Building Profitable, Resilient Farms Through Biologically Led Systems

If you've ever felt there aren't enough hours in your farming day, watched your input costs climb year after year without market prices keeping pace, or felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data and advice landing on your kitchen table, this webinar speaks directly to you. The Ground Shift team has built their entire business around solving these exact frustrations, and this recorded session is your introduction to how they do it.

Ground Shift is a New Zealand business partnering with farmers, agri-businesses, catchment groups and councils to implement high-performing, biologically led farm systems. Their goal is straightforward: consistent profitability, healthier ecosystems and communities, and long-term resilience baked into every farm system they touch. In this webinar, CEO Conan Mourin walks through what that actually looks like in practice, drawing on his background as a former sheep and beef farmer and several years as an independent farm consultant across the South Island.

What sets this session apart is its refusal to offer one-size-fits-all recipes. The team repeatedly returns to a single idea: context is everything. Two farms separated only by a fence line can run identical stock and infrastructure yet have wildly different goals. Ground Shift's whole-farm approach considers eight key areas, including your goals, financials, soil health, farm system, plant and animal performance, energy inputs and overall resilience. You'll come away understanding why soil health underpins everything and how maximising photosynthesis and the liquid carbon pathway creates a compounding effect that builds nutrient cycling, water-holding capacity and carrying capacity over time.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to watch is the hard data. Biologically led and regenerative farming often attracts the criticism that "the numbers don't stack up." This webinar tackles that head-on with real case studies from New Zealand and overseas. You'll see dairy operations averaging a 30% reduction in animal health costs, dramatic cuts in synthetic nitrogen use (some Canterbury farmers growing 18 tonnes of grass and producing 2,000kg of milk solids per hectare on zero nitrogen), and research showing organic dairy farms running 30% more profitable than conventional counterparts. Two sheep and beef case studies, one intensive and one extensive, demonstrate how farm working expenses can be nearly halved while EBIT improves significantly, including one farm that pulled itself back from the brink of a forced sale.

The session also explains why now is the moment to act. Input cost inflation, tightening market requirements around sustainability and scope 3 emissions, evolving regulation, risk-based finance and insurance rates, climate volatility, and the growing link between growing practices and human health are all reshaping the landscape for farmers. Ground Shift makes a clear case that farms able to evidence lower risk and verifiable data will access better finance rates and premium markets in the years ahead.

You'll also get a first look at how Ground Shift works with farmers across three layers: tailored advisory support delivered one-to-one or in cohorts, a strong education and peer-to-peer learning community, and a digital "farm twin" platform built in partnership with Climatist that integrates AI and your own farm data while keeping that data firmly in your ownership. The team explains their assessment and digital road map process, including financial stress-testing tools that model mild and severe downturns.

Throughout the webinar, the emphasis stays on empowering farmers to make confident decisions themselves, supported rather than dictated to, and moving at a pace that suits each individual operation. Whether you're curious about transitioning your farm, frustrated by fluctuating markets and rising costs, or simply searching for a community of like-minded, driven farmers, this session offers a grounded, evidence-based starting point.

Watch the full recording to understand the thinking, the numbers and the support that could help anchor long-term profitability and resilience into your own farm system.