Farm to fork built New Zealand horticulture. Fork to farm (image: copyright @2017 Dr Angeline Achariya) is what happens next. Grow what the land gives. Sell what is grown. Find a buyer after the fact. That is farm to fork, and it has worked, until the moment it stops working. Fork to farm reverses the order. Name the consumer first. Design the variety, the orchard, the season backward from there. Demand leads. Supply is built to meet it. I introduced this argument to Australian horticulture...

Australia is getting better at starting companies. We have not yet solved how to scale them. The boardroom is part of the reason. Recently I sat in a room with a founding team preparing for a capital raise. The business was real. The product worked. Customers were coming back. The commercial case was not the problem. The governance was. Not in an obvious way. No fraud, no conflict, no crisis. Just a board that had never stopped being a founder meeting. The founders running the business day to...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about where the margin goes in Australian food manufacturing. I want to pick that thread up, because something has happened since that makes the argument harder to ignore. It has crystallised something I have been circling in this newsletter for the past year, not because the thinking has been slow, but because the world has only now made the distinction impossible to avoid. Geopolitical shocks, energy volatility, trade uncertainty, they are not background noise...