Federated Farmers vs Greenpeace — and the bigger question it raised
Following our recent look at the clash between Federated Farmers and Greenpeace, we found ourselves asking: what’s really at stake with MPI’s proposal to raise glyphosate residue limits by up to 9,900%?
Federated Farmers insist that nothing will change on your breakfast table — because, they say, New Zealand grain destined for food isn’t treated with glyphosate. But MPI’s own consultation makes it clear this is about food. The notice is titled “Proposed amendments to the New Zealand Food Notice: Maximum Residue Levels for Agricultural Compounds”, and under the Food Act 2014 its purpose is to “specify the maximum amount of contaminants or residues that may be present in food.”
That means wheat, oats, barley, and peas — the staples we eat every day. And that’s where chemical creep comes in. Once the “maximum safe” level is pushed higher, it rarely ever comes back down.
There’s also a bigger backdrop. The proposed rise in glyphosate limits comes just as the government is moving ahead with the Gene Technology Bill — raising questions about whether higher tolerance levels are quietly paving the way for glyphosate-resistant GMO crops in New Zealand.
The result? More glyphosate allowed in the food system, less transparency about where it shows up, and no reassurance for the people actually consuming it.
So let’s take a closer look at the numbers we do know — and the gaps MPI isn’t filling.
How Much Grain Do We Actually Grow?
New Zealand does produce a fair amount of grain — but not nearly enough to meet national demand. According to Statista’s most recent figures, in the year ended June 2024 the harvests looked like this:
- Wheat: 444,000 tonnes
- Oats: 23,000 tonnes
- Barley: 357,000 tonnes
- Maize grain: 193,000 tonnes
Those numbers tell us what’s coming off the paddock. What they don’t tell us is just as important: how much of each crop ends up in the human food chain?
A quick thanks to Statista.com for publishing these updated figures — even on a free account, their snapshot helped us ground this discussion in something more concrete.
While Statista gives us the harvest totals, the USDA offers a broader perspective. In 2023, it estimated that around 75% of New Zealand’s grain goes to dairy, 12% to poultry, and only about 9% to human consumption. That’s a sobering reminder of how little actually ends up on our plates — and how unclear the split is by crop. Wheat, oats, barley, and maize may all follow very different patterns, but the data to prove it is hard to find.
For wheat, we know that around 100,000 tonnes is milling quality, used for bread, pasta, and baked goods. The balance goes mainly to feed. For oats, barley, and maize, the end-use split is much less clear. Harraways publicly reports buying 14,000 tonnes of locally grown oats annually, but beyond that the national picture is murky.
This lack of transparency matters. MPI is proposing to raise glyphosate residue limits under the Food Notice — rules that explicitly govern food for sale. Yet ordinary New Zealanders can’t easily find out what portion of local crops they’re actually eating.
What’s Behind the Numbers?
We scoured the internet, we even tested Grok and ChatGPT for leads—and the answers came back fragmented and incomplete. That itself tells a story: why is it so hard to find straightforward data about what happens to the crops we grow?
So here’s what we did find … and in the spirit of open inquiry: if anyone out there has more accurate or recent data, we’d be more than happy to be corrected.
Now, let’s look at what we can say with confidence.
Wheat – The Staples We Eat Every Day
Wheat is the grain New Zealanders encounter most directly, and it’s where the glyphosate story bites hardest.
In the year ended June 2024, New Zealand harvested about 444,000 tonnes of wheat. But only around 100,000 tonnes was milling quality — the portion destined for bread, pasta, and baked goods. The rest went largely into stockfeed.
Federated Farmers insist that New Zealand milling wheat isn’t treated with glyphosate before harvest. But whether through weed control during the growing season — or in imported grain, where pre-harvest spraying is common — residues still turn up in our food.
MPI’s own Food Residue Survey (2015/16) found glyphosate in 43% of wheat samples, with 26 out of 60 exceeding the legal limit of 0.1 mg/kg. Instead of tightening oversight, MPI dismissed the findings as “not a food safety risk.” Now they are proposing to raise the allowable limit a hundred-fold — to 10 mg/kg.
That’s not just a technical adjustment. It’s a shift in what New Zealand considers acceptable in its daily bread. And once the ceiling is raised, it never comes back down.
Oats – Breakfast with a Question Mark
Oats are another staple that regularly end up in our breakfast bowls — yet here the picture is even murkier.
In the year ended June 2024, New Zealand harvested about 23,000 tonnes of oats, down from 30,000 tonnes the year before.
Growers in Southland and Otago deliver around 14,000 tonnes of locally grown oats annually to Harraways, the country’s only oat mill (Farmers Weekly, 2025). That’s a sizeable share of the harvest, but it still leaves unanswered questions.
How much of the total oat crop is destined for human consumption versus animal feed? No clear national breakdown is published.
If Harraways won’t accept glyphosate-treated oats, what happens to them? Are they diverted into animal feed, exported, or used in other processed foods? That’s a question for another day — but it underscores why transparency matters.
Barley & Maize – Mostly Feed, But Not Irrelevant
Barley and maize don’t feature on most New Zealand dinner plates in their raw form, but they still matter in the glyphosate debate.
In the year ended June 2024, New Zealand harvested about 357,000 tonnes of barley — most of it in Canterbury — and around 193,000 tonnes of maize grain, almost entirely in the North Island.
Barley is split between malting for beer and stockfeed, with only a small portion ending up in soups, health foods, or other direct human consumption. Maize, meanwhile, goes overwhelmingly into dairy and poultry feed or silage, with just a fraction processed into food products like cornmeal, snack foods, or ingredients in processed goods.
At first glance, that might make them seem less relevant to the debate about glyphosate residues in food. But here’s the catch: MPI’s proposal doesn’t distinguish between feed and food — the new limits apply under the Food Notice. And even where the majority is used for animals, there are two lingering concerns:
- Indirect exposure — residues in feed can flow through to animal products we consume.
- Market risk — exports tied to barley could face barriers if overseas buyers demand stricter limits.
So while barley and maize may not dominate your pantry, they remain part of the bigger glyphosate picture.
Why Poultry, Eggs & Feed Matter
Just because maize and barley may go mostly into feed, doesn’t mean they’re irrelevant to human health. In fact, glyphosate in livestock feed can lead to detectable residues in eggs and meat — a pathway we’ve highlighted in our recent article “Glyphosate, Roundup & Poultry Risks”.
That coverage explored research linking glyphosate exposure in poultry to a host of harmful effects — gut and organ damage, reproductive issues, weakened immunity, and even reduced hatchability. It wasn’t just abstract risk. Glyphosate residues were found in eggs sold at grocery stores.
This connection matters now more than ever:
- Raising residue limits for grains—even if those grains are used for animal feed—can increase glyphosate exposure in the food chain indirectly.
- As we push for transparency and safety, we must remember it’s not just about bread or cereal. It’s about the safety of eggs, chicken, dairy, and everything tied to feed grain.
The Imports Problem
Even if Federated Farmers are right, and much of our locally grown grain isn’t treated with glyphosate before harvest, that doesn’t mean our food is glyphosate-free.
New Zealand doesn’t grow enough milling wheat, oats, or other cereals to meet domestic demand. A significant share of what ends up in your breakfast cereal, pasta, or muesli bar is imported — most often from Australia.
And here’s the catch: Australia’s allowable residue limits are already far higher than ours. Where New Zealand has long set the default at 0.1 mg/kg, Australia allows glyphosate residues of up to 5 mg/kg in wheat, oats, and barley. Now MPI wants to raise our limit to 10 mg/kg — not just catching up to Australia, but leapfrogging them to one of the highest residue standards in the world.
Under the Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition Agreement, food legally sold in Australia can also be sold in New Zealand — even if it exceeds our local residue limits. Which raises the obvious question: if Australian grain already gets in, why raise New Zealand’s limits at all? The answer may lie not with Australia, but with aligning to global Codex standards and clearing the path for glyphosate-tolerant GMO crops.
That’s why independent testing of both local and imported foods matters more than ever.
The Real Issue – Chemical Creep
MPI frames the proposal as a technical adjustment, but timing and context suggest there’s more at play.
One backdrop is the Gene Technology Bill, which could pave the way for glyphosate-tolerant GMO crops in New Zealand. Internationally, those crops carry much higher residue allowances — soybeans up to 20 mg/kg, rapeseed up to 30 mg/kg, maize around 5 mg/kg. Raising New Zealand’s limit now looks uncomfortably like preparing the ground for that shift.
There’s also the question of imports. Under the Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition Agreement, Australian cereals already enter New Zealand regardless of our lower limit.
But for global imports it’s different. By lifting our ceiling to 10 mg/kg, MPI removes a barrier for grain from countries where glyphosate-tolerant GMO crops are common and residue levels are far higher. Instead of tightening protections, the bar is raised so that what once breached the standard now passes as “safe.”
What many people don’t realise is that New Zealand already allows the import of GMO-derived foods if they’ve been cleared by Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ). That includes GMO corn, soy, canola, sugar beet, and cottonseed — many of them glyphosate-tolerant. Labels are only required if DNA or protein is detectable, which means oils, sugars, and animal products from GMO feed often slide through without disclosure.
FSANZ’s website proudly declares “Safe food for life — food safety is our business.” Yet under that same system, residue levels climb, GMO ingredients slip through without labels, and New Zealand is asked to accept glyphosate levels a hundred times higher than before.
This is the danger of chemical creep. History shows that when residue limits are raised, they almost never return to their original levels. Consumers are left with higher exposures, weaker labelling, less transparency, and no real choice in the matter.
Federated Farmers may insist that “nothing will change” on your breakfast table. But whether it’s local milling wheat, imported cereals from Australia, or GMO-derived ingredients from overseas, one thing is clear: so while Federated Farmers say nothing will change, one thing certainly will — far more glyphosate will be legally permitted in your food.
Where This Leaves Us
Federated Farmers may keep telling us that nothing will change on our breakfast table, but the evidence tells a different story. Even if only a fraction of our grain becomes food, that’s the fraction where glyphosate residues are most concerning — and where transparency should be highest. On top of that, much of what we eat is imported from Australia — where allowable levels are already far higher — or from countries producing glyphosate-tolerant GMO crops.
Instead of protecting New Zealanders from this trend, MPI’s proposal would lock it in. By raising our limits ten-fold and beyond, they shift the standard so residues that once breached the law will now pass as “safe.”
That’s the essence of chemical creep. Little by little, what’s considered acceptable exposure keeps climbing. And once the ceiling is lifted, it becomes the new normal.
So the real question isn’t whether things will change on your breakfast table. It’s whether New Zealanders are willing to accept more glyphosate in their daily bread, their cereal, and their imported food — with less transparency and fewer choices than ever before.
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Resources & References
We’ve pulled together the sources that informed this article — from official MPI consultations to industry reporting, Statista data, and our own investigations. What’s striking is how fragmented the information is. Some figures are decades old, some tucked away in government reports, others scattered across industry press. That patchwork itself raises the question: why is it so hard for the public to get a clear, transparent picture of what’s really on our plates?
Statista — Grain Harvesting Area in New Zealand by type (log in required)
Published by L. Granwal, July 2025.
Provides harvest volumes for wheat, oats, barley, and maize in the years ended June 2023 and 2024.
USDA (2023) — New Zealand Grain and Feed Market Situation
Estimates around 75% of NZ grain goes to dairy, 12% to poultry, and only 9% to human consumption — but without crop-specific breakdowns. Highlights the data gap.
Link to Report: New Zealand Grain and Feed Market Situation [PDF]
MPI Consultation (2025) — Proposed amendments to the New Zealand Food Notice: Maximum Residue Levels for Agricultural Compounds
The official consultation document, detailing the proposal to raise glyphosate MRLs for wheat, oats, barley, maize, and peas.
MPI — Food Residue Survey Programme (2015/16)
Survey found glyphosate in 43% of wheat samples, with 26 out of 60 exceeding the legal 0.1 mg/kg limit. (Archived material, but widely cited in submissions and media coverage.)
Farmers Weekly (2025) — “Southern group grows oats of the future”
Reports that Southland and Otago growers deliver about 14,000 tonnes of locally grown oats annually to Harraways, the country’s only oat mill.
FSANZ — Food Standards Australia New Zealand
Tagline: “Safe food for life — Food safety is our business.” Sets residue and food standards across Australia and New Zealand, including approvals for GMO-derived foods.
NoMoreGlyphosate.nz — Related Articles
Glyphosate Residues: The Story Federated Farmers Won’t Tell
A detailed breakdown of the conflicting narratives between Federated Farmers’ claims and MPI’s data on grain residue.
Are Glyphosate Limits Paving the Way for GMOs?
Exploring the link between higher MRLs and GMO deregulation.
Glyphosate, Roundup & Poultry Risks
Residues in animal feed and their impact on poultry and eggs.
These resources don’t give us every answer — but they do highlight just how much we aren’t being told. That’s why independent testing and public pressure matter more than ever. If MPI won’t draw a clear line, then it’s up to us to hold them accountable.
Join us at NoMoreGlyphosate.nz and help stop the chemical creep before it becomes the new normal.
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