'Your next purchase decision should be electric’, says fossil-fuel-free farmer
Mike Casey gets pretty excited about the latest tech and the latest new gadget for his orchard is an electric Monarch tractor, the only one of its kind in New Zealand. Casey sold the tech company he co-founded to Seek in 2019. Since then, he and his wife Rebecca have been running an experiment in the real world, starting Forest Lodge, the countrys first fossil fuel free cherry orchard in Central Otago. Casey saw an opportunity to do much more than just plant trees to remove carbon. In keeping with the open source philosophy often seen in the tech world, he embraced radical transparency in an effort to show other farmers and growers that it is not only possible to go fully electric on a farm , but it is potentially more profitable. READ MORE: * Fully electric cherry farm the result of 'going geeky' * All electric, fossil free farm down to entrepreneur thinking, 'under the hood' Kiwi ingenuity and a diesel tractor * Project Onslow is the key to unlocking our renewable future * How 'green' hydrogen gas can help us protect the climate It doesnt matter if youre a Greenpeace activist or dairy farmer from Southland, you leave with a smile on your face and a couple of ideas on how to improve things. For the dairy farmer, its all about finances, cost savings, return on investment and being rewarded by customers for doing things differently. For the Greenpeace activist, its really about carbon saving. Casey says the benefit of becoming a concept farm means he can tell his story and its not possible to be wrong. If you're an academic, you say this is how it should be and you can contest that. But its hard to contest if its your own experience. You throw in all the mistakes you've made, and it becomes an authentic story that people can get behind. Thats what weve been experiencing. Hes been very pleasantly surprised with the amount of interest in their operation. He says most moderate farmers are looking for solutions. No business likes it when they are told to make their business smaller. So what is within your scope of control? The answer is the removal of fossil fuels. Casey says thousands of farmers have visited Forest Lodge. Most of them have been fellow fruit growers and viticulturists, but there have also been plenty of dairy, sheep and beef farmers and quite a few from the UK. After proving it could be done, Casey looked at the existing carbon zero certifications and became disillusioned with the role that offsetting played. I eliminated fossil fuels, but I couldnt appear to be any better than someone who had just offset their emissions. Youre paying to sweep your bad behaviour under the rug. There was no platinum standard, he says, so thats what hes intending to create a NZ0 certification aimed at other food producers wanting to eliminate all scope one fossil fuels. Producers will still offset the scope two and three emissions that are out of their control, like shipping. The accreditation is really easy for consumers to understand, he says, and removing fossil fuels has already been proven to generate a premium, with a 15% boost for Forest Lodge cherries in the domestic market when it ran price trials in Farro Fresh last year. It also received a premium in the export market, but it was just one wholesale customer. We share all our numbers, so we say now youve seen all this, your next purchase decision should be electric , he says. And while solar, batteries and clever use of grid electricity can reduce cost and emissions, there is so much more potential here, he says. Asking how much money will I save if I shift from diesel to electric? is too one-dimensional. You need to ask If I usually run my diesel tractor for 350 hours, what if its basically free to run, and I use it for 1500 hours a year? How can I use this tractor with this abundance of power to make more money? Casey believes there are plenty of individual benefits to any business that makes the transition, and that this approach can help the country as a whole to reduce our reliance on imports. Currently, 40% of all global sea freight is in the transportation of fossil fuels or chemicals derived directly from fossil fuels. We are one of the few countries that could truly become energy independent if we electrify. Yes, there will need to be more facilities, but the energy will be ours, so its changing the narrative from electric vehicles are scary to hell yeah, go New Zealand.