Controlled Demolition: How New Zealand Is Dismantling the Science It Needs Most
No Federated Farmers - lower barriers to agrichemicals are not the silver bullet for grass grub.
Federated Farmers argues that agrichemical regulations should be loosened because farmers are losing access to effective grass grub controls. Yet this framing misses the central lesson from overseas: successive generations of pesticides have repeatedly produced new ecological, environmental, and health concerns, which is precisely why many jurisdictions now place greater emphasis on Integrated Pest Management rather than perpetual chemical substitution. The real question is not what chemical comes next, but why New Zealand has failed to invest in the research needed to make farmers less dependent on hazardous chemicals in the first place.
What does Federated Farmers not talk about? Farmers, growers, and spray operators bear the greatest occupational exposure to agrichemicals, yet the organisation seldom frames pesticide use as a farmer health issue. Nor has it strongly opposed the long-term decline in public-good agricultural science, environmental monitoring, and independent ecological research. As a result, its advocacy often appears closer to the interests of the agrichemical sector, represented by APHANZ, than to the long-term interests of farmers themselves, who ultimately need safer, more resilient and less chemically dependent farming systems.
The grass grub Costelytra giveni is the most economically damaging pasture pest in New Zealand. Its larvae feed on the roots of ryegrass and clover, causing annual losses estimated between NZ$1.7 and $2.3 billion across the primary sector. Federated Farmers released Reforms could finally unblock agrichemical pipeline (published in the May 2026 Farmers Weekly). Their example – grass grub.
‘The phase-out of chlorpyrifos and the earlier decision to ban diazinon from 2028 have heightened concerns about farmers being left without effective replacement products.
“There’s a real risk here that farmers are left with no effective tools to combat grass grub,” he says.
“There are new products in the queue waiting to be approved, but we need the EPA to prioritise them now.”
The international lesson from white-grub management in Europe and North America is not that regulators found a perfect replacement for older chemistry. Instead, each generation of control agents revealed new trade-offs. Organochlorines gave way to organophosphates. Organophosphates gave way to neonicotinoids. Neonicotinoids were subsequently restricted because of pollinator and aquatic ecosystem concerns. Newer diamide insecticides such as chlorantraniliprole may present lower mammalian toxicity but still raise questions regarding persistence and impacts on non-target invertebrates. Consequently, many researchers increasingly frame pest management as an ecological systems challenge rather than a chemical substitution challenge.
Yet the New Zealand Government has systematically dismantled the public infrastructure of knowledge that would allow it to manage problems like grass grub, while simultaneously removing the environmental oversight that might otherwise slow that dismantling. What the public are left with is the comprehensive subordination of science to commercial logic, of public good to private capture, and of long-term knowledge to short-term innovation.
New Zealand funds interventions while reducing our capacity to understand the systems those interventions are intended to improve - because the monitoring and research funding for key boots-on-the-ground monitoring and research does not exist. The problem extends beyond agrichemicals and grass grub. Recent work by PhD candidate Eu Tait-Jamieson highlights that pasture systems developed under historical climatic conditions may be increasingly unsuited to emerging weather patterns. Changes in temperature and rainfall influence pasture growth, pest dynamics, disease pressure, soil biology, and nutrient cycling. While biotechnology receives substantial attention as a climate adaptation strategy, equivalent investment in long-term monitoring and agricultural ecology is absent.
New Zealand is dismantling precisely the scientific capability needed to understand and adapt to our greatest problems – pest species and climate variation. While this discussion is about invasive insect pasture species – many more case studies can reveal how science funding has been reconfigured away from public good monitoring and research.
There is no institutional mandate for long-term, place-based agroecological research that is not linked to a technology, product, commercial pathway, intellectual property opportunity, or innovation programme.
This might explain why New Zealand does not fund a multi-factor, long-term, systems-level integrative pest management (IPM) research programme that would tell us how to reduce pest pressure without depending on increasingly controversial chemicals, and why the NZEPA doesn’t have the scientific resources to draw on, from the broader research community.
PSGRNZ’s Submission (PDF) to the Primary Production Select Committee, Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Amendment Bill (304-1). Submissions close June 15, 2026. More PSGRNZ information can be found here.
The Pest, The Poison, and the Farmer in the Middle
The grass grub has been a significant pest since European settlers established intensive pastures in New Zealand in the late nineteenth century. Its biology is well understood: adult beetles emerge in spring, females lay eggs in soil, larvae hatch and spend the critical autumn and winter months feeding on root systems, causing pasture damage visible as brown, lifting turf by March to June. The economic damage can be measured, it is repeated annually, and concentrated in the regions that produce the dairy, sheep, and beef products that underwrite New Zealand’s export economy.
For decades, the primary chemical controls were organophosphate insecticides: chlorpyrifos and diazinon. Both are neurotoxic. Both work by inhibiting acetylcholinesterase, the enzyme that breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, causing sustained nerve stimulation, paralysis, and death in insects. In humans, the same mechanism produces a spectrum of effects from mild discomfort to severe neurological damage. Chlorpyrifos, in particular, has been associated with developmental neurotoxicity in children, and EFSA concluded in 2019 that no safe exposure level could be established. New Zealand’s EPA reached a similar conclusion, banning chlorpyrifos from July 2025. Diazinon follows by 2028. Farmers who sprayed chlorpyrifos for grass grub were, by the EPA’s own assessment, at risk from immediate and long-term health issues. They were not spraying recreationally. They were spraying because the grass grub was destroying their pasture and there was no alternative.
A farmer in the Canterbury plains, or the Waikato hill country, applying chlorpyrifos in late summer was not a bad actor. Farmers respond to a real pest pressure with the only commercially available tool the research system had provided. The health risk they accepted was not chosen in ignorance, it was accepted because the system removed choice by removing the informational monitoring and research pathways for solutions that are similarly effective with less toxic risk
The regulatory response banning the chemicals without ensuring viable replacements effectively leaves farmers exposed to both the health risks of continued use during the phase-out and the economic risks of pest pressure without control. They bear the physical and economic cost.
The Replacement That Isn’t: Why New Chemistry Is No Solution
Overseas experience suggests that there is no simple chemical solution to grass grub or its North American and European equivalents (white grubs and chafer grubs). More recently, neonicotinoids such as imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam became widely adopted because they were viewed as safer alternatives. However, these compounds proved highly toxic to pollinators and aquatic invertebrates, persistent in soils, and capable of contaminating waterways. As a result, the European Union prohibited outdoor uses of the major neonicotinoids, while Canada cancelled several turf and lawn uses following environmental risk assessments.
The most successful modern grub-control insecticide is generally considered to be chlorantraniliprole, a diamide insecticide that has lower mammalian toxicity and lower vertebrate risk than the older chemistries. Regulatory reviews by both the US EPA and European authorities indicate that it remains toxic to aquatic and soil invertebrates, is highly persistent in some soils, and may pose risks to sediment-dwelling organisms. Consequently, even the most favourable contemporary chemical option carries ecological trade-offs. The broader lesson from Europe and North America is therefore not that one insecticide has solved the grub problem, but that successive generations of insecticides have repeatedly revealed new environmental concerns.
The anthranilic diamides (IRAC Group 28), chlorantraniliprole and cyantraniliprole, are the most frequently cited candidates. They have a genuinely different mode of action, activating ryanodine receptors in insect muscle rather than inhibiting acetylcholinesterase, and they are registered in the US, Canada, and the EU. They are not registered for pasture use in New Zealand. The reason may be that New Zealand’s agrichemical approval queue is chronically under-resourced, and major companies including Syngenta have deliberately deprioritised NZ registrations because the regulatory burden is disproportionate to the market size. The result is a country with one of the most agriculturally dependent economies in the OECD unable to access modern chemistry that farmers in Europe, the US, and Australia can use.
The anthranilic diamides cannot fill this gap, even though corporate reviews may suggest otherwise. Research published after the 2014 EFSA approvals identified a cluster of concerns. Soil persistence under cool temperate conditions approaches or exceeds a year in some studies, and repeated applications extend this significantly. Multigenerational earthworm studies demonstrate increasing sensitivity at concentrations below those measured in agricultural soils. Springtails, critical decomposers and a key link in the soil food web, show an EC50 for reproduction of just 0.14 mg/kg dry weight, making them potentially more sensitive than the target pest. Honey bees display persistent cardiotoxicity and locomotor impairment after single non-lethal doses. Amphibian metamorphosis studies suggest potential hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis disruption at environmentally relevant concentrations. (Lavtizar et al 2016; Kaabeche et al 2024; Martin et al 2024; Pena and Brodeur 2024; Charreton et al 2026; Granados Povedano et al 2026;Wu et al 2026)
New Zealand’s proposed fast-track approval mechanism, which would rely on the assessments of trusted overseas regulators as its primary evidentiary basis, would not capture any of this post-2014 literature, since the EFSA approvals on which fast-tracking would be anchored predate it entirely; the 2013–2014 peer reviews that form the regulatory foundation were conducted before the multigenerational earthworm sensitivity data existed, before the honey bee cardiotoxicity and locomotor impairment studies were published, before the springtail EC50 was characterised in low-organic-matter soils, and before the amphibian metamorphosis work raised the HPT axis question, and no NZ-specific monitoring, independent risk assessment, or long-term soil ecology surveillance is proposed to fill that gap, because the institutions and funding streams that would conduct such work have been simultaneously removed.
The anthranilic diamides are perhaps safer than organophosphates across most toxicological metrics, but they exert toxicity and persistence. Applying them at scale to NZ’s earthworm-rich, cool, well-watered pasture soils warrants genuine caution as without independent NZ-specific assessment of soil persistence under cool temperate conditions, ecotoxicological risk to NZ’s particular soil invertebrate communities, and long-term monitoring of field impacts, it replaces one set of inadequately understood risks with another. The agrichemical pipeline is being unblocked, but the independent science to assess what flows through it is simultaneously being dismantled.
The Big Six Pasture Pests and the Road Not Taken
The grass grub is one of six pasture insect pests, the so-called Big Six, that collectively cause NZ$1.7–$2.3 billion in annual damage to New Zealand pastoral agriculture. They are: the grass grub (Costelytra giveni) the Argentine stem weevil (Listronotus bonariensis), the root aphid (Aploneura lentisci), the porina moth complex (Wiseana spp.), the African black beetle (Heteronychus arator), and the pasture mealybug (Balanococcus poae).(Hewitt et al 2025) Each is biologically distinct. Each has a different life stage that causes primary damage, root feeding, stem boring, sap sucking, leaf consumption. Each responds differently to farm management decisions. Each of them might be meaningfully suppressed, not eliminated through a different understanding of the farming system itself.
Decades of agroecological research in other contexts: that a farming system designed with ecological function in mind, rather than chemical correction applied after the fact, can reshape the conditions under which pest populations establish, thrive, and damage. Increasing numbers of researchers to advocate integrated pest management (IPM) approaches that combine biological controls, pasture or crop diversity, cultivation and rotation strategies, and ecological management of soils, rather than relying solely on replacement chemistry (Deguine et al 2021).
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) emerged internationally as a response to the limitations of chemical control. Rather than asking which pesticide should be applied to a pest outbreak, IPM asks why pest populations have reached damaging levels in the first place. It combines monitoring, economic thresholds, biological control, crop and pasture diversity, cultivation practices, rotation strategies, resistant plant varieties, nutrient management, and targeted chemical intervention only where necessary. The objective is not eradication but the maintenance of pest populations below economically damaging thresholds while preserving ecosystem function.
The most important lesson from the international literature is not that regulators eventually found safer insecticides. It is that many Integrated Pest Management programmes failed to escape chemical dependency. In their influential 2021 review, Deguine and colleagues concluded that despite six decades of IPM promotion, global pesticide use has continued to increase. They argue that pest management became trapped in a cycle of chemical substitution, replacing one problematic pesticide with another, while paying insufficient attention to the ecological conditions that generate pest outbreaks in the first place. Their proposed alternative, Agroecological Crop Protection, shifts the focus from products to systems: species diversity, crop rotations, soil ecology, microbial communities, biological regulation, and farming-system design. The question is no longer which insecticide should replace chlorpyrifos, but whether the farming system itself can be redesigned so that dependence on insecticides becomes progressively less necessary.
For grass grub and New Zealand’s broader ‘Big Six’ pasture pests, a genuinely integrated approach would investigate how species diversity, rotation history, cultivation intensity, soil organic matter, microbial ecology, nutrient management, endophytes, biological control organisms, and climatic conditions interact to influence pest populations. Such a programme would inevitably be long-term, multidisciplinary, and place-based. It would generate ecological understanding rather than simply evaluate products.
The problem is that no obvious institutional home now exists for this work. The Bioeconomy Science Institute has been established around innovation and commercial outcomes. That mandate is well suited to developing patentable technologies, licensable biological products, novel seed technologies, or commercial agrichemicals. It is less obviously suited to a decade-long public-good research programme investigating whether diverse pasture systems, suppressive soils, rotation strategies, and microbial ecology can collectively reduce pest pressure across multiple species. Such research generates knowledge rather than products, management principles rather than intellectual property, and public benefit rather than direct commercial return.
Current science funding restrictions rule out a research agenda with the six variables (in paragraph form below) to investigate impact across the Big 6 pest species.
Species diversity. The composition of the sward shapes which pests can establish and at what density. Grass grub larvae show higher survival in high-clover swards. Argentine stem weevil preferentially colonises perennial ryegrass monocultures. Porina, while catholic in its host range, is suppressed in swards containing species that are less palatable to its larvae. Root aphid populations are strongly modulated by endophyte strain in ryegrass, but the effect of sward diversification, the presence of other grass and herb species that do not host the aphid (which might also be nutritious and lead to weight gain), has barely been studied. African black beetle and pasture mealybug have received almost no examination from a species diversity perspective. The pre-WWII NZ literature noted that changes to sward composition affected pest dynamics. A century later, that observation has not been made the subject of systematic experimental inquiry.
Crop rotation and cultivation are the most powerful tools available for disrupting soil-dwelling pest populations. Rotation breaks the continuity of host plant availability; cultivation physically destroys larval habitat, disrupts overwintering stages, and exposes soil fauna to predation and desiccation. Argentine stem weevil is less sensitive to rotation than grass grub, because its adults can disperse into newly sown pasture from adjacent areas. Porina pupae are relatively deep in the soil and survive many cultivation events. These interactions between rotation, cultivation, and individual pest species have been examined in isolation but never in combination, and never with soil ecology measured as an explanatory variable.
Soil health. Soil organic matter, structure, bulk density, and biological activity together determine the conditions in which larvae live, in which entomopathogenic fungi and bacteria maintain viable populations, and in which plant root systems develop the resilience to tolerate sublethal feeding pressure. Healthy soils with high earthworm activity, diverse microbial communities, and stable organic matter profiles may be more likely to support the biological processes that suppress pest outbreaks, although this relationship remains under-investigated for grass grub and most of New Zealand’s major pasture pests.
Nutrient management has direct effects on pest fitness that operate through host plant quality. The most recent NZ research — glasshouse work by Hewitt, Hofmann, Ball, and Popay at AgResearch and Lincoln University in 2024–25 — demonstrated that phosphorus levels modulate grass grub survival, with an interaction between P status and endophyte infection that affects pest outcomes. The same team found that phosphorus-induced changes in forage quality enhanced porina fitness on endophyte-free grasses. (Hewitt et al 2024;2025) These are genuine and important findings. But they are two-factor studies: nutrient × endophyte strain. The interaction of nutrient management with all the other dimensions: species composition, rotation history, soil microbial activity, has not been examined. For the other Big Six pests, the nutrient management literature is thinner still. A Tanzanian study found that African black beetle abundance was significantly higher in farmyard manure treatments than mineral fertiliser plots (Abdullah et al 2016). For root aphid, the Massey PhD work of 2019–2020 explicitly called for irrigation and fertilisation studies to determine whether these could mitigate yield losses in the field.
Microbial ecology is where the most intellectually promising research territory may lie. The concept of invertebrate-suppressive soils is well established for a small number of systems. A study using high-resolution rhizosphere sequencing of soils across a NZ latitudinal gradient found that two of ten soils showed suppressive activity against Costelytra giveni larvae, with rhizosphere fungi responsible for the effect identified via next-generation sequencing. The question of what management practices build or deplete that suppressiveness — which cultivation strategies preserve the microbial communities responsible, which nutrient regimes favour entomopathogenic fungi, which sward compositions recruit suppressive microbiota through root exudate chemistry, has not been answered. The Dignam, O’Callaghan, Condron, and Wakelin research programme at AgResearch and Lincoln through the 2010s established that land use and soil organic matter quality shape microbial community structure with implications for disease suppression( Bell et al 2016).
The research programme that could exist and does not, could bring these six dimensions into a single experimental framework. It would establish long-term field sites across NZ’s key pastoral regions and soil types. It would vary species composition, rotation sequences, cultivation intensity, nutrient inputs, and organic matter management in designed combinations. It would measure pest population dynamics for all Big Six species simultaneously. It would characterise soil microbial community structure and function using modern sequencing tools. It would track entomopathogenic fungal and bacterial populations and correlate them with pest outcomes. It would run for at least ten years, because soil ecological dynamics and pest population responses to management change operate on decadal timescales. And it would generate no licensable IP, no patentable product, and no commercial outcome for any private entity.
Every element of that programme is feasible and the tools exist. The biological hypotheses are grounded in existing evidence. International precedents - the Kellogg Biological Station long-term rotation experiments, and the Paddock et al. (2024) work on conservation agriculture microbiomes and western corn rootworm in the US , are examples of potential approaches.
The Research Gap: A Study in Institutional Capture
Behind every chemical control decision lies a research question: is there a better way? For grass grub specifically, and the Big Six NZ pasture pests more broadly, the research that would answer this question: a systematic, multi-factor investigation of the combined effects of species diversity, crop rotation, cultivation practices, soil health management, nutrient management, and microbial ecology on pest suppression, does not exist.
This gap reflects the dynamics that have shaped NZ agricultural research for three decades: the dominant research agenda is set by MBIE who controls the terms of reference for science funding and the institutions that are incentivised to develop and hold IP.
AgResearch discovered, developed, and patented the AR37 Epichloë endophyte. Its commercial subsidiary, Grasslanz Technology Limited, established in 2003, holds the IP and licenses it to seed companies including PGG Wrightson Seeds. AR37 is a genuine scientific achievement, independently estimated to contribute NZ$3.6 billion to the economy over the life of its 20-year patent. It suppresses five of the Big Six pests in a single seed purchase. It is the kind of scalable, commercially deployable solution that a research system optimised for commercialisation produces.
When the primary management tool is a patented biological product delivered through seed, the research programme naturally extends and deepens that research trajectory: what nutrients enhance its efficacy, what endophyte strains are more effective against which pests, what genetic modifications might extend its scope. The research funded by Grasslanz, enabled by AgResearch, and published by the same scientists has encouraged aligned research.
However, research into the ecological conditions under which a diverse, unpatentable, multi-species sward might suppress grass grub populations through natural soil microbiome dynamics, research that generates no IP and threatens no commercial position, has no institutional champion and therefore has not been done.
The identification of suppressive soil microbiota through publicly funded research creates a prospecting problem that runs parallel to the endophyte capture story. Once a specific fungal or bacterial taxon is identified as responsible for a valuable suppressive effect, against grass grub, against nematodes, against any of the Big Six, the research pipeline pivots from characterisation to isolation, from isolation to culturing, from culturing to patent application.
Years of public funding can be directed at developing a single biological agent: optimising its activity, establishing its genetic identity with sufficient precision to make a patent defensible, and ultimately, under the old Gene Technology Bill and now new HSNO Amendment Bill 304-1 that removes declaration requirements for many gene-edited organisms (via ‘denewing’), enhancing it in ways that may never be disclosed to regulators or the public.
What began as knowledge about a soil community - a commons, shaped by NZ’s particular land history, climate, and pastoral management, becomes a proprietary strain, owned by a private entity, licensed back to the farmers whose land generated it. The public funds the prospecting via MBIE’s science budget. The organisation registers the claim.
The ecological knowledge of what that organism does in complex soil communities, how it interacts with other suppressive taxa, what management practices build or deplete it, remains uninvestigated, because that research has no patent at the end of it.
APHANZ (formerly AGCARM), the industry body representing agrichemical and animal health companies, has been systematically positioned as a key stakeholder in agrichemical regulatory conversations. This is the body that represents the commercial interests of chemical registrants, the same parties who benefit from an agrichemical pipeline that prioritises registered products over ecological management alternatives.
While Industry should have a voice, APHANZ’s voice is amplified as agricultural and environmental scientists - independent ecologists, soil scientists, and entomologists are lose their institutional homes due to defunding of research, when NZEPA scientists lack a funding budget, when the people who can identify the limitations of chemical and endophyte solutions are being made redundant by the hundreds, the conversation loses its balance.
Funding Pipeline for Public Good Agricultural Research Closed
Against this backdrop, the restructuring of New Zealand’s research system must be understood not merely as an administrative reorganisation but as a fundamental reorientation away from publicly funded public good science to science for economic growth and commercial development.
On 1 July 2025, AgResearch, Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research, Plant & Food Research, and Scion were merged into the Bioeconomy Science Institute. It is funded according to the terms of reference, scope and purpose of funding instruments. That Institute’s stated purpose is ‘to drive innovation and commercial outcomes in the bioeconomy’. Early policy documents and press releases reveal how innovation and hence, expected economic growth, are the dominant themes that underpin reform:
The word ‘innovation’, used throughout MBIE’s mandate, carries a specific technical meaning in the OECD framework that governments worldwide use to measure science investment. The OECD Oslo Manual defines innovation as a new or improved product, good, service, or business process that has been introduced to market or brought into use. Innovation is downstream of research. It is what happens after knowledge has been generated. It is not the generation of knowledge itself.
The OECD’s Frascati Manual, by contrast, defines basic research as experimental or theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge “without any particular application or use in view.” That phrase, without any particular application in view, is the definition of the kind of fundamental ecological inquiry this essay has been circling: the multi-factor, long-term, IPM-oriented research into grass grub ecology and its non-chemical management. It is definitionally excluded by a mandate built around innovation and commercial outcomes.
Environmental monitoring, biodiversity science, suppressive soils research, long-term ecological monitoring: these appear in the mandate’s ‘collaboration’ areas, but are lower order activities the BSI is invited to participate in but not to drive.
The institutional home for genuinely curious, independent, public-good ecological science has been subordinated to a commercial mandate, and then had its budget cut by 22% at the same time.
The Transition Research Fund announced in Budget 2026 will absorb both the Marsden Fund, NZ’s primary mechanism for curiosity-driven research, and the Endeavour Fund, which has funded applied research programmes. Both are being merged into a single fund requiring “clear alignment with Government priorities.” The Marsden Fund’s 2026 round offered no new Council Awards. Eighty-four percent of Endeavour Fund applicants failed at the first round in recent cycles. The funding pipeline for independent, non-commercially aligned agricultural research it has been closed.
Professor Hugh Campbell (University of Otago) has argued that genuine state R&D investment, excluding university teaching budgets, is approximately 0.4% of GDP, one-fifth of the OECD average. The government’s response to this chronic underinvestment has been to reallocate what funding exists rather than grow it, and to direct the reallocation toward the technology and commercialisation end of the research pipeline, further starving the upstream basic research on which all applied work ultimately depends.
Human, Environmental and Agricultural Health Research Effectively Silenced
Last month, in late May 2026: the disestablishment of the Ministry for the Environment, absorbed into a new Ministry of Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport. More than 99% of submitters opposed the merger.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, while accepting the technical necessity of the legislative mechanism, warned explicitly that the change risked diluting independent environmental advice and sidelining rural challenges. He recommended that the Ministry for the Environment be excluded from the merger. This did not occur.
The dedicated institutional voice for environmental protection is now merged with agencies whose primary functions: housing development, transport infrastructure, regional growth are in tension with environmental protection. Environmental monitoring, environmental reporting, and the provision of independent environmental advice to government will now compete institutionally with development promotion within a single ministry.
For grass grub and the broader pest management challenge, the implications are direct. The environmental assessment of new agrichemicals, the monitoring of chemical impacts on soil ecology and waterways, the independent scrutiny of claimed safety for compounds being fast-tracked through regulatory approval, all of this depends on a functioning environmental oversight system with genuine institutional independence. That system is now embedded in a ministry defined primarily by economic development objectives.
The Social Cost Nobody Counts
To a city-dweller who sees news about pesticide bans, the story is simple: chemicals are being banned because they are dangerous, and farmers are resisting because they are profit-driven. The farmer spraying chlorpyrifos is the villain. The regulatory system is the hero. The science is clear.
None of that framing is accurate. The farmer spraying chlorpyrifos was at risk of neurological damage from doing so. The farmer facing a grass grub outbreak without chemical control faces pasture destruction and economic loss that cannot be absorbed. The chemical bans are correct on health and environmental grounds. The failure is not the ban, the failure is the thirty years of under-investment in the alternatives that should have been available before the ban was necessary.
Federated Farmers’ calls to fast-track agrichemical approvals look, from the outside, like an industry lobby seeking to weaken environmental protections. From the inside, they are the response of an organisation watching its members face impossible choices, spray a neurotoxin you know is being banned, or watch your pasture die.
Yet Federated Farmers’ own public position itself – let’s its membership base down. The organisation has called consistently for faster agrichemical approvals and a streamlined EPA registration pipeline: new chemicals, faster, with less regulatory friction. What it has not called for is IPM research, ecological alternatives, or multi-factor investigation of the farming system conditions that might reduce pest pressure without chemical intervention.
Federated Farmers has not named agrichemical exposure as an occupational health issue for its members, despite the NZEPA’s own finding that spray operators and bystanders bear the greatest immediate and long-term health risks from chlorpyrifos use. The representative body for NZ farmers is not, in its public advocacy, asking for the science that would most benefit farmers. It is asking for more of the same - more chemicals, approved faster - which is also, not coincidentally, what APHANZ, the industry body for agrichemical and animal health companies, wants. Whether that alignment reflects institutional capture, the limits of what seems politically achievable, or simply the urgency of an immediate crisis overwhelming longer-term thinking is impossible to say from the outside. What can be said is that the farmers bearing the occupational health risk of spray exposure are not the people setting the advocacy agenda, and the research that would reduce that risk - long-term, ecological, unpatentable, commercially inconvenient - remains unasked for by the organisation that most directly represents the people who need it.
The cost of that incomprehension reverberates across New Zealand, shaping Parliamentary and resulting in polarisation in the public. Members of Parliament whose knowledge of agricultural science is limited to a handful of briefing notes and competing industry submissions cannot interrogate the difference between innovation and research, cannot evaluate whether a Bioeconomy Science Institute mandate that never mentions basic science is structurally adequate, cannot assess whether fast-tracking anthranilic diamide registrations without NZ-specific soil ecology monitoring is prudent.
They have no language for it.
The dots are invisible to them because the institutions that would make those dots visible - independent scientists with long-term research programmes, a Ministry of Environment with investigative capacity, a funded Marsden research programme oriented toward public-good agricultural ecology - have been systematically removed.
What Is Actually Being Lost
The Bioeconomy Science Institute’s mandate is designed to produce the next AR37: a patentable, licensable, commercially deployable solution to an agricultural problem that can be sold as seed or granule to every farmer in New Zealand and, through Grasslanz’s international licensing arrangements, to farmers worldwide. That is a legitimate and valuable objective. AR37 is a genuine contribution to NZ agriculture.
This is not clever enough. Grass grub – and the big 6 - population dynamics are shaped by soil temperature, moisture, microbial community composition, host plant species, pasture age, cultivation history, and nutrient status. The interactions between these factors are non-linear, context-dependent, and have never been experimentally characterised together. The endophyte addresses one dimension of the problem (host plant resistance) in one crop species, under one management paradigm. It does not address the suppressive soil ecology question, the rotation and cultivation effects, the role of plant diversity in supporting natural enemy communities, or the long-term demographic dynamics of grass grub populations in different farming systems.
All of those research questions have been identified in the literature as important. None of them have been funded, because none of them generate IP.
The Bioeconomy Institute cannot address the broader problem – it’s too siloed.
What is being lost is not just the research that could have been done. It is the institutional capacity to know what we do not know, the public funding to investigate it free from commercial constraint, and the regulatory architecture to act on the answers even when those answers are commercially inconvenient.
Neither the public nor the scientific community can estimate scientific surprise -for example the possibility that a long-term multi-factor field trial on the suppressive properties of diverse pasture swards might reveal something genuinely unexpected about grass grub population dynamics that no one with a commercial interest in a particular answer would have been motivated to find.
Science in the public interest is not the same as science in the commercial interest. Both are valuable. But only one of them can be trusted to find findings that are commercially unwelcome. Only one of them can sustain the research programme that takes fifteen years to produce an answer. Only one of them can maintain the monitoring datasets that reveal slow ecological change before it becomes crisis. New Zealand is progressively funding only one kind and wondering why the other kind is disappearing.
Again, another well written article, thank you. It shows the "do not look, do not see" which supports those who stand to financially benefit at the expense of the everyday person and the environment.