Sri Lanka Banned Fertiliser Overnight. Nobody Here Is Proposing That.

On 21 September the NZ Herald ran a column warning New Zealand off organic farming. The warning was Sri Lanka.

In 2021 Sri Lanka's government banned synthetic fertiliser and pesticides. Rice harvests fell, prices jumped, and the tea crop, the country's main export, took a hammering. The column's author, Dr Jacqueline Rowarth, draws a line from there to here. Statements keep being made, she writes, that New Zealand should move toward organic and regenerative farming, and Sri Lanka shows how that ends. (Herald, 21 Sep 2026)

I went looking at what actually happened in Sri Lanka, what is actually proposed here, and who is making the argument. The Sri Lanka part checks out. The rest is where it gets interesting.

She's right about Sri Lanka

Worth saying first, because it's true. Sri Lanka was a disaster.

Rowarth writes that rice production fell 20% in the first six months. If anything, that's generous. A 2025 study in the journal Food Security, by researchers at the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, cites a World Bank analysis finding a 32% fall in rice yields after the ban.

The same study found something organic advocates won't enjoy. Even a gradual transition, with years of investment in compost and manure collection, could not have produced enough organic nitrogen for Sri Lanka's rice crop.

So no argument there.

What Sri Lanka actually did

The detail matters, because the detail is where the comparison comes apart.

Sri Lanka's president announced a ban on importing agrochemicals on 22 April 2021. It took legal effect in early May. It covered pesticides as well as fertiliser, and it came with no transition period.

That wasn't the plan. The country's 2007 agricultural policy had set out a gradual reduction in chemical fertiliser. As late as September 2020, the agriculture minister was talking about lifting organic fertiliser use to 30% over three years.

Then Sri Lanka ran low on money. The country was close to bankruptcy, and the ban saved about US$400 million a year it had been spending on fertiliser imports and subsidies.

Farmers were caught with nothing to replace what they'd lost. Even supporters of organic farming objected to how abrupt it was. The government lifted the ban on 24 November 2021, seven months in.

The study's authors also point out that the government's idea of "organic" wasn't the one the international organic movement uses. All of this comes from the same Food Security study.

Sri Lanka didn't try organic farming and fail. It stopped importing farm chemicals in the middle of a currency crisis and called it organic.

What's actually on the table here

The column doesn't say who wants New Zealand to follow Sri Lanka. So I looked.

The most concrete proposal this election is the Green Party's plan to phase out synthetic nitrogen fertiliser. Its own policy page says the phase-out would start by lowering the existing cap for dairy farms. It says no timeframe has been set, "recognising there are challenges". It promises an implementation plan with milestones, developed alongside industry.

You can argue with that policy. Plenty of people do. But an open-ended phase-out worked out with farmers is the opposite of an overnight ban imposed on them.

As for organic farming itself, certified organic land covers 89,544 hectares, 0.6% of New Zealand's farmland, according to the organic sector's own 2025 market report. Every one of those farmers chose to be there.

Where the column is on firm ground

Rowarth is a soil scientist whose PhD was on phosphate cycling in hill country. Parts of her column sit squarely inside that expertise.

She cites trials where superphosphate was withheld from sheep and beef country, and production fell and stayed down: a decade after the experiments finished, she writes, it was still only 70-80% of conventionally farmed areas. That's a real, peer-reviewed finding, not something she's characterising loosely, and her figure holds up well against it. A 2014 paper in the New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research, based on 12 grazed farmlets at the Ballantrae Hill Country Research Station in Hawke's Bay run from 1975 to 1988, found pasture production averaged 39% higher on the high-fertiliser farmlets than the low-fertiliser ones across years 2 to 13, and that production kept declining, by 3% a year, on the farmlets where fertiliser was cut off entirely. Compound that 3% a year over a decade and you land at roughly 74% of the fertilised rate, squarely inside her 70-80% range. I'm not going to argue soil phosphate with someone who did her doctorate on it. One thing is worth adding, though. Those trials withheld phosphate altogether. Certified organic farms here can still apply reactive phosphate rock: Ballance, the company she names in her 8 September column, lists its Pure RPR product as BioGro certified, with the certificate available to download from its own site.

She also writes that organic farming loses more nitrogen per kilogram of food produced. A 2012 meta-analysis of European studies backs that up: nitrogen leaching was 49% higher per unit of product on organic farms. That figure rests on ten comparisons, and an earlier meta-analysis found the reverse.

The same study found organic farms leached 31% less nitrogen per hectare. A river doesn't care how many kilos of milk came off the paddock next to it. It cares what's draining off that paddock.

The authors' own conclusion was that management choices mattered more than whether a farm was organic or conventional.

Her own numbers

Two things in the column deserve credit for being precise rather than vague, and worth engaging with directly rather than waving off.

First, she explains where the "much less synthetic nitrogen" figure comes from, rather than just asserting it's wrong. The 150kg/ha nitrogen-loss number, she writes, is calculated as fertiliser applied to crops minus what's harvested in the crop itself, on New Zealand's roughly 180,000 hectares of arable cropping land, out of the country's 26.8 million hectares total. Her point is that this doesn't account for nitrogen that ends up building soil organic matter rather than leaching. That's a real methodological objection, not a dodge, even though she still doesn't say who used the 150kg/ha figure in the first place.

Second, she gives her own comparison: New Zealand's nitrogen loss, measured the OECD's way (total nitrogen entering the system minus what's taken up by crops and grassland), at 57kg/ha in 2023, 60kg/ha in 2024, and 63.4kg/ha in 2022, against 83kg/ha for the UK and 133kg/ha for the Netherlands. I looked for the OECD's own country-by-country table to check those numbers directly and couldn't get a page that listed them by country rather than as an OECD-wide median, so I can't independently confirm the exact figures. What the OECD's own 2026 report does confirm is the direction: the median nitrogen surplus across member countries fell in 2022 and 2023, which lines up with a falling NZ figure over the same years rather than contradicting it.

Where it isn't

The column quotes the World Bank's April 2026 outlook on Sri Lanka: poverty double its 2019 levels, malnutrition and stunting up. The quote is accurate, word for word. But that World Bank document doesn't mention the fertiliser ban anywhere. It points to the 2022 economic crisis, a cyclone that killed 646 people in late 2025, and the conflict in the Middle East. The column places the quote straight after the organic experiment and closes by saying "the ramifications continue for society."

The Sri Lanka figures in the column, a 20% fall in rice within six months and prices up around 50%, line up closely with a 2022 Foreign Policy article by two staff of the Breakthrough Institute, an American think tank that promotes what it calls ecomodernism. The column doesn't cite it.

Who's writing

Rowarth's column appears in The Country, the NZ Herald's rural section, roughly every fortnight. Her author page lists 36 opinion pieces running from 15 May 2025 to 21 September 2026. They cover nitrogen, water quality, food prices, regulation, science funding and the election. I haven't found one that leans the other way.

She is a dairy farmer. She sits on the board of DairyNZ, the levy-funded industry body for dairy farmers, first elected by farmers in 2018 and re-elected in 2024. Her DairyNZ profile says she remains committed to "dispelling the myths that surround food production".

She also sits on the board of Ravensdown, the farmer-owned co-operative that sells fertiliser, agrochemicals and seed.

On 8 September, two weeks before the Sri Lanka column, she wrote that farmers get help using fertiliser precisely, and that "both the main fertiliser companies (Ballance and Ravensdown) have dedicated research programmes and agri-advisers to assist." (Herald, 8 Sep 2026) That's a Ravensdown director naming Ravensdown's services, in a column arguing against cutting synthetic fertiliser.

The Herald discloses her roles. In the Sri Lanka column the top byline reads "Adjunct Professor Lincoln University". The DairyNZ and Ravensdown roles appear in the sign-off at the bottom. On some of her other columns they sit at the top.

She has been here before. In 2018 she resigned as chief scientist of the Environmental Protection Authority after 15 months. Her public comments in that job, including describing irrigation as a "great boon" to the environment, had drawn criticism. The Prime Minister's then chief science adviser, Sir Peter Gluckman, told RNZ many of them were inappropriate for a regulator. Rowarth has said she left of her own accord.

The platform

The Country is NZME's rural brand across radio, print and online. When NZME launched it in 2016, its chief commercial officer said it gave advertisers "a multi-media platform to reach their target market."

One of those advertisers is DairyNZ.

The Country runs pieces labelled "Content brought to you by DairyNZ". Eight turned up this session, running from December 2024 to August 2026, close to every couple of months. There's a December 2024 end-of-year interview with DairyNZ's chief executive, a 20 November 2025 opinion piece bylined to him, and a 29 January 2026 piece on DairyNZ's board governance programme.

The resource management reforms get particular attention. An 18 February 2026 piece has DairyNZ calling for changes to the RMA reform bills. Rowarth's own column on the same reforms ran three weeks later, on 12 March. Then, four months after that, DairyNZ's chair welcomed the changes the select committee had made, in a 21 July 2026 piece. So the same platform ran DairyNZ paid content on the reforms both before and after Rowarth's own column on them, with her piece landing in the middle of a sustained campaign on the same subject.

There's also a 12 May 2026 piece on freshwater outcomes, and two from August, five weeks before the Sri Lanka column: 6 August, where DairyNZ's chair set out six election priorities including resource management and science funding, and 13 August, a follow-up pressing the same six priorities directly ahead of the election.

Rowarth's 8 September column, defending synthetic fertiliser and science funding, ran four weeks after that election-priorities push named those same two things as its top asks.

To be clear about what this shows and what it doesn't. The Herald labels the paid content. Rowarth's columns are labelled opinion, not sponsored. I found nothing to suggest DairyNZ pays for her column or has any say in what she writes. It isn't publicly known whether she is paid by NZME at all.

What it does show is simple enough. The industry body she helps govern is a paying customer of the platform that gives her a fortnightly column. Readers can weigh that for themselves. Most won't get the chance, because it isn't written anywhere near the column.

Is the Herald doing anything wrong?

Under the NZ Media Council's principles, no. Opinion pieces don't have to be balanced, as long as the material facts they rest on are accurate. Where an author has a link to the subject, it has to be declared, and the Herald declares hers.

So this isn't about a rule being broken. It's an editorial choice. The Herald has given a farmer-elected director of a fertiliser co-operative and of the dairy industry body a standing column on farming and the environment, and it is running that column through an election campaign in which fertiliser is a live issue. Her 8 September column answered a line from the Green Party's Steve Abel at a televised rural debate two days earlier.

I couldn't find a regular columnist in the same section making the case for organic or regenerative farming.

Where that leaves it

Sri Lanka happened. It was awful, and nobody arguing for organic food should pretend otherwise. But what Sri Lanka did in 2021 is not on offer in New Zealand in 2026.

Sri Lanka banned fertiliser overnight. In New Zealand, a fertiliser company director gets a column every fortnight.

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