Vanessa Winning of Irrigation New Zealand: Bringing a Holistic Perspective to Irrigated Agriculture
Irrigated dairy pasture in the Canterbury region on New Zealand’s South Island.
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anessa Winning has served as the CEO of Irrigation New Zealand (IrrigationNZ) since October 2020. IrrigationNZ is a member-founded industry organization committed to representing the interests of New Zealand’s irrigation sector and promoting best practices across the industry. In this interview, Ms. Winning tells Irrigation Leader about her background, IrrigationNZ’s current top issues, and the importance of taking a holistic view of the benefits of irrigated agriculture. Irrigation Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
8 | IRRIGATION LEADER | June 2021
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PHOTO COURTESY OF IRRIGATIONNZ.
Vanessa Winning: I went to Auckland University, where I got a bachelor’s degree in commerce, majoring in management and economics, and then got a postgrad degree in marketing. After graduating from university, I spent 18 years in banking. I went into a little startup banking organization called Ergo, which was an offshoot of AMP and was essentially the world’s first internet-only bank. I was a junior product manager, so I got to price and set product features. About 5 years later, HSBC bought us out, and I moved to HSBC with the retail portfolio.
I was lucky to be part of the process of integrating the products into a different system, which required quite a lot of development and customer engagement. I was at HSBC for about 6 years before moving on to ANZ—moving from one of the largest banks in the world to the largest bank in New Zealand—and spent another 6 years at ANZ. I moved into roles that had more to do with marketing than with product development and pricing. I left ANZ as the head of marketing for the institutional, commercial, and ag markets. That’s where I got more engaged with farming customers and service organizations for farming. New Zealand’s economy is largely made up of food producers and the service industries that support them—when you add it up, it accounted for about 65 percent of business in New Zealand before tourism started to grow. I went on to do a leadership and governance program with the Agri-Women’s Development Trust, and as part of that, I sat in on DairyNZ’s strategy development. DairyNZ is an industry body in New Zealand that was set up when Fonterra was formed to ensure that there was still a noncommercial support organization for dairy farming. It essentially takes a levy off the milk solids as mandated by government and the Commodities Levies Act and uses it for science, research,
