The treasure map nobody asked ratepayers to fund
Central Hawke’s Bay District Council has released an interactive Crop Suitability Map that lets any farmer type in a property address and receive colour-coded suitability ratings across 16 different crops, from apples and avocados to truffles and wine grapes. The ratings draw on long-term climate patterns, soil data, yield potential, and economic factors. It was built over the past year at no direct cost to ratepayers beyond staff time.
Deputy Mayor Jerry Greer called it “a treasure map to help landowners find their gold”. That sounds like local government puffery until you understand why the council built it now.
Processors left. The data stayed.
Both McCain and Heinz Wattie’s have scaled back vegetable processing operations in the region. For growers who built supply relationships around those processors, this is not a temporary price dip. It is a structural income gap. The old playbook of growing what you have always grown and selling to whoever is buying locally no longer works when the buyer has left.
Libby Tosswill, Economic Growth Manager at CHBDC, framed the tool as a response to that reality. “Council is filling an information void with an information highway”, she said. More pointedly, she noted that “Central Hawke’s Bay’s primary sector contributes 32% of our district’s GDP, but we know there is still unlocked potential here.”
That 32% figure matters. When a third of your district’s economic output depends on what farmers choose to put in the ground, giving them better information is not a nice-to-have. It is economic development at its most direct.
Data kills the “I didn’t know” defence
The tool’s underlying methodology draws on the Whitiwhiti Ora Productive Potential framework, published in 2024 by LWP Ltd, which uses colour-coded ratings incorporating climate, soil, yield, and economic data at farm, catchment, and national scales.
CHB is not even the first region to apply this approach. In September 2024, the Central Economic Development Agency built a similar GIS-based tool for the Manawatu region, describing it as “the first tool of its kind in New Zealand.” What CHB has done is take that concept and make it specific, local, and immediately actionable.
Tosswill, who is also a farmer herself, acknowledged the climate dimension. “The climate is changing and what can be grown here is changing too. This tool utilises data that captures that so that we can plan ahead.” For a centre-right audience, the important word there is not “climate” but “plan.” This is pragmatic adaptation, not ideology.
A Lincoln University report, reported by RNZ, has previously argued New Zealand’s agricultural economy could earn an extra $10 billion in five to seven years through better land use. Whether that figure proves precise matters less than the direction. The returns from optimising what is already in the ground are large and largely untapped.
The water problem nobody can ignore
There is a significant caveat. The tool assumes water access throughout, and Greer’s own quote contains the qualifier: “if we had guaranteed access to water.” In a region still dealing with the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle and constrained irrigation infrastructure, that is not a small asterisk.
The gap between what the data says is possible and what farmers can actually achieve without reliable water is real. The tool shows the ceiling. Infrastructure determines how close anyone can get to it.
What every sector should take from this
The broader lesson here extends well beyond agriculture. Statistics NZ’s 2025 Agricultural Production Survey covered an estimated 45,800 geographic locations, yet the data that actually changes farmer behaviour has to be local, specific, and easy to use. CHB built that for the cost of one person’s time over a year.
For business owners in any sector, the question is worth asking honestly. How many of your margin problems are actually information problems? How much of what you attribute to market conditions is really a failure to assess what your existing assets could produce under a different configuration?
MPI’s primary industry outlook data provides the commodity price backdrop against which these decisions play out. Waiting for better prices is a strategy. It is just a passive one. CHB’s tool makes the active alternative visible, and that is harder to ignore than any government report.
Sources
- NZ Herald: ‘Like a treasure map’: New tool points CHB farmers to more profitable crops (2026-05-09)
- Farmers Weekly: CHB council releases land use ‘treasure map’ for farmers (2026-04-30)
- CEDA: New Land Diversification Tools to Unlock Potential for Manawatū Farmers and Landowners (2024-09-26)
- WWO Productive Potential – Method for Estimating Economics of Horticultural, Arable, and Alternate Dairy Land Uses (2024-03)
- RNZ: Economy could earn extra $10b in five to seven years through better land use
- Statistics NZ: Agricultural Production Statistics June 2025 (2026-04)
- MPI: Situation and Outlook for Primary Industries Data (2025-12)