Capturing the unique opportunity in decarbonisation

Lake Hawea Station (LHS) is a 16,000 Acre sheep and beef station owned by Geoff and Justine Ross and supported by their children Finn and Gabriel. LHS is primarily focused on farming merinos for fine wool. They work progressively through partnerships with other organisations on biodiversity and climate change mitigation projects. They have dual motives of running a profitable farm and pioneering a regenerative farming system that positively impacts the planet.

“I think farmers and New Zealand are increasingly recognising that there are consumers around the world who are looking to pay a premium for sustainability credentials, and so we've been selling our Merino fibre direct to high-end fashion brands overseas and achieving a premium for our product based on our own branding and environmental credentials.” - Finn Ross

This has been enabled through establishing strong customer relationships, which include carbon negative clothing companies like Sheep Inc. and Maggie Marilyn.

Based in London, Sheep Inc is a carbon-negative clothing brand (the values are declared on the website) whose clothing includes a tag on the bottom of their products, allowing a consumer to link their product back to the farm and even name a Sheep on the farm. Having a social media page and using storytelling to share content of their on-farm activity and promoting the brand has been one area that helped create success for LHS. The site has enabled end consumers to connect to LHS and provided brand partners with content, a key selling point to marketers.

While they are achieving a premium and receiving recognition for their activities, it is the improvements in biodiversity and forest recovery that Finn sees as the biggest reward. He notes that “being custodians of a pretty decent slice of New Zealand when you revisit parts of the farm after a few years and see the planting, it’s a really cool change”.

Extreme success for the business would be an improvement in biodiversity and climate change metrics, no use of fossil fuels, more regenerating native bush and improvement of tons of carbon sequestered.

Their pathway to success has been enabled by the entrepreneurial passion of the Ross family and the drive to farm well and utilise their progressive values. Comfortable with experimentation and happy to share learnings with other farmers, LHS are open about the projects and collaborations they have undertaken, believing that others can use knowledge and experiences gained to accelerate the sector’s decarbonisation. This is particularly valuable while science and data around regenerative farming are still being collected.

A key achievement for Lake Hawea Station has been becoming the first farm in Australasia to be awarded the Carbon Zero certification for the farm through Toitū, which at the time could not provide farm-level positive ratings.

To go beyond the requirements for Carbon Zero and become Carbon Positive, the farm planted thousands of trees, retired areas of farmland, initiated pest control programmes and created stock exclusion zones for regenerating native bush.

LHS has created their own carbon clear brand to help communicate its carbon-positive status and is currently sequestering twice as much carbon and greenhouse gases as they emit. LHS have a longer-term goal to be 10x carbon positive. They also believe that Carbon Zero will soon become the minimum requirement to operate and retaining a carbon-positive status will keep them ahead of the mob.

Lake Hawea Station has worked hard to make changes on the farm so that it is carbon positive. They are willing to experiment with practices and crops, sharing these learnings, encouraging farmers to understand their sequestration and eligibility for carbon credits, and engaging with other farmers to learn from their experiences. The ability to extract a premium for their wool is due to their connection to the end user of the product and the deep relationships they have developed with their customers, supported by transparent messaging and certification of their Carbon Zero status. 

Read more case studies on New Zealand businesses in the food and fibre sector turning decarbonisation into a business opportunity in Chapter 2 of KPMG's Agribusiness Agenda 2022