Mike Chapman NZKGI Chief Executive

Every industry needs to identify and nurture its future leaders. Most industries do very little to make this happen. Horticulture is fortunate that HortNZ, our industry organisation, runs and supports many leadership development programmes.

For kiwifruit to do its part, New Zealand Kiwifruit Growers Incorporated is supporting and supplementing the HortNZ and other programmes.

Keeping young leaders in horticulture is a big challenge. Once up-skilled, those with potential are highly marketable and are often recruited internationally into off-shore horticultural industries, or into other commercial operations both in New Zealand and overseas. The issue we have been working on is how to incentivise our young leaders to stay within horticulture in general, and kiwifruit in particular.
As part of this campaign, 70 orchard and packhouse workers, growers, post-harvest operators and Zespri attended the recent ‘Young Leaders' breakfast. The breakfast was run by NZKGI, sponsored by Farmlands and Aongatete. It was designed for potential young leaders to network, learn about leadership and explore options for the future, including succession planning for those who owned orchards.

Jon Mayson, former CEO of the Port of Tauranga was guest speaker at the breakfast event. Jon spoke of the importance of good leadership and self-belief. 'Leadership is the ability to inspire others to strive to be the best they can be. Leaders are those who walk forward and take people with them.” Self-belief and recognising that 'if it's going to be, it's up to me” is important to success, as is integrity, trust, vision and a sense of direction.
Succession planning was covered by John Gordon and Kylie van Heerden from Tauranga law firm Sharp Tudhope.
This is a key issue as growers become older, the average age is around 60, because as an industry, we need more young growers and young leaders.

Giving the young leaders of the future some ownership of an orchard, or the vines on that orchard, we believe will help keep them involved with the industry.
This is what the succession planning work is about – how the older generation can, for example, retain ownership of their land, while allowing the young leaders to have a stake in growing kiwifruit.

There are some key aspects to this.
The proposal is that the land owner continues to own the land, and the new owner of the vines has continuing legal rights over the vines. Therefore, whatever device is put in place, it will need to be registered against the properties certificate of title.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it gives robust and continuing legal ownership. Secondly, the banks are more likely to lend development and operating funds if the ownership of the vines has a robust legal basis. Forestry rights work in this way and have allowed for much greater development of forestry across New Zealand by permitting both the owner of the land, and the owner of the trees, to have legal rights registered against the certificate of title.
Working with Sharp Tudhope, we are putting together a proposal for the Ministry for Primary Industries to consider. Hopefully, we can convince Government to put in place a scheme for vines and fruit trees that works in the same was as forestry rights, as explained above.
This will apply to wine grape growers, avocadoes, and citrus, in fact any horticultural or viticulture crop.
What we hope this will do, is give our young leaders the opportunity to invest in our industry and give them a reason to stay with the industry for their careers.