 wagon trains.

You know, the scale, we're not going to compete with.

And that was the thing that really just struck me.

And you've just said it.

It's that piece, the UK, similar to New Zealand, I guess.

We're not going to compete on commodity.

Why are we even trying? That was me on a video call from New Zealand trying to make sense of what I'd seen.

The scale of global agriculture makes UK farming look tiny.

And it is tiny.

So the question I kept coming back to was, if we can't compete on volume, what are we competing on? In this episode, I'm meeting Lisa Portas, a farmer, wool specialist and fellow Nuffield scholar based in New Zealand.

Lisa has spent more than a decade adding value to wool, running diversified operations and moving fibre directly to overseas buyers.

Her own Nuffield research asked a question that goes right to the heart of this episode.

How do we get stronger returns back to farms? We'll be exploring identity, direction, and the commercial test that separates story from strategy.

But now let's go back to that uncomfortable truth that UK agriculture is dwarfed by other nations around the world.

And that question that I kept coming back to, if we can't compete on volume, what do we compete on? In New Zealand, I found an answer that I wasn't really expecting.

The businesses performing best weren't necessarily the biggest ones.

They were the ones that could clearly explain where they'd come from and where they were heading.

So in my head, this idea started forming as a picture of a bow tie.

You've got those different elements of our origin story or our genesis story, which converges from the left-hand side.

And then all these different paths of where our future could take us, our vision expanding out to the right.