Understanding New Zealand's largest pastoral farmer

The Brief

This integrated report, our first for Pāmu (Landcorp Framing Ltd), needed to bring greater clarity to the company’s purpose and performance. As a State Owned Enterprise, Pāmu is the largest pastoral farmer in New Zealand, managing 358,000h over 112 farms consisting of a broad mix of land types and classes, much of it steep and remote. Part of its remit is to ensure that its large tracts of New Zealand remain in local ownership.

The Solution

This report was a significant step-change from previous years, requiring substantial client vision for what was possible and considerable faith in the counsel we offered, while ensuring internal leadership buy-in to our recommended changes.

We began by gaining a thorough understanding of Pāmu, the complexities of its landholdings and its mix of mandates for NZ Inc. We then analysed their previous year’s report, assessing the value of the various buckets of information to readers’ understanding. That resulted in a re-strategising of the entire report structure: ditching some components, introducing others, shuffling the sequencing and crafting the pace of content to guide readers through information, keeping them engaged as our content got deeper.

The outcomes for our design approach targeted clearer and more logical structure, clearer narrative language, a stronger focus on performance, the strategic plan for a strong future, and how that strategy was being practically implemented, white space to allow key information to connect without distracting clutter, and a varied pace to keep reader engagement high.

The use of macro feature aerial photography captured the sheer scale of Pāmu. Fully expansive showing the best of Aotearoa, New Zealand, its operations and its nationwide footprint while detailed micro photography supported Pāmu attention to detail for every aspect within their ecosystem.

This approach informed the typographic approach where bold single minded statements were given prominence and allowed the reader to easily access key messages. Detailed design elements supported this attention to detail.

‘From the ground up’ is used as a sign off to the document that rounds out the core message for this report of ‘Building resilience at scale’ while striving for farming excellence.

Imagery was selected to demonstrate a diverse and inclusive workforce positively engaged in the diverse aspects of the business, from technology, community engagement and on-the-ground empowered leadership.

Because the vast majority of readership is online, we shifted format to a digital-first, screen-friendly landscape format, and optimised clickable navigation.

The Result

This was a big leap towards best practice for Pāmu, recognised by winning the Public Sector and Non-Listed category of the 2023 NZ Integrated Reporting Awards. But Pāmu see this report as only the first step on what they see as an evolving communications approach to reporting. All involved are extremely pleased with the achievements of this first step, seeing the visible value in the effort to change and looking forward to the opportunities to further improve the report over the coming years.