Wheat has always been a staple crop for Mid Canterbury farmers – we produced over 300,000 tonnes of it in 2022. But that year, we imported double the amount from Australia. The Guardian spoke to farmers about why foreign products make our supermarket shelves while New Zealand grain is sent to the cow shed.

Your pasta, your pies, your bread and your Weet Bix; New Zealanders consume wheat products in more ways than one.

But your diet might not be as Kiwi as you thought it was.

According to the Foundation of Arable Research, New Zealand produces around 400,000 tonnes of wheat a year. Canterbury supplies most of it - in 2022, almost 80% of New Zealand wheat was from the region.

“Which, ironically, about matches our current milling requirement,” Arable Food Industry Council chairperson Brian Leadley said.

Leadley is co-director of Bradley Fields Limited with his wife, Rachael, in Dromore.

Of the two classes of wheat - animal feed and milling - Leadley’s taking a chance on the latter. He has silos full of bread grain, prepped for freighting, and biscuit grain in his paddocks.

Lower yield potential and stricter quality requirements make milling wheat a risky, but hopefully profitable, move.

“We can grow as good a milling wheat as anywhere in the world,” he said.

“New Zealand if it chose to, could double its production without any difficulty.”

Despite having good grain, local grain, and lots of it, we imported 621,323 tonnes of wheat from Australia in 2022.

Some local grain gets turned into flour, and then food, domestically.

But about three quarters gets turned into animal feed, Leadley said.

It’s a reality arable farmers have grappled with for years, and a narrative that has failed to change since dairy went big.

“When we had the dairy boom through the 2000s, we saw an increase in the requirements of supplementary feed into the dairy industry,” Federated Farmers arable group chairperson David Birkett said.

Since then, livestock industries have remained a consistent customer for farmers. But a percentage of feed wheat comes from Australia, too.

Birkett has a farm in Leeston, passed down to him through generations, and is all about innovation and making the most of difficult situations.

But some forces are out of a farmer’s control, like freight costs, weather and contract availability, he said.

“For example, one of the companies this year put a contract out - it was open for two hours, and then it closed.”

As Leadley pointed out, “farmers who aren’t sitting by their computers at the right time, when most of them would be out on their tractors, miss out”.

On top of that, Birkett felt the wheat characteristics that contractors want - protein quality, for example - are not given to farmers early enough.

“It’s been a perennial problem where we’re not getting that information before we're ready to plant. And people have to plant without knowing what their price is.

“Having that information in a timely manner, would go a long way, and would help to create some stability within the market.”

Growing the grain and getting it into the hands of suppliers is one issue. But a bigger one looms, Leadley said.

“The largest portion of grain is grown in the South Island. The largest population of people is in the North Island.

“Immediately, we move into a logistics issue with freight.”

A 2022 report averaged the price of importing foreign wheat into New Zealand to $570 per tonne that year.

Foundation for Arable Research business operations general manager Ivan Lawrie said freighting across the Cook Strait costs between $100 and $130 per tonne of wheat.

The foundation is responsible for a wealth of research into boosting arable’s prevalence on local shelves, Lawrie said, and the numbers tally up fast for Mid Canterbury farmers.

“By adding that to the local price, we are no longer competitive with Australia importing to the North Island.”

Tack on the cost of land, farm maintenance and New Zealand’s cost of living, and it’s not a pretty picture for growers.

“All in all, to be fair, New Zealand is very expensive,” Lawrie said.

“That’s always been there around cost, and it’s increasingly there around reliability,” Leadley added.

“We see that with weather events affecting sailings.”

Ships from our neighbours are more reliable and constant than those crossing our own strait - and there’s domestic competition, he noted.

“While we want to send grain, there are other food products wanting to go both ways. Food, clothing, vehicles.”

Birkett said it was actually cheaper to bring wheat from halfway across the world, somewhere like Canada, than to bring it from the south to the North Island.

“Which is madness, really.”

Cost is one issue, and perception is another, Luisetti Seeds’ managing director Ed Luisetti said.

Luisetti manages an Ashburton warehouse where grain is cleaned and prepared for domestic and overseas shipments.

He reckoned most Kiwis don’t even realise they were consuming a foreign product when it comes to wheat.

“There is no way of telling.

“Weet Bix, you’d think ‘Kiwi Kids are Weet Bix kids’ so you’d think Weet Bix would be New Zealand wheat, but no, that’s all Australian.

“Likewise, McDonalds hamburger buns, you’d be thinking that’s all New Zealand wheat, but that’s all Australian wheat too.”

Since the South Island has an abundance of the crop, Luisetti said, some local mills and bakeries get their hands on NZ grain, and without a huge jump in cost.

“[Woolworths], their in-house bakeries are actually committed to using New Zealand wheat,” he said.

The irony of an Australian-owned supermarket supporting Kiwi produce was not lost on him.

“They’re certainly the outlier on that front.”

While costs can be volatile, locally grown wheat benefits Aotearoa in more ways than one, he said.

“We’ve carried out a carbon footprint analysis for local versus imported wheat, AgriLink did that work for us, and that actually showed Australian wheat flour has a carbon footprint 20% higher than New Zealand wheat.”

Leadley said peer reviewed research, produced by the foundation, consistently found the environmental impact of arable "is as low, or lower, than anywhere in the world, without the freight added on”.

“Because of our yield, our per-unit emissions are very low.”

Wheat grown in New Zealand is traceable and allows for transparency about chemical use too, he said.

“It’s also about self-sufficiency for the country,” Luisetti said, which the other farmers echoed, thinking back to 2020.

“When Covid hit, we were reliant on a lot of things coming into the country. That’s why things got a bit short in supermarkets,” Birkett said.

While the Cook Strait is a logistical nightmare, equally, global shipping is under a lot of challenges at the moment.

“If we can be more resilient,” Birkett said, “and rely more on the domestic economy, that’s gonna be a better thing for reliance.”

It will take a village, the farmers say, to educate people about the wheat they consume. They asked the public to take a stance on shopping local.

“We’ve done work with consumer surveys, and it shows a clear consumer preference for locally grown grains, and even a willingness to pay more for them,” Luisetti said.

“A lot of flour products are recognised as bread,” Leadley said. “But there’s a lot more that you can look at; your cereal foods, your bakery goods, your pasta and noodles; it’s all coming from those things.

“They’re a huge part of the Kiwi diet.”

“We’re trying to look for ways to promote a ‘New Zealand brand’, some packaging that would help you pick it out,” he added.

The food council met with associate minister of agriculture Nicola Grigg on Wednesday to voice their concerns and advice, especially regarding strait freight.

“We met yesterday to tell her ‘Hey, look, these issues are there and while it affects our industry, we recognise it affects all Kiwis.’

“Will much change? We don’t know, but we know that it would benefit our industry.”

By Anisha Satya