World Milk Day – June 1
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) back in 2001 established June 1 as World Milk Day, "which celebrates the important c...
Craige Mackenzie
A New Zealand Farmer Looks at Subsidies Through a Different Lens
A $12-billion “assistance package” to American farmers sounds like a great deal, at least for the recipients: a one-time payment that is intended to soften suf...
GMO Beyond The Science III: Collaborative GLP and GFN Project
The Global Farmer Network (GFN) has collaborated with the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP) on GMO Beyond The Science III that follows the earlier I and II multi-p...
Crop Biotech 3.0: A Farmer’s Perspective
Here in New Zealand, we did not participate in the GE Gene Revolution. Farmers like me see an advantage in making sure that we do not miss the next one. You...
Sustainable Farming Practices, New Zealand
The Global Farmer Network recently queried some of its members with some questions about their views on sustainability in their countries, regions and local are...
Tackling Water, Resource Conservation With Modern Agriculture
As I sat in a board room in Minneapolis, I used a break in my meeting to check the moisture of the soil on my farm in New Zealand. I didn’t walk into a field ...
Food Evolution: Search for the Truth
As a farmer in New Zealand, I have no access to genetically modified crops. Our legislation does not allow us to grow them on our island nation. So I was eag...
Creating a Positive Trade Future with TPP
The best way to predict the future is to create it. Some attribute this clever line to Abraham Lincoln and others to Peter Drucker. Yet it doesn’t matter who...
The Trans Pacific Partnership will be Good for New Zealand
It took five years of intense negotiations and political controversy—and last week, trade diplomats finally gathered in New Zealand to sign the Trans-Pacific Pa...
Sustainable Intensification In Global Agriculture
When people in the United States and Europe think about New Zealand at all, a few notions usually pop into their heads: Our islands are far away, they’re pristi...
Craige Mackenzie
Farmer, Methven, New Zealand
Craige Mackenzie is an innovative dairy and cropping farmer from Methven, New Zealand. His farms are situated near the foothills of the Southern Alps on Canterbury Plains. Greenvale Pastures is an intensive irrigated cropping operation that grows several specialty seed crops, along with wheat and rye grass. Three Springs Dairies is a high output dairy farm milking 1050 cows on 320 ha that includes a fully irrigated pasture-based system with additional grain feeding. Craige and his daughter established Agri Optics NZ Ltd., a company that provides precision agriculture tools and services to increase the efficiency of NZ farming systems. Craige volunteers as a board member for the Global Farmer Network, is one of New Zealand’s two representatives to the International Society for Precision Agriculture and is heavily involved in a number of industry research initiatives involving the dairy and cropping sectors. Honored as the recipient of a New Zealand Nuffield Farming Scholarship, Craige and his wife Roz were also awarded the coveted 2013 National Ballance Farm Environmental Award and in 2016, Craige was recognized as the International Precision Ag Farmer of the year.