Under the headline "Let’s do right by farmers, and our planet", the advertisement said he was worried an opportunity was being missed to "truly do something about methane" and that the primary sector would be hurt in the process.
Mr Sturgess, the founder of New Zealand’s Lone Star Farms, is an American-born businessman who served with the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam before gaining a master’s degree in business administration at Harvard.
He later embarked on a highly successful corporate career in private equity firms, food service, aluminium manufacturing, housing and office products.
Lone Star Farms, established in 1997, owns six sheep and beef properties in the South Island totalling 16,670ha (13,560ha effective), running more than 63,000 sheep, 6000 cattle and employing 35 permanent staff.
That included the 6000ha Caberfeidh Station in the Hakataramea Valley, The Wandle, a 2600ha property at Middlemarch, and Barewood Station, a 6420ha property between Outram and Middlemarch.
Mr Sturgess is the founder of Methane Mitigation Ventures (MMV) which was investing heavily in technologies to eliminate methane — which he believed was the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce warming now — plus methodologies and measurement tools to enable farmers to monetise the methane reductions they achieved.
It partnered with "world leaders" in natural methane mitigating technologies to secure products for New Zealand farmers as they became available. It was actively working with those partners and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) through a Sustainable Farming Fund (SFF) grant to assess the efficacy of those products in a New Zealand pastoral environment.
MMV’s science adviser is Dunedin scientist Dr Peter Fennessy, who was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in this year’s New Year’s Honours for services to agricultural science and business.
Mr Sturgess said farmers would not absorb another cost.
Planting carbon pine forests provided better returns than sheep and beef and vast tracts of productive land were being lost to forestry "at significant cost to our economy, rural communities and landscapes".
The Government’s split gas approach, allowing methane to be treated differently from CO2, was a "master-stroke". But he believed its recent proposal on how to deal with agricultural emissions was too expensive to be absorbed by many farmers, and did not incentivise real investment, either by farmers or entrepreneurs, in technologies that would change the game.
The Government has said the proposal would mean New Zealand farmers would lead the world in reducing emissions and help give New Zealand a competitive advantage in a green-conscious global marketplace and has drawn criticism from the sheep and beef sector.
Mr Sturgess said keeping methane emissions the same had little impact on the planet’s current temperature. While methane must not increase and reductions must be sought, taxing the status quo today risked the viability of many farms in New Zealand.
"I say, let’s not tax the sheep and beef farmer until we have technologies which are readily available to be used by the real world sheep and beef farmer," Mr Sturgess said from the US yesterday.
That real-world sheep farmer was the one who spent 60-70 hours a week working on the farm with their family — "not a scientist or a crash-test dummy".
If there was a tool that had been proven to work, then that farmer could be given a year to start using it; if they did not take it up, then they could be taxed. But that technology had to be proven.
MMV was "working hard on this stuff" and making great progress, but it was not ready yet. And, if somebody else came out with a product that worked, in the meantime, then he would be "quite happy to quit going to school".
Mr Sturgess, whose family’s involvement in sheep and beef farming dated back 175 years, said New Zealand had been "incredibly generous" to him and his family, and the industry was one that was in his "wheelhouse". He also knew how to get added value.
"There’s a big opportunity to do something here," he said.
Every other business that he was involved in, aside from farming, was in competition with other businesses. He loved the fact that he was farming in co-operation with fellow farmers.
He said the Government deserved kudos for some of the things that it was doing right, including the split-gas approach, and the work it was doing through MPI in funding research, not just MMV’s SFF project, but also others.
