The farm vote is back in play as old economic pressures return

Saturday, 6 June 2026

Luke Malpass is politics, business and economics editor

OPINION: When Christopher Luxon travels to Fieldays in the Waikato next week, it will matter.

Internally, there is an acknowledgement that the National Party is back in a knife fight for the votes of rural New Zealanders and farmers. Within the party there is significant concern that some of those voters are considering heading towards New Zealand First.

It is a broader reflection of National's weak polling and the personal unpopularity of the Prime Minister, despite what have arguably been some of the strongest outward-facing weeks of his premiership.

There are many structural issues facing rural New Zealand. The sector has been in relatively good health, coming off the back of strong export prices, particularly in farming. But, as ever, there are problems bubbling away beneath the surface.

The first is that, like the rest of the economy, the cost of energy has been increasing. New Zealand First talks about that consistently.

It is also the case that, despite commodity prices being higher, many of the structural issues in the economy remain much the same as they were when Luxon came to power. Input costs remain high and inflation looks likely to tick up again.

To understand some of this, rewind the clock to 2021. The ACT Party was edging up towards National in private polling. Then leader Judith Collins overreached and was removed after attempting to end Simon Bridges’ political career.

Enter Christopher Luxon, the political greenhorn who emerged as the compromise candidate. Many viewed him as the figure who could reunite the party simply because he had not been involved in the bitter internal warfare of 2020 and 2021.

A big part of what he did, relatively successfully, was to bring rural voters back to National. He made a point of holding his first major public meeting in Morrinsville, delivering a speech beneath the town’s giant cow and recommitting National to the farming sector. His message was simple: farming was valued and farmers were not the enemy.

It became a cornerstone of National's revival under Luxon.

Now he is having to do much the same thing again.

Fieldays will be the latest high-profile opportunity to reconnect with rural New Zealand, although the Prime Minister is frequently in provincial and rural communities towards the end of most weeks.

While Luxon and a large contingent of ministers are expected to spend the best part of two days at the country's biggest agricultural show, there have been other signs this has become a priority for National.

When Luxon reshuffled his caucus following the confidence vote he ultimately survived, one of the more surprising promotions was that of farmer Mike Butterick.

Butterick, now an Associate Agriculture Minister, hails from the Wairarapa and had been heavily involved in rural concerns around productive farmland being converted into forestry.

His elevation was part of a growing acknowledgement that National had begun to lose ground among farmers. Luxon appears to have concluded that Butterick was someone who could be sent around the country to help repair those relationships.

It does not appear that the effects of the conflict in the Middle East have yet flowed fully through into farming, apart from the obvious increase in the cost of non-hedged diesel fuel. Over the next six months, however, that is likely to change in the form of higher fertiliser prices, more expensive plastics and increased costs across a range of farm inputs.

Also at Fieldays will be the New Zealand Economics Forum, which traditionally gathers at the start of each political year at the University of Waikato.

This year the NZEF is running a session at Fieldays. (Disclosure: The Post is an NZEF partner and I will be chairing two of the panels.)

There is no shortage of real-world economic challenges facing farmers, and simply being politically “for farmers” cannot make many of those challenges disappear.

One of the more significant problems is that, while the farming sector has continued to record productivity gains over recent decades, much of that improvement has come through land-use change, particularly the conversion of arable land into dairy farms (kiwifuit excepted).

That has delivered economic benefits, but it also raises questions around environmental impacts and social licence. It has also contributed to a situation where New Zealand produces less fruit and vegetables and more protein.

Part of that reflects a much broader historical trend. Livestock production is generally a more reliable business than growing crops. Crops are more vulnerable to disease, adverse weather and other disruptions. Raising animals is often the safer commercial option if the land allows for it.

However, on-farm productivity, including in dairy, has not meaningfully accelerated for at least a decade.

There may yet be gains from innovations such as Halter, the rapidly growing New Zealand company that uses virtual fencing technology and collars to manage livestock. But better pasture management and other improvements have not recently translated into major productivity breakthroughs across the sector.

The farming sector is also not merely exposed to growing geopolitical tensions; it is particularly vulnerable to them.

And while it was notable that in a Budget defined by restraint, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade under Foreign Minister Winston Peters received more funding rather than less, there was a reason for that.

The Government understands that New Zealand’s prosperity depends heavily on a trading system that is becoming less predictable. In a world where old alliances are under strain and economic shocks can arrive from the other side of the globe overnight, relationships matter.

The fuel crisis may have faded from the headlines. Oil prices have eased from their peaks and the Strait of Hormuz is no longer dominating daily news coverage. But the underlying vulnerabilities remain.

Farmers know this better than most. They are among the first to feel rising fuel costs, fertiliser price increases and disruptions to global supply chains. They are also among the first to benefit when international markets are working well.

That is the challenge facing Luxon as he heads to Fieldays. The politics are important, but they are only a reflection of something deeper. Rural New Zealand is not looking for sympathy or slogans. It is looking for answers to problems that are becoming increasingly global in nature and increasingly difficult for any government to control.

Fieldays was an important linchpin in Luxon’s relationship with rural New Zealand when he became National leader. Four years later, it has become a reminder that political support, like farming itself, requires constant work. And in a tougher economic and geopolitical environment than the one he inherited, keeping those voters onside may prove harder than winning them back in the first place.