15 mins with...Carlos Bagrie

CLA Deputy President Joe Evans sits down with New Zealand farmer, entrepreneur and Nuffield Scholar Carlos Bagrie for a wide-ranging conversation about rural innovation, brand-building and what UK and New Zealand farming can learn from each other.

Carlos Bagrie is anything but a conventional farmer. Having co-founded My Food Bag - New Zealand's answer to HelloFresh - he went on to purchase a stunning 1,200-acre farm in the foothills of the Southern Alps near Queenstown, and has since built one of New Zealand's most recognisable rural brands.

From a micro abattoir and butchery producing 10 tonnes of lamb per month, to two high-end supermarkets, a brewery, a whiskey label and a TV show that draws inevitable comparisons to Jeremy Clarkson's farming adventures, Carlos and his wife Nadia have become household names in New Zealand.

A genuinely global perspective on farming's future, this episode is essential listening for anyone interested in rural diversification, farm business strategy and the power of authentic storytelling in agriculture.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to Fifteen Minutes With, a podcast from the Country Land and Business Association. In this episode, CLA Deputy President Joe Evans sits down with New Zealand farmer and rural entrepreneur Carlos Bagri.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Carlos Bagri, good morning. Very warm welcome to the CLA pod and really delighted to see you. I think I'm right in saying you are our first international guest, which is a great honour for me to be uh chairing and hosting this one. You and I met um very randomly at Mutual Friends Extraordinary Party overlooking the beautiful Vista at Queenstown on Crown Range. Um and whilst everyone else was having a polite conversation about canopes and these amazing friends we were partying with, I think we were talking about farming. And so um I thought it was uh a good opportunity to pick it up here on the pod. Um maybe you'd be kind enough just to set the scene. Um, you and Nadia are household names in New Zealand. Um, not everyone in the UK may know of all your work, so perhaps you could give our listeners just a brief overview.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Well, thank you very much, Drummond. It's a pleasure to be here. Uh our story, we've been in the food industry now for 15, 20 years. And I I grew up on a farm, but I'm not a farmer by trade. So I ended up uh going into the corporate world, but exiting out of that uh when we sold down a business that we had. We started a business called My Food Bad, which will be similar to your HelloFresh or any sort of menu recipe delivery businesses. And I spotted a farm I fell in love with. Beautiful 1,200 acres of lovely, uh lovely land, freehold land in Queenstown. So for any listeners in the UK, a lot of you will be familiar with with where Queenstown is, but it's in the sort of the foothills of the Southern Alps of New Zealand, in the South Island. Uh we're we're high, so uh 615 metres above sea level. Uh we get snow, we get ice, we get frost, and then we get extreme heat. Uh so that's a very unusual place to farm, but uh our whole sort of movement around it has been a combination of building our own brand. Uh, and that's I guess if you like that's been quite central to what we do. We built our own microabattoire and butchery on the farm, and we supply a lot of our meat. So we're pushing about 10 tons of lamb meat a month into into restaurants and kind of high-end supermarkets in New Zealand. We also started our own high-end supermarket, so we've got two supermarkets uh in Queenstown. Uh, and what else do we do? We do beer, uh, we do whiskey, and hell Joe, what else have I done? Uh TV, all sorts of things. So I think some of we get a little bit of comparison with uh Jeremy Clarkson, uh, because we've got a show that's it was as similar in ilk, albeit I like to think that maybe I know a little bit more about farming than Jeremy does, but yeah, sort of similar.

SPEAKER_01 2:45

That's amazing. Well, um, Carlos, if you were in the UK, we'd be nabbing you as a sort of poster child for CLA business because many of our members also have their roots in farming, but realize the importance of branching out and you know doing more with uh rural land-based business. Um, Carlos, you're also a Nuffield scholar. Um, and yeah, many of our pioneering farmers in the UK have been through that programme also. Um, perhaps you could just give us a bit of a sense as to what you looked at and and when for your Nuffield scholarship, and we might talk a bit about that.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

Yeah, sure. I was I was a scholar in 2024, and that took me, uh took me to the UK three or four times, or also took me into Africa, uh, the Australia, the States, Eastern Europe, and Europe. Uh so I had good look oh and also a month in South America. So I had a good stint of travel, and potentially the most life-changing of all of experiences that I've had. Like that was pretty hard on the family. Uh, you know, we have we've got three young children, and I left I left my wife Nadia at home with a uh a nine-month-year-old baby. So you can imagine how well that's this all went down when Carlos is away for three to four months. But predominantly I was looking at farming systems initially. Uh so I was looking at you know add adding value into products and into systems. But then ultimately, I might I wrote my uh wrote my paper, my report on it was more of a macroeconomics debate. So sort of considering New Zealand's future uh with if you like New Zealand's uh an island country with this five million of us, and we're entirely reliant on export. And so our entire economy hinges on primary production, uh predominantly been dairy, and tourism. Uh and those are the two key pillars that keep our economy in in float. However, like any good stall, I argue that we need a third league. And so I sort of open up the debate as what that might look like.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Amazing. Well, I wouldn't expect you to be an expert on UK agri policy as well, but I know you did spend some time in the UK. Right now, in a post-Brexit world, we are still now trying to work out domestically what our farming policy is going to be. Um, and as you know, you and I chatted a bit about it. A lot of my role within the CLA is to try and lobby government for better policies to ensure that farmers can have a prosperous future. Um, and it strikes me that in many ways, uh a relatively urban-centric government hasn't quite figured out what it wants of the countryside just yet. Um, we're slightly different in the UK in that, you know, we're obviously 65, 70 million people rather than five, not entirely reliant on export, but we're still an island nation. Um, finite resource, lots and lots of calls on that same amount of land. So perhaps this is a bit of a cruel question to put to you, but um, I'm interested. I know one of the things that you looked at in your um in your thesis was what um what New Zealand could learn from UK farming systems right now, given the state of flux. I'm wondering if, having been around the world, you've got any reflections on what the UK might learn from New Zealand, which seems to me, on the face of it, to have a very thriving farming sector.

SPEAKER_02 5:52

Gosh, that isn't a solid question. Look, my um my my initial reaction is economies of scale. And and and by that, like so, I mean, it's just just so listeners in the UK are familiar, we're playing catch-up, we have no subsidies in New Zealand. None. Like, not not one, uh, which means there's there's no herbal lays, there's there's no there's no handouts for for anything. It's it's you're purely left to your own devices. Uh, and that has so that or that got rugged in the 80s, and consequently our farms got bigger, and our machinery got improved, and everything really was all about just chasing the dollar. And we had to go find our own export markets. So that that's that's the the background, and where that has led us to is a very efficient farming system, especially when you take the likes of dairy. Like we're we're very good at turning grass into milk powder. Now that that's challenging. So what what I saw in the UK was obviously got tremendous urban sprawl. You know, you've got these beautiful villages, and of course, you know, the land's being eaten up by development and or just reforms, really. And so what I I guess what I was curious about in the in the UK was what opportunities have you got around food production. Uh, what I was really impressed with, what I took away from the UK, um, having spent a bit of time in Scotland and also in the northern parts of England was what you're doing with your estates. Like that was really quite special. Like the agro-tourism side of it, the hunting side of it, uh, I thought that was was particularly interesting. And we've we have, to be brilliant, taken some, we've stolen some of your ideas and brought that back to our own system here in Queenstown. Um, so we've, you know, we've kind of been checking away, if you like, at that.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

I'm not sure I've answered your question here, Joe. I feel like I'll be able to do that. No, that's really interesting. I mean, one of the things that I picked up in that is that um I there's there's there are a couple of schools of thought you have very proud primary food producers in the UK that feel a really strong imperative to produce food, and that is the main thing. Increasingly, I'm observing that the ones that are right at the top of the pile are doing that, but also recognising the other uses of their land, be that tourism or or or or even adding an element of value to their produce, which of course is something that you've been able to do in Queenstown. I mean, one of the things that I'm really was really struck by um with you, and sadly, we didn't have time on my trip to come and visit your farm, but um chatting to our friends, I I've I've heard by second hand the extraordinary showcase that you've you've done with your farming business there. To what extent do you feel it's important these days to connect consumers with the manner in which their food is produced? That actual kind of it's a bit of an overused pithy cliche to talk about education, educating the consumer, but there's a connection bit that sees people understand where their food comes from and therefore perceive better value in that. To what extent do you think that's important in your business?

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Well, if we're gonna go back a step, I'd say that it's all about chasing margin. And so it struck me that there's no way that New Zealand or the UK is everything we're gonna be going to compete with the likes of Brazil. Like, none. Like that's just not like we're never gonna be able to produce food at a level that it's just we can't do it. And so sort of stepping back, you go, well, how how do we how do we add more value? And and for that for me was two parts. It was the brand, building that brand, building that distribution, and building like so that's all about storytelling, that's about I think having a superior product, but it's it's also I I think it's also living it, you know. Like we we have as we've done the TV shows, we've done all sorts of things around it, but ultimately that that story is genuine. Like it's this is what we do, you know. We're I think we're I mentioned before, we're doing about ten times a month of of red meat that we butchered off the farm ourselves. So it's not small, it's not also it's not large, like it's not, you know, that's you know, the freezing works of you know processing three, three, four thousand lambs a day here in New Zealand. So it's we're we're tiny compared to them, but we've been able to extract margin at the other end. And that's been can every farmer do that? Probably not. Does every farmer want to do that? Probably not, but there will be those that can, whether that's by their cheeses, whether that's um some sort of milk product, whether that's meat, whether that's hunting experiences, whatever it might be.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Amazing. And that sort of speaks to the final section of the topic I wanted to explore with you, which is that again, going back to much of the work of the CLA, we spend an awful lot of our time lobbying government for better, clearer uh agroenvironment schemes where they exist, better regulation, better uh conditions, economic conditions in which to invest in our business and diversify. And specifically on the agroenvironment schemes, we actually are moving away from the terminology of subsidy. We no longer have subsidies in the UK either, but we do have a few billion pounds of public money that the government wishes to invest in farming systems for public good, to create better, healthier soils, better quality waterways, uh, cleaner air, etc. And but that's quite complicated to lobby for good outcomes in that. I suppose my question to you is of those things that I've just described about the areas that we're lobbying for, how does that compare to what you have to deal with in New Zealand when it comes to creating good conditions to be able to actually do business?

SPEAKER_02 11:21

Look, there's there's similarities there. Uh so we have a Resource Management Act that's been around since 1991. And effectively, what that does is it prohibits certain things that we can and can't do. It's a pretty strict uh I suspect it was model of the UK, if I'll be honest. But it's it's quite strict rules around what we can build, the building consents, the resource consents required to, you know, like one of the things I want to do right now is expand wetland. You know, like I actually want to take farmland, pastoral farmland, retire it, plant trees, and build a wetland. Now, you would think that'd be simple, but that's going to cost thousands of dollars in consultants, geotechs, resource consent, like pain counselors. Uh, and and that's that's a shame because that that slows my mind, that slows up progress, that gets in the way of people, well-mount well-meaning people doing the right thing. Probably also in the same breath prevents people who are you know maybe trying to take advantage. Uh so like I think all similar. Like, just going back to that point I made before about living it and like the storytelling, I do think that is key for farmers just everywhere in the world to have that. We have a thing in New Zealand called open farms. Whole concept is uh through immigration, like yeah, historically New Zealand is everybody knew someone with a great uncle or a granddad or someone grew up on the land, right? That's increasingly less so. So we've got a lot of immigrants who've come from other parts of the world and they have no connection at all with rural New Zealand. And so this open farm field days thing, what we've done with our TV shows here and our books and media and everything else is to try to open that up so the public can actually see, hey, look, what we're what what is what does agriculture look like and and and and why is it important? Like what what what like we need to tell that story ourselves, or otherwise I feel like it's just gonna get lost. Or get told worse or worse, it'll get told for us.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

And get told wrongly. I mean, um, I think a three or four apps back we had um Ian Piggott, who was the founder of what we have in the UK, which is called Open Farm Sunday, every year. Farms coordinate and they do this extraordinary thing, and tens of thousands um of members of the public get to experience farms. So completely agree. And your commentary is prescient because we are we have our big conference coming up in the autumn, and our plans at the moment is to actually centre anchor that entire conference around the importance of telling our story better. And that doesn't necessarily need to be lots of petting zoos and lots of members of the public coming to just have a nice time on farm. It is about telling our story better to the supply chain as well, and why we've got a superior product in in all sorts of different ways. So that that really lands. Carlos, thank you so much. And um your you and Nadia and your amazing young family, I sense, are only just getting started. What have you got next um in terms of your own uh your own business? What's what what can listeners look forward to if they uh choose to hunt you out?

SPEAKER_02 14:09

So off farm for for us our retail stores have have really, I mean, they're really starting to grow into their straps. And so expansion of them would be uh like I'd love to have a third store and like a medium format size retail, like like a proper although people think farm shops, which one of them is, but the other one is is a small supermarket. I'd like to have a a bigger one. Um much easier to make money there than than necessary farming. The other thing that we're doing, and and Joe, like I've I've stolen this to be honest a little bit from yourself, and and a lot of a lot of what I saw in the UK, which I think does it extraordinarily well, is agritourism. So what what we can generate off, you know, we've we've only we've retired the you know a 10-acre block of land that we built um various things on for conferences and um product launches and hospitalities uh style gigs, and that has been I mean, it has been very welcome, very welcome income. So I'll I'd like to do a bit more of that too.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Amazing. Well, I'll give you your you've been very classy and not given too much of an overt plug, but I'll do it for you. If um anyone is visiting Queenstown, I mean it is I'm very fortunate to live in Herefordshire in in the UK, which is beautiful. I have to say, standing on Crown Range and overlooking that that vista and Queenstown itself, it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. So um I I think your your instinct is right. I'm sure a lot of people go. Um, Carlos Bagri, thank you so much for giving of your time. Um look at that. We did it in exactly 15 minutes. So thank you very much indeed. Um and I hope to see you either here in the UK or next time I'm um I'm in New Zealand. Thank you very much indeed.

SPEAKER_02 15:41

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

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