With the 2026 election approaching, five political parties have put competing agricultural, environmental and tax policies before around 350 farmers at Mystery Creek in Waikato. Behind the campaign promises lies a larger question for rural New Zealand: which policies protect productive capacity and property rights while dealing credibly with water quality, emissions and long-term economic resilience?
Report by eLocal
Representatives from National, Labour, ACT, New Zealand First and the Green Party faced farmers at Mystery Creek as agriculture moves into the centre of the 2026 election campaign. The debate, organised by Beef + Lamb New Zealand, DairyNZ and Federated Farmers, covered carbon forestry, the Emissions Trading Scheme, freshwater regulation, taxation, agricultural emissions, genetic technology and investment. Te Pāti Māori and The Opportunities Party were not represented.
The timing matters. Election day is 7 November, and New Zealand is now inside the regulated election period. What farmers heard was not simply a collection of rural promises, but competing ideas about the relationship between government, landowners, environmental limits and the productive economy.
The Carbon Forestry Problem
Few issues demonstrate that tension more clearly than the treatment of forestry within the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Farmers have argued for years that carbon incentives can make permanent forestry more financially attractive than continuing to farm productive land. That changes the calculation facing a landowner. A farm is no longer competing only against another agricultural use or commercial forestry operation, but against the value created by government-regulated carbon units.
National's Todd McClay told the debate that the Government had changed the rules to restrict new farm-to-forest conversions while attempting to preserve property rights. He said the first full year under the changes had stopped sales of valuable farmland for conversion, although previously committed planting would continue.
Labour agriculture spokesperson Jo Luxton went further in signalling an urgent review of the ETS and forestry's place within it, saying Labour wanted to discourage pine planting undertaken principally for carbon returns.
Green Party agriculture spokesperson Steve Abel proposed a structurally different approach: remove forestry from the ETS entirely and bring agricultural emissions into the scheme. His argument was that forestry's presence had distorted the carbon market and that the Government's restrictions did not resolve the underlying problem.
There is evidence that the ETS itself is under significant strain. The Government's auction monitor reported that the March 2026 auction received no bids, following an entire year in 2025 in which no auction received bids. The last government auction to sell units was in December 2024, when units partially cleared at the auction floor price of $64.
That does not mean the ETS has ceased functioning, because NZUs also trade on the secondary market. It does, however, raise a legitimate question about whether the auction mechanism and existing supply settings are producing the market behaviour policymakers intended.
Productive Land Is More Than an Environmental Accounting Unit
The argument over forestry has consequences extending beyond individual farms.
When productive pastoral land is permanently converted to trees, the decision can affect livestock production, processing volumes, transport businesses, contractors, rural employment and the economic base supporting nearby towns. Conversely, forestry is itself a productive industry, and landowners have legitimate reasons to choose trees where forestry is the best economic use of their land.
The central policy problem is therefore not whether farming or forestry is inherently preferable. It is whether government-created incentives are artificially determining the result.
Will this in fact make New Zealand stronger? A policy that rewards genuine reductions in emissions while allowing land to move towards its most productive long-term use could strengthen New Zealand. A system that makes productive farmland uneconomic because the state has created a more lucrative regulatory asset risks shifting resources away from food production and export earnings without necessarily increasing the country's underlying productive capacity.
That distinction should sit at the centre of the ETS debate.
Agriculture and the ETS
The parties also differ over whether agriculture itself should face an emissions price.
The current coalition removed agriculture from the ETS and abandoned the previous He Waka Eke Noa agricultural emissions pricing programme. The Greens told the Mystery Creek audience they would reverse the direction of travel by pricing agricultural emissions through the ETS while removing forestry from it.
That presents farmers with two separate questions which are sometimes treated as one.
The first is environmental: what measurable reductions in emissions would a pricing system actually produce?
The second is economic: where would the cost ultimately fall?
If an emissions charge reduces farm profitability without providing economically viable ways to reduce emissions, part of the result may be lower land values, reduced investment or reduced production. If technological changes allow farmers to reduce emissions while maintaining output, the economic calculation changes substantially.
For an export-dependent country, the relevant measurement cannot therefore stop at tonnes of emissions priced. It also has to include productivity, food production, export income and whether production displaced from New Zealand is simply undertaken elsewhere.
Tax Promises Meet the Farm Balance Sheet
Tax produced another dividing line.
National, Labour and ACT told farmers they would impose no new taxes on them. Labour also said farms would be excluded from its proposed capital gains tax, which it describes as applying to commercial and investment property.
New Zealand First's Mark Patterson instead emphasised reducing the company tax rate, establishing a sovereign wealth fund and continuing investment through the Regional Infrastructure Fund. His argument was that economic growth, rather than further taxation, should carry more of the burden of improving the government's fiscal position.
The Greens offered a substantially different tax programme. Abel said the party's wealth tax would affect about 2 percent of New Zealand's approximately 46,000 farms, principally larger corporate operations. He also said its proposed inheritance tax would apply above $1 million while excluding the family farm and family home. The party proposes additional corporate taxation and a $150 million Fair Food Fund.
For farming families, however, headline exemptions are only part of the equation. Farms are frequently asset-rich while producing much lower cash returns relative to their capital value. Tax policy therefore needs to be tested not only against who is formally liable, but against succession, debt, investment, ownership structures and the ability of younger New Zealanders to acquire productive assets.
The question is whether the tax system encourages capital to remain invested in productive businesses or progressively makes those businesses harder to own, expand and transfer between generations.
Freshwater: National Rules or Local Catchments?
Freshwater produced a different policy divide.
Luxton said Labour would take its freshwater management rules through a select committee process and argued that the party had listened to rural concerns since leaving government.
ACT's Andrew Hoggard advocated catchment-specific targets, arguing that environmental rules should begin with the actual conditions and competing uses within individual waterways. Abel also supported catchment parameters, while maintaining that government must establish environmental boundaries within which farmers operate.
The Greens additionally propose reducing the synthetic nitrogen fertiliser cap applying to dairy farms from 190 kilograms per hectare to 125kg/ha. Abel also argued that dairy stocking rates should be reduced in some catchments, specifically pointing to parts of Southland.
This is an area where slogans are particularly unhelpful. Waterways differ in geology, rainfall, soil type, land use, existing nutrient loads and ecological condition. A nationally uniform rule may provide regulatory simplicity, but it can impose costs unrelated to the environmental problem in a particular catchment. Purely local standards carry the opposite risk if environmental limits become inconsistent or insufficient.
The stronger approach is therefore measurable: identify the condition of a catchment, identify the principal sources of degradation, establish achievable environmental outcomes and determine whether the regulatory cost imposed produces a corresponding improvement in water quality.
Genetic Technology Reveals the Trade-Off
One of the more consequential admissions at the debate concerned the Gene Technology Bill.
New Zealand First's Patterson said his party had stopped the legislation because of concerns about export-market access, New Zealand's genetic-engineering-free status and whether different production systems could coexist.
That exposes another recurring tension in agricultural policy. New technologies may offer productivity or environmental benefits, but market access and consumer preferences can themselves have substantial economic value.
The correct comparison is therefore not simply biotechnology versus no biotechnology. It is the value of technologies that might become available compared with any premium, market access or national positioning that could be lost.
For a country that exports much of what it produces, both sides of that calculation matter.
Wilding Pines and Environmental Liability
ACT also highlighted a proposed national pest management plan for wilding conifers. Hoggard argued that such a framework would provide more certainty around funding, rules and long-term control.
Wilding conifers illustrate an important distinction from commercially planted or carbon forestry. Once invasive trees spread beyond managed areas they can impose costs on neighbouring landowners, conservation areas, landscapes and future control programmes.
That makes prevention and early control fundamentally different from subsidising a particular land use. Where one land use imposes measurable costs on other property owners or the public estate, there is a clearer case for coordinated intervention.
One of the few areas of apparent cross-party agreement at Mystery Creek was increased support for the QEII National Trust, which protects areas of biodiversity on private land through covenants.
The Rural Question Behind the Election
The Mystery Creek debate demonstrated that the major argument facing agriculture is no longer simply farmers versus environmentalists.
National is attempting to constrain carbon-driven land conversion while retaining the ETS. Labour now says it wants to revisit forestry's role in that scheme. The Greens propose removing forestry from the ETS but bringing agricultural emissions into it. ACT is placing greater emphasis on property rights and catchment-level environmental regulation, while New Zealand First is emphasising productive investment, lower company taxation and caution around genetic technology.
Each approach creates different incentives, costs and risks.
For ordinary New Zealanders, agriculture matters far beyond the farm gate. Farming supports export earnings, food production, regional employment, processing industries and a substantial share of the country's productive asset base. Environmental degradation also carries real costs, including degraded waterways, biodiversity loss and liabilities passed to future generations.
The policy test should therefore be harder than asking which party promises farmers the least regulation or which promises the strongest environmental rules.
The more useful question is which mechanisms produce measurable environmental improvements while preserving the productive capacity, property rights, investment incentives and export competitiveness on which rural communities and the wider New Zealand economy depend.
With voting beginning later this month and election day on 7 November, that is the choice beneath much of the agricultural policy now being presented to rural New Zealand.
Source
Monique Steele, RNZ, October 2026: Carbon farming, freshwater targets and tax features of farmer policy debate
Ministry for the Environment, 15 September 2026: New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme Interim Auction Monitor Report: 8 September 2026 Auction
Electoral Commission: Key dates for the 2026 General Election