27 minute read
Opinion
From the Editor Political leaders missing from frontlines
Neal Wallace Senior reporter
THE lasting memory is of anger laced with fear.
I began my journalism career in 1983, just in time to cover the heartache of farmers as they weathered the economic reforms unleashed by the David Lange-led Labour government.
Such was the pace and scale of change as subsidies and support payments were axed overnight, many farmers were fi nancially hurting, they were angry, frightened and felt betrayed.
In my subsequent 38 years as a journalist I never again saw that level of sustained anger and frustration – until now.
Having watched the debate and attended two farmer meetings in the past week over the government’s response to He Waka Eke Noa (HWEN), I am reminded of the level of hostility and fear of meetings and rallies I covered in Southland and Canterbury from 1984 to 1987.
The farmers’ response is perhaps understandable, given that government modelling shows that if adopted, its proposal could cause what can only be described as a drastic 20% decline in sheep and beef production.
But there is one signifi cant difference from 40 years ago.
The architects of the 1984 reforms, Roger Douglas, Richard Preeble and David Caygill, fronted farmers to explain why they were making these cuts.
I recall them standing stoic and unfl inching in front of hundreds of farmers baying for blood at a meeting at the Christchurch Show Grounds.
They believed they were right, defended their decision – and history will show they eventually won the support of most farmers.
Jacinda Ardern, Damien O’Connor, James Shaw and their offi cials have not fronted farmers since announcing their response to HWEN, despite the prime minister labelling climate change her generation’s nuclear-free moment.
We are constantly reminded that agriculture accounts for 48% of our greenhouse gas emissions, so why are they not trumpeting this solution from the roof tops?
If they truly believe they are right, as Douglas, Preeble and Caygill did 40 years ago, why aren’t they selling it to the sector?
The reality is their response to HWEN is a signifi cant departure from the original document presented by the 11-party primary sector group, but instead of the government explaining its reasoning, farmers have to fi nd out by reading two 100-page technical reports.
Having created this poisoned chalice, the government has casually left it to the chair of Beef + Lamb NZ, Andrew Morrison, and Dairy NZ chair Jim van der Poel, to weather an onslaught of anger and abuse from their sector groups.
Placating statements in the media from O’Connor that the fi nal policy will not be as severe as the proposal ring hollow without additional commentary and explanation.
In the 1980s the Lange government was delivering brutal medicine to right a sinking New Zealand economy.
Ardern rates climate change an even greater threat, but such is the silence from Wellington and the depth of anger and fear among farmers, a satisfactory agreement appears diffi cult to reach.
Letters of the week
I was wrong about Nadia’s Farm
Siobhan Griffi n
Retired dairy farmer and regenerative grazing coach
IAM WRITING to you about redacting my opinion piece about Royalburn Station and Nadia Lim, “Nadia’s Farm could use some regen training”, October 31. Now that I have seen episode four where they sort their grazing out and clearly show well-fed and managed livestock, I realise I grossly misjudged them and their conscientious team.
My frustration came from seeing farmers make the same mistake I used to make 15 years ago by allowing my livestock to get ahead of the grass in the summer because I didn’t have the tool of holistic planned grazing to manage my spring surplus better.
Planning for drought and ways to monitor that alert the farmer to an impending drought before the neighbours realise it seemed at the time like information that Royalburn Station could fi nd useful to avoid the problems they encountered at the end of episode three.
I linked them to my website because the featured video interviewed farmers near them in Central Otago whose monitoring last year alerted them that grass was growing slower than expected around Christmas, and they talk about the proactive decisions they made to avoid growing a lot less grass.
I thought this and other free info could be relevant and useful to them at no cost whatsoever.
I was not trying to promote myself but rather holistic management and pointed out they can buy the books and teach themselves.
I have no fi nancial connections with Holistic Management International whatsoever.
I merely found practising it on my farm resulted in the outcomes we wanted around profi t, health and biodiversity, and it helped us avoid our grass going brown in the summer and having to feed out winter feed earlier than we wanted.
I was pleased to see Carlos and his father in episode four appreciating the beech forests planted on the working landscape of their new block.
Seeing these farmers value wildlife habitat and growing nutrient-dense food and fi bre on a diverse landscape, I realise how I had misjudged this lovely family and their team who, like all farmers I have met in New Zealand, are trying to care for the land and their animals the best they know how.
I now realise short glimpses of a few sheep on TV can never refl ect the reality of what is going on with thousands of sheep at the farm and I had no evidence or right to insinuate the sheep had lost any weight whatsoever. This was simply unfair to these hardworking farmers and I apologise to everyone involved. The footage in episode four of many more sheep in lovely condition proves I was completely off the mark.
Best letter WINS a quality hiking knife
Send your letter to the Editor at Farmers Weekly P.0. Box 529, Feilding or email us at
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Meet the people behind the farm gate
In my view ...
Put a cap on unworkable emissions plan
Malcolm Bailey
Former chair of the Dairy Companies’ Association of NZ and former special agricultural trade envoy
OPENLY opposed by industry as well as the political opposition, the government’s emissions pricing proposal looks dead in the water and should be scuttled. Perhaps the government has done us a favour by amplifying the weaknesses of the levy approach and the stupidity of cutting New Zealand’s worldleading low emissions production.
Both He Waka Eke Noa (HWEN) and the government proposal should go to the bottom and make way for a new solution that follows key principles, uses market solutions, and works.
What has also been exposed is that HWEN was never a genuine partnership.
The government has come up with new impact modelling and rejection of the emissions leakage risk with no link to earlier work or credibility.
“Bad faith” is the best way to describe how the government engaged then dis-engaged as a “partner”.
Sound familiar when we think of other government consultations that were never genuine?
So where to from here? The primary sector does need to find cost-effective ways to reduce emissions for the sake of our planet and further enhance our world-leading low emissions credentials.
The key guiding principles for a new way forward are: • NZ aligns with the 2015 Paris
Agreement and contributes to a net reduction in global food production emissions and avoids emission leakage. • Efficient farmers and growers’ businesses and their rural communities remain vibrant and the system is neutral re land use change. • Emissions are priced at the margin (not across the board). • Early adopters of emissions reductions are not penalised. • On-farm sequestration is recognised. • Cost effectiveness and robust science and economic analysis are used.
When judged against these six key principles, HWEN is a dismal failure too. Looking back it seems incredible that, in an effort to find consensus with the government, industry partners went so far down the wrong path.
We can achieve emissions reductions without one dollar of money going to the government.
It is now clear that the government has an agenda to raise a lot of money from the farm emissions levy.
We now know where the money will come from to fund the Budget 2022 announcement to spend $338.7m over the next few years on emissions reduction research.
Levying is not cost-effective and is built on taxing every kilogram of output (not pricing at the margin) and then inefficiently re-distributing this money into incentive payments and hoping that throwing money at R&D will achieve something.
“Have money – will spend” is not the way to do things and reminds us of the bad old days of high taxation and subsidies.
Efficient farmers and growers who have already adopted emissions reduction measures will not get the benefit they deserve and will contribute to incentive payments to those who are inefficient.
The government will use the Climate Change Commission to drive up the methane levy price until targets are met.
And the nitrous oxide price will be linked to the Emissions Trading Scheme.
This inefficient approach will see some farmers go out of business and cause harm to rural communities and the NZ economy. Only limited on-farm sequestration will be recognised.
A blind eye will continue to be turned to foreign companies buying up large areas of good food-producing NZ land to plant pine trees so they can keep emitting back home.
If we are really serious (worldwide) about producing more food while reducing emissions, improving efficiency is the key. Efficiency is the one word that sums up what needs to be targeted to reduce emissions without driving farmers out of business.
The alternative proposal from the Waka Adrift farmer group, while a welcome breath of fresh air, runs out of puff by shying away from efficiency and a market-based solution like cap and trade (C&T).
So what is C&T?
This is a well-proven concept and is used to manage nitrate emissions around Lake Taupō.
The permitted level of total emissions in NZ would be set (capped) at an agreed amount. This amount would be determined by robust scientific and economic analysis in line with all the key provisions of the international climate agreements NZ has signed up to.
Initial allocation of units is a challenge.
If every farmer was allocated their share of this capped volume based on the average level of emissions per kilogram for each farm output category, sheep farms would not be pitted against dairy farms.
Farmers with lower emissions than the average will have emissions units they can sell and those above the average will be incentivised to improve their management to reduce emissions or face the cost of buying some emissions units.
No money is amassed anywhere and none goes to the government. So no money is at risk of being wasted on incentives or any other stupid political idea.
Therefore, for most farmers, it is only the last few percent of emissions (at the margin) that would be either available for sale or need to be purchased to comply with the cap. The price of these emissions units would be set by trading among farmers.
Where to set the cap level is inevitably a government decision. This is the elephant in the room for C&T because the cap is a proxy for the reduction targets. It is crucial that robust scientific and economic analysis is used in the process.
If all the key principles are adhered to, especially the risk of emissions leakage, efficient farmers should have confidence that C&T will not undermine our farm businesses as we achieve genuine emissions reductions.
PROVEN: Malcolm Bailey says the answer to improving farming efficiencies lies in a market-based solution like cap and trade – already used to manage nitrate emissions around Lake Taupō.
This is where you find ground-up change
Richard Kyte
CEO of Thriving Southland
WHEN everyone is trying to push through their ideas, including regulations, too much pressure on farmers – or anyone for that matter – actually puts the brakes on.
You have to slow down to speed up, and then you have to give people space and time to sit round a table to identify problems, opportunities and then solutions.
More than a decade ago now, I facilitated a workshop given by Sue Yerex, a Taupō farmer who had been instrumental in working through the challenges faced by her community.
Sue’s message was clear. Change is coming, and you need to get on board the bus, be part of the discussion and have a voice as a community. Alternatively, you can stand in front of the bus as it picks up speed and cross your fingers.
It was a direct message to farmers to get involved rather than be dictated to.
A group of Southland farmers took Sue’s words to heart and that was the beginning of the formation of a new wave of community catchment groups.
By 2018, there were 18 catchment groups in Southland supported by sector organisations, the regional council, stakeholders and the New Zealand Landcare Trust.
These catchment groups were formed from farmers and community members with a passion for their communities, for the land, their waterways and for wanting to make changes in a way that worked best for their communities. They had an independent voice, while having the ability to work as a collective and through a catchment group forum.
From these groups, a crosssectoral group of farmers and rural professionals decided to combine their efforts and look at funding in a different way. Thriving Southland was formed.
It was time of huge policy noise, when farmers felt they were getting continuous flack, and pressure was coming on for change. Not a lot has changed in that respect.
Farm systems may look simple from the outside but every single one is different, and each contains multiple complexities. Farmers, daily, have to juggle these complexities and constantly factor every part in their decisionmaking. Implementing one policy change and dealing with the implications can be hard enough, but when you have several simultaneous changes, it starts to create real challenges and risk to the existing business model.
Our role at Thriving Southland is to give farmers and communities the tools and information they’ve asked for, connecting in the science and specialists, so they can make decisions on their individual pathway forward.
Not long after its formation and unfunded, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) approached Thriving Southland about delivering on-the-ground programmes for farmers coping with policy changes. Thriving Southland was able to show that catchment groups are already doing this.
MPI not only saw the value but also offered funding to be used to set up Thriving Southland as a formal organisation with a board, and for the funds to be administered to catchment groups through Thriving Southland.
Even better, MPI agreed to let catchment groups have autonomy around their ideas and projects. Normally government funding is linked to an individual project and the model means you’re not catching the wave of farmer’s enthusiasm to access different types of funding when they need it.
Thriving Southland integrates funding for farmers and connects catchment groups with sector groups, the regional council, iwi, stakeholders and Crown research institutes to work together and help deliver amazing projects and outcomes for the environment and community.
Our model means people are supported to understand and be a part of the development of their land and their catchment. In less than two years, we have jumped to 35 catchment groups with 1300 farmers involved, covering 90% of the Southland productive area.
For the first time we have whole communities, with dairy, deer, beef and sheep, crop and more, coming together and bringing a range of different expertise and experiences.
People underestimate farmers’ ability to do big things and deliver ingenious solutions. This groundup approach with support from Thriving Southland offers a far more effective way of bringing about change on our farms than any policy document ever could.
Got a view on some aspect of farming you would like to get across? We offer readers the chance to have their say. Contact us and have yours.
FARMERS WEEKLY – farmersweekly.co.nz – November 7, 2022
Opinion A breath of fresh air in New Caledonia
Meaty matters
Allan Barber
Meat industry commentator: allan@barberstrategic.co.nz, http:// allanbarber.wordpress.com
IT WAS four years since our last overseas trip and we were well and truly ready to get away from the awful spring (still virtually winter) weather, as well as experience a completely different culture. At just under three hours, New Caledonia is the closest island destination to Auckland, but as a former French colony it provided a very different set of attractions, not least the food, French culture and language, and bright blue, warm seas.
The island was discovered in 1774 by Captain James Cook on his HMS Resolution voyage and named New Caledonia in memory of his father’s Scottish birthplace, but it remained unclaimed by a colonial power until it was annexed by France in 1853. The original inhabitants are the Melanesian Kanaks, who live mainly in tribal settlements outside the main urban centre of Noumea, especially in the north of the island.
During the second half of the 19th century, France used it as a penal colony for 22,000 convicts who were initially kept on an offshore island and brought to the mainland to carry out building projects, such as the Catholic Cathedral of Saint Joseph and Noumea’s main Protestant church. Not many ex-convicts settled on the island after their release.
The 20th century saw indentured labourers arrive from Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Vietnam, Java and Japan, although again these did not tend to stay permanently. The free white population was made up of French from the military and administrative classes, Australians and New Zealanders, as well as former sugar planters from Reunion in the Indian Ocean. There were also sizeable blocs of deportees from France’s North African colonies, Algeria and Morocco, while white and Polynesian immigration increased significantly between 1969 and 1972 because of the nickel boom.
Despite fairly frequent Kanak uprisings, most recently in 1984, France has retained a strong hold over New Caledonia. Progress has been made towards selfgovernment with the signing of the Noumea Accord in 1998 and an undertaking to hold three referendums on independence from France.
The first two of these resulted in a vote to remain part of France by a smaller margin than anticipated (56% and 53%).
The third and final referendum was held in December 2021 when independence groups boycotted the vote because the Kanak population was disproportionately affected by its mourning customs as a result of covid.
Only 44% of the population turned out to vote, with 96% wanting to remain part of France. Although there is no immediate sign of unrest, it does not require too much imagination to foresee further agitation for a fourth referendum, although not provided for in the accord.
New Caledonia’s main challenge is economic. Under French control it receives a large amount of aid from France for health, education, and military and security forces.
It has a chronic balance of trade deficit because it has very few exports apart from nickel, which fluctuates according to global demand. Two thirds of employment comes from governmental business services, trade and finance.
Agriculture centres largely on cattle, pigs and horses, although even here New Caledonia is not self-sufficient, needing to import meat, dairy and other foods.
There are large herds of cattle, all European beef breeds and Brahmans owned by white landowners and which are slaughtered and sold locally, while there is a dairy factory in Noumea. Much of tribal agriculture, notably yams, is traded unofficially between tribes with up to 90% of production being excluded from official statistics.
Diversification beyond the commercial and administrative promoting it in NZ to have much chance of success in competition with the rest of the Pacific Islands, which have a much higher profile.
We hadn’t been there for nearly 40 years and only thought of holidaying there when we saw Air Calin was a sponsor of the French Film Festival.
Air New Zealand flies there, although you would have to search pretty hard to find out, and special deals only appear to be available from Air Calin, even when one leg is with Air NZ.
New Caledonia has some superb beaches, wonderfully vibrant sea life and a coral reef second
in size only to the Great Barrier reef, accessible to divers as well as being well displayed in Noumea’s aquarium.
The excellent Maritime Museum tells the history of New Caledonian discovery and settlement. There are also some very good restaurants in the capital, serving French, Italian, Mexican and other ethnic cuisine. Unfortunately prices tend to be quite high, particularly in the resort hotels, because so many supplies are imported as well as attracting quite a few additional consumption taxes.
A little known fact is New Caledonia’s role in World War 2, when it became a logistics hub for the Allied forces after Pearl Harbour, when tens of thousands of American soldiers plus NZ and Australian forces were based there. The Americans brought in a substantial amount of machinery, including tractors, which enabled agricultural production to move ahead at a previously impossible pace.
The American hospital in Noumea is about to be demolished 75 years after the end of the war while there is also a NZ cemetery about 90 minutes north of the main airport where New Zealanders killed in the war in the Pacific are buried, because of the difficulty of repatriating the bodies.
All in all it was a very interesting and enjoyable break away from normal life and its constant media earbashing about climate change, ram raids and social problems, with hardly any rain, lots of sun and a constant 25degC. We are already thinking of booking for next year.
REEF: New Caledonia has some superb beaches and a coral reef whose marine life can be visited by divers, or in Noumea’s aquarium.
sectors has proved difficult, although more tourism from Australia, NZ and Japan is considered to have potential. At least the first cruise ship since before the pandemic was in port while we were there.
Realistically there needs to be a great deal more effort put into
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Bring some speed to fixing rural roads
Alternative view
Alan Emerson
Semi-retired Wairarapa farmer and businessman: dath.emerson@gmail.com
IT’S BEEN a long, harsh winter in coastal Wairarapa with mud and slips everywhere. I’m over it.
Roads have suffered too, with the current trip into Masterton fraught with slips and washouts.
The local council does a good job with the resources it has but they aren’t enough. The answer is for the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) to do a lot more, especially in the provinces.
That is, I fear, a forlorn hope as funds are going into a pile of big city projects like cycleways and public transport, which is of little use to the productive rural sector.
We urgently need money spent upgrading our provincial roading network, making our country roads safer.
The issue is that the NZTA focus is not currently on the state of our roads but on speed limits.
Let me state up front that I want to see our road toll reduced. My view of the issue is widely different from those of our army of bureaucrats.
The problem with our bureaucrats is that they seem to spend their time finding ways of mucking you and I around in plaintive, unworkable efforts to fix often imagined problems.
They tend to have a single focus, too, as evidenced by the NZTA’s concentration on speed and speed limits.
The stupidity started with Auckland Transport reducing the speed limit on more than 1600 roads. Some went from 50km/h to just 10. Others went from 100km/h to just 40.
I’m glad I don’t live in Auckland as I strongly believe that the changes will only make commuting around Auckland worse than it is.
Hard on the heels of the Auckland stupidity came Police HQ telling us they wanted the speed limit reduced to 80km/h on roads “with no protective median barriers”, which would include all rural roads.
Reducing speed limits on provincial roads has many unintended consequences, with animal welfare being one.
I was a little surprised by the lack of any hysteria from either SAFE or Greenpeace. Surely they would be as concerned as I am about the severe animal hardship caused by the extended amount of time animals would be on trucks.
I’m also horrified that the National Advisory Committee on Animal Welfare didn’t get involved either.
I can remember when the speed limit was 50 miles an hour, or 83km/h. The cars back then had antiquated rack-and-pinion steering systems and cable brakes. The technology bore absolutely no resemblance to that of a modern motor vehicle.
Also, the bureaucrats’ argument that vehicles didn’t go as fast back then isn’t true as I can remember doing 100MPH quite regularly on the Kumara Straight.
The problem is NZTA has the resources to bury us in irrelevance with its 88 PR staffers, with 65 earning over $100,000.
I’d sooner see their annual $10 million wage bill put into road improvements.
My real frustration is that we’ve had many road safety initiatives and our road toll keeps climbing as it is currently doing. As well as speed limits we’ve had so-called solutions that have created real issues for the provinces, like raising the driving age, which has had zero effect.
NZTA tell us that the rural network is the deadliest. The answer is to fix the roads, not muck with speed limits, but provincial New Zealand is getting a smaller share of NZTA road funding.
Now the NZTA brains trust is demanding councils do “speed management plans”, which will solve nothing except increasing rates.
You drive to the conditions and not according to the signs on the side of the road, which, inevitably, won’t be policed.
Again they ignore the state of our roads. For example there have been several road deaths recently near Cambridge, with the locals saying there will be more. Speed limits are secondary; the state of our roads isn’t.
It gets worse, with the government and NZTA announcing a campaign to try to reduce the road toll to zero by 2050. You’ll have seen the advertisements.
I have several issues with that.
The first is that our bureaucrats will inflict a pile of stupid restrictions on us in pursuit of their goal.
The second is that I would prefer the nearly $5m spent on the campaign so far to be spent on upgrading roads.
Finally, who is going to be around in 28 years to judge the effectiveness of the campaign?
Roading has been a political shambles for decades and needs to be fixed. Remember the Roads of National Significance from the National Party? Treasury claimed they didn’t make financial sense but the politics obviously appealed.
Now we’re lurching into a zero-by-2050 campaign that will involve massive restrictions over the decades but achieve little.
The answer is simply to improve our roading network, which neither Labour nor National appear committed to doing.
UPHILL BATTLE: The New Zealand Transport Agency needs to do a lot more in the provinces, says Alan Emerson.
Getting quite deep in the swimming pool
From the ridge
Steve Wyn-Harris
Central Hawke’s Bay sheep and beef farmer: swyn@xtra.co.nz
IWAS doing an annual job yesterday that gave me pause to reflect on the drive to increase biodiversity.
We’ve forgotten about that, given the focus on methane emissions, but it’s still there, lurking in the background.
I used to be good at running the old in-ground concrete-block swimming pool all year, keeping it reasonably clean through all those months when no one was at all interested in using it.
As my enthusiasm waned and it would become manky, there would be calls from Jane and the kids to get the water swimmable for the summer.
I’d point out that hardly any of them would swim in it until close to Christmas but under sufferance I’d spend all year keeping it to their required standard. Sure enough there might be nice sunny hot days through November and December, but the water was deemed too cold for a dip.
Christmas would come and I’d enjoy seeing the pool being well used, but the chillier days of March would see a rapid decline in use.
A lot of work and cost for three months’ swimming but as they say, happy wife, happy life.
However, since the kids all left home, as soon as Jane stops her morning swim I quit keeping the pool clean. The leaves come off the trees and float to the bottom and by spring it has the look of one of our dams.
I opened the tap to let it go and could hear the usual cacophony of frogs who sensed something was about to change.
First job next morning was to capture the frogs among the sludge and put them in my bucket.
They must be bewildered by this sudden transformation in their world.
Do they consider it dramatic climate change, some sort of global catastrophe, or maybe the intervention of a wrathful God?
Do they think it is something they did that turned their world upside down? Or do they blame each other for something someone else might have done?
This year it was a record haul. Twenty-three of them.
Despite the deep bucket, the more athletic were still able to leap up and land, impressively, on the rim before attempting a bid for freedom.
I carried them down to the dam and liberated them with the advice to watch out for the eels.
I water-blasted the pool and decided it was due for another coat of expensive rubber paint.
This morning, I went back into the clean pool and caught the few frogs who’d obviously been away in the garden when the pool emptied and had returned home.
What were they thinking when they perched on the side, looking down into a vast empty space? Why did they still jump into the pool knowing there was no water there, facing certain death if it wasn’t for me rescuing them? Is this what we humans are doing in our world?
I was wondering, if frogs are likened to the canary in the coal mine and their decline is a symptom of environmental degradation, why do we have so many around here?
The pool water during the winter is very unappealing and disgusting looking but that doesn’t stop them making it home.
Even when I fill it up and pour acid in to counter our spring-fed, high-lime-content water, then stabiliser chemicals, chlorine and copper sulphate, they still like making it home.
I know because I’m often called upon to catch them before some people will get in the pool and I take them down to the dam to join their mates.
Anyway, the exercise has allowed me to consider the biodiversity of our pool and given me the satisfaction that my highintervention and non-intervention strategies both appear to be working well.
A ram client rang last night with his ram order and said he only liked my columns about farming matters.
He’s not going to like this one much.
