NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS NEWS
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New Zealand now imports about 60% of the grain and feed it needs and 80% of the fresh fruit it eats domestically, by volume. Those figures were presented at the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science forum at Lincoln University, where growers and scientists were briefed on the state of the arable sector.
The import volumes have shifted sharply. About 2.9 million tonnes of palm kernel, soybean meal, wheat, maize and barley entered the country in 2025, up from 1.8 million tonnes in 2010. Domestic grain output has not kept pace: it sits at 1 million tonnes in 2025, up only from 900,000 tonnes in 2010. Imports have grown while local production has barely moved, so overseas supply is filling the shortfall.
Domestic feed-grain prices have been pushed close to or below the cost of growing the grain. That leaves growers in a position where the price they receive doesn’t cover what it costs to produce the crop, and the gap isn’t purely a matter of price.
Freight is part of it. Moving grain across Cook Strait is quoted at $110 to $130 a tonne. Shipping grain from Australia to New Zealand can work out cheaper than moving it from the South Island to the North Island. On-farm inflation is at a five-year high, and imports face a 26% tariff.
The forum was told the country has never been self-sufficient in grain. That position has worsened as dairying has expanded since 2010, and it is expected to worsen again as Canterbury undergoes another wave of dairy conversions.
New Zealand is a trading nation that depends on exports, so border restrictions are unlikely to shelter local growers. Growers also can’t influence scale, foreign support, logistics, standards and compliance, the forum heard.
Australia subsidises freight from Tasmania to the mainland. New Zealand has no equivalent support, and the government has been reluctant to put barriers in place. The country also lacks critical infrastructure investment, which underpins the freight cost gap between here and Australia.
The practical consequence is that imports are no longer a marginal feature of the market. They are the market, and the numbers behind that shift have been building for decades rather than appearing in a single season.
The alternative put to growers is to compete on value rather than volume. That means promoting New Zealand provenance, with the NZ Grown Grains certification cited as an example of the approach, backed by government infrastructure support.
The argument is that shoppers, food makers, and growers all buy on provenance, and that making provenance easy to buy lets a local product command a price above the imported alternative. Owning the product and its story is presented as the lever growers can pull, unlike the freight, tariff, and scale issues they cannot.
An industry cooperative structure was raised as a long-held preference, with the acknowledgement that the opportunity for one may now have passed.
For food manufacturers and feed buyers, the import share means supply chain decisions increasingly rest on imported palm kernel, soybean meal, wheat, maize and barley, and are exposed to the freight and tariff costs attached to them. For growers, the pressure is direct: if domestic feed-grain prices sit at or below the cost of production, the margin on a grain crop depends on finding a buyer willing to pay for where it came from.
There is a wider risk. Continued land-use change away from arable production raises the question of who will produce the seed the pastoral sector needs, since New Zealand is the only country producing the forages that system relies on. Arable has reached a ceiling, and the sector is now working through what comes next.
NZ Business News reports on the decisions, deals and numbers shaping New Zealand business — the companies making them, the policy and market conditions they work within, and what it means for the people running businesses here.