Department of Conservation director-general Penny Nelson wants to work with the primary sector to achieve common goals. Photo: Danny Rood
New Department of Conservation director-general Penny Nelson has strong ties to the primary sector that she hopes to make the best of for the benefit of the country as a whole. Colin Williscroft reports.
Having dealt with farmers and growers before, Penny Nelson understands what can be achieved by working with them, rather than preaching to them.
She plans on bringing that collaborative approach into her new role at the Department of Conservation (DoC).
The former Biosecurity NZ boss says one of the things she learned during her time at MPI is that farmers and growers are very good at solving problems and finding solutions if you work with them.
“They will find phenomenal ways to achieve what you’re trying to achieve, so I’ll definitely be taking that approach to what I do at DoC,” Nelson said.
The primary sector is one Nelson has plenty of experience with, initially through working as regional policy manager for DairyNZ in Christchurch.
She was on the job during the dirty dairying campaign.
“I used to land at Christchurch airport in my DairyNZ jacket and (on the) front page of The Press everyone would be having a go at the primary sector,” she said.
To find a solution she brought together scientists, the regional council, Forest & Bird, dairy company representatives and Federated Farmers.
“Initially no one wanted to get into the same room, they didn’t want to talk to each other,” she said.
Undeterred, she managed to bring the groups together.
“We started to unpick the problem and what we found was, in terms of the effluent spreading non-compliance, farmers weren’t clear what ‘good’ looked like, so we worked with the regional council to do that,” she said.
“Within a year we’d reduced non-compliance by 50%.
“A lot of that was around how you get people together to solve problems, rather than pointing fingers at the primary sector for not doing what they (are) meant to do.”
After several years at DairyNZ Nelson joined MPI, her first role leading the policy and trade part of the organisation.
Policy-wise the big issue of the day was climate change and she was involved in working with the sector on future on-farm emissions plans, with He Waka Eke Noa evolving out of some of that work.
It was from there that she moved to heading up Biosecurity NZ.
She sees parallels between that role and what DoC does as biodiversity cannot be achieved without good biosecurity.
While she enjoyed MPI, the opportunity at DoC was one she couldn’t resist.
“I’ve always had an appreciation of what good conservation looks like and I love what the Department of Conservation is about,” she said.
“If you look (at) my career, a lot of the thread is ‘how do we have a strong economy and really good environmental management?’
“Those are the things I’m interested in.
“So, when this role came up, the opportunity to continue in a big operational job and have a role where we’re working to protect what’s so special about NZ, it was just my dream job.”
She said her primary sector experience will influence how she approaches her new position.
“In terms of biodiversity, a lot of the things that are unique to NZ are either on public conservation land, or they are on farms.”
Because of that, working with the sector is important, as pests don’t distinguish between public conservation land or farmland.
“They move around and, for a lot of our threatened species, they need to have corridors of habitat, so how we work with the primary sector will be critical.”
Nelson has already spoken with MPI director general Ray Smith about collaborating on biosecurity in a practical sense.
She would like to bring together groups like DairyNZ, Beef + Lamb, Federated Farmers and MPI to talk with DoC about areas where there is high risk to biodiversity.
“Then have a really good discussion about, if we’re going to do more on-farm, what does that look like?” she asked.
“What I’m hearing is people have high confidence in the QEII Trust, so what more can we do with that?”
She said there are companies like Silver Fern Farms and Fonterra already doing work in the biodiversity space.
The next step is to take what’s good, look at how to build on it, then scale it.
Fire risk, particularly the potential hazard of allowing undergrowth to get back to its natural state, is another area where there’s crossover between farmers and DoC and Nelson recently had a meeting with Fire and Emergency NZ (FENZ) chief executive Rhys Jones to explore how they could work together.
She said one of the areas they want to discuss further is what climate change will mean for future fire risk and how that can be managed.
The plan is to utilise FENZ land manager forums to work through what DoC, FENZ, local government and landowners can do.
“Fire is a critical place where working with the primary sector will be important,” she said.
Where there are challenges there are opportunities and she said one of the latter involves the growing number of people in NZ who care about conservation and want to be a part of it, both on public conservation land and outside it.
She wants to explore how to enable more people to do that and gives the example of problems with deer on public conservation land.
“We’re currently working with people like the Game Animal Council to work out where we need to get to so that our forests are in a good place.
“What do they do, what do we do and how do we make that a really positive working relationship, rather than a tense one?” she asked.
Nelson is the first woman director-general of DoC and was the first woman to lead Biosecurity NZ.
She is aware of the disproportionately low number of women in senior leadership roles in the primary sector compared with men, but says that can change.
Women employees from both DoC and MPI have told her that her achievements have shown them that they can do something similar.
“When I was in my last role (at MPI) I did a lot with our women employees where they could shadow me, we would do a range of things so they could get a sense of what the job looked like,” she said.
“One of the things that I valued at MPI was when I was interested in the biosecurity role, I had a male boss who really backed me to do it.
“I think women can absolutely get into leadership roles in the primary sector.”
For now though, Nelson’s focus is on doing the best she can for conservation and biodiversity in NZ and a key part of that is working with the primary sector.
“I don’t think we will get to amazing biodiversity in NZ if we don’t work well together.
“There is a whole lot that we can achieve if we do that,” she said.
