Farmers urged to think about energy plan, preparedness as fuel crisis continues

Wednesday, 10 June 2026

Volatility and disruption are the new normal for the rural sector, and farmers are warned not to rely solely on diesel.

“There is no normal any more,” Farmlands chief executive Tanya Houghton said during a Wednesday panel at Fieldays.

“We are seeing price rises, inflationary pressure come onto farms through literally every single category that we have.”

The Farmlands panel event saw three experts from the fuel, rural, and global risk industries discuss how the primary sector should adapt to ongoing worldwide disruption, climate change, and rising costs.

Fern Energy chief executive Chris Gourley said farmers needed to focus on energy resilience rather than responding to individual crises.

“That is about making sure you've got a good amount of supply of diesel on farms, making sure that you do have some solar, and you have other options if your electricity goes out.

“I think… given these types of events are more regular, we've got to be planned and organised.”

Gourley said the ongoing crisis in Iran was the first time he’d seen diesel top the price of petrol.

Rather than focus just on renewable energy or just fossil fuel, Gourley said he thought New Zealand “needed it all”.

“We actually have to go all in. We're a small country and we have to build energy resilience across all of those things.”

Alongside individual farms, he wanted to see an energy resilience plan implemented nationally.

“There's too much going on globally and with the weather locally, that we can't afford not to have a strong national plan,” he said, adding it should be a political issue.

He encouraged the audience to “ask those questions of politicians and get them thinking about it because we need one”.

Houghton, the chief executive of Farmlands, said farmers could no longer budget statically and needed to be ready for whatever came their way.

“You need to be budgeting in scenarios, budgeting for scenarios on price for fuel, or budgeting on availability even, and how will you have plans to de-risk those scenarios.”

Farmers needed to look at their headroom and be prepared for the upcoming spring season, she said, with resilience and preparedness being key.

When asked if farmers should consider installing solar panels on their sheds, Houghton replied they absolutely should.

Farmlands introduced an initiative called Farmlands FLEX a year ago. Since then more than 100 installations had been completed — a higher uptake than expected, Houghton said.

“It's not about replacement of diesel, it is around alternative sources of energy which give you resilience,” she said.

“Farmers are smart people and they know the importance of being resilient and they very quickly understand the economic offer.”

Horizon Lab managing director Tim Ewing-Jarvey said the current fuel crisis reflected broader changes in the global environment.

Even if the best-case scenario happened and the Strait of Hormuz opened, it would take time for infrastructure to recover and for lower prices to be passed on to consumers, he said.

For the last 60 to 80 years, New Zealand had enjoyed a “remarkably stable international trade system”.

“We've had largely consistent and enforceable rules, open markets, cheap logistics, and reliable just-in-time supply chains, and so I guess Kiwi businesses across all sectors, but particularly farms have understandably optimised for those environments,” he said.

“Now, we're seeing the likes of climate change and strategic competition in particular really starting to unsettle that.”