Opinion
26 FARMERS WEEKLY – farmersweekly.co.nz – April 26, 2021
Reactions fail science test Alternative View
Alan Emerson
I SPENT the weekend ploughing through the Statistics New Zealand/Ministry for the Environment (MfE) document Our Land 21 and the various reactions to it. For a variety of reasons, I was unimpressed. My immediate thought was that MfE’s naïvety when it comes to rural goings on is palpable. Reading the document, political correctness seemed to be more important than scientific rigour. Having said that, there was good work on the amount of rural land being taken up for housing and lifestyle blocks. The figures are horrific and an indictment on local government. Since 2002 there has been 1.9 million hectares of good land being taken out of agricultural and horticultural production. From 2002, the amount of good productive land lost to urban sprawl jumped 54% from 69,920ha to 107,444ha in 2019. Putting that in perspective, the equivalent of 100,000 rugby fields have been lost to food production. In addition, local government has approved the subdivision of 5800 lifestyle blocks each year since 1998.
There is no need for the encroachment. Driving round our main centres there is a considerable amount of bare land that could be developed. Fewer people are playing golf, so there are underutilised golf courses ripe for housing. The Government, to its credit, has said we should be building multi-storey apartments, much to the hysteria of the NIMBYs in Auckland and Christchurch. There are additional problems with urban encroachment onto farmland. Issues like the smell of silage, which some of the Carterton residents found offensive. There was the noise of tractors early in the morning and late at night. In rural NZ it’s a way of life. To townies, it’s unacceptable. Finally, there are the increased rules and increasing rates. The report talks about growing our population to 6.8m by 2073. Why should we go there? Greater population increases our carbon footprint and the need for more houses, schools, hospitals and the like. What is interesting is that farmers are producing more with 14% less land. Our rural export receipts have almost doubled in just nine years, up from $23 billion in 2010 to $44b in 2019. Take a bow folks, no one will give you a medal for your sterling work keeping NZ surviving during and after covid-19. Climate change is discussed in the report and my answer to the problem is simple, we need irrigation. Only 5% of our land
is irrigated, 95% isn’t – and that needs to change. We know the east of both Islands will get drier because of climate change and that means we need more water storage and irrigation starting now. The anti-farming fringe cry that irrigation causes pollution isn’t true. Foundation for Arable Research chief executive Alison Stewart told me that “cropping under irrigation has both economic and environmental benefits”. Also “sediment run-off and fertiliser pollution are considerably less under irrigation”. The StatsNZ MfE report doesn’t acknowledge that. The report mentioned covid-19 and the high risk of introduced farm animals spreading diseases to humans citing campylobacter. Interestingly, in my view, they ignored the campylobacter pollution from ducks, geese and swans. The reaction to the report was interesting. In the opportunistic corner was the Forest Owners Association who said the report “scored exotic forestry highly for its low impact on soils”. It got better saying “MfE analysis found only 11% of exotic forests were below the microporosity target range, whereas 75% of lifestyle blocks had the problem”. My response to that would be to respectfully and humbly suggest that farms aren’t lifestyle blocks. They went on “all forests prevent erosion, filter water and reduce flood damage”. I’m sure I could get a second opinion in
VIEW: Climate change is discussed in the Our Land 21 report and the answer to the problem is simple, we need irrigation, Alan Emerson says.
Tasman, Wairoa or Tolaga Bay. Also, if they read the full report, they’d have found out about the horrors of slash. Nitrogen fertilisers take a hit with Greenpeace waxing shrilly on state radio. “The price of decades of inaction is that rivers are sick, soil is depleted, our drinking water is full of nitrate nitrogen and we’re spewing heaps of climate pollution out into the atmosphere that’s driving more extreme weather” was the cacophonous cry. The facts are that the rivers aren’t sick. More than 72% of the sites measured had N levels within the target range. The soil isn’t depleted, as the report acknowledges. If drinking water is full of nitrate nitrogen, it is the fault of the water
supplier not farmers, and spewing pollution into the air is more a problem for synthetic clothing and carpets than agriculture but as usual, facts and Greenpeace don’t mix. My final issue is that the environmental report was “based on themes such as air, marine fresh water and climate”. Surprisingly, there was no mention I could see of the massive volumes of raw sewage from local government regularly going into waterways and the sea. They can’t have thought it important.
Your View Alan Emerson is a semi-retired Wairarapa farmer and businessman: dath.emerson@gmail.com
A little help goes a long way From the Ridge
Steve Wyn-Harris
FROM our vantage point here in 2025, the story behind New Zealand’s successful covid-19 vaccination programme during 2021 completely changed how
international pandemic vaccination programmes are now run. And yet, this success happened by chance. As the country began to vaccinate its populace, nagging doubts remained as to whether the system run by the Ministry of Health (MoH) was up for the challenge. The previous year’s influenza roll-out had been anything less than a success. A few years earlier, the ministry had botched the measles vaccination roll-outs. But luck or happenstance can often bring about welcome outcomes, and this is what happened in this case in a small rural backwater in an island nation at the end of the earth. A sheep and beef farmer went into the Central Hawke’s Bay health centre for his annual influenza shot. The receptionist told him that unfortunately all the doctors were away sick, and the nurses weren’t allowed to administer
IMAGINE THAT: Steve Wyn-Harris imagines the possibilities of NZ’s health system if rural practices were empowered to provide the best care possible.
the flu shot and of more concern, the perishable covid-19 vaccine shipment that had just arrived. The farmer said that he wouldn’t be able to come in again for a few weeks and asked if it would be okay if he just gave himself the vaccination. He explained that he was an experienced vaccinator after a 40year career, and had done tens of thousands without any difficulty. The receptionist didn’t think this would be allowed and asked others, but no one had heard that it was illegal. They looked up the protocols and then did some googling, but nowhere did it say people weren’t allowed to vaccinate themselves. So, they said they would allow him to do so, but he would still have to stay for 10 minutes so that the nurse could ensure there were no adverse reactions. He agreed, so they provided him with the syringe which he plunged into his arm and then sat out his time reading a Woman’s Weekly with an interesting article of a woman called Markle. He watched the waiting room fill with expectant folk hoping to get their pandemic vaccination. He once again approached the desk and said he’d be happy
to administer the vaccination to these people given the vaccine was perishable and about to expire. He said it wasn’t a tricky operation putting a needle into the middle of a bicep and pushing in the plunger. The staff didn’t think this was a good idea, but again he pointed out his experience and that in all those years, he’d never lost an animal or had an adverse reaction. This was a national crisis he told them and in times like these, one couldn’t be too rule bound. This was a pragmatic rural practice, so they finally agreed and set the farmer up in a small room where he administered several hundred vaccinations over the rest of the afternoon. Over a beer with the staff at the end of the day, they asked him how many he thought he could do in a day. He said he’d done 2500 sheep, but he didn’t think people would be that happy if he brought his Prattley Yards into town, so assuming they would prefer to be sitting on a chair, probably 1000 if those preparing the syringes could keep up. A decision was made, and the staff got onto the phones. By the end of a fortnight, the
farmer had vaccinated all of Central Hawke’s Bay and moved on down to Tararua. News began to spread around the country and the Farmy Army was remobilised, and farmers and vets took up the challenge and volunteered their services throughout the land in towns and cities. They were averaging 55,000 vaccinations a day and within three months the country was vaccinated and safe from the ravages of the plague. The urban population were incredibly grateful to their rural counterparts for picking up the gauntlet and running with it. Other countries took notice and began to use their practical rural dwellers to exponentially increase their vaccination rates and by the end of the year, enough herd immunity existed that this particular pandemic fizzled out. When the next large-scale vaccination programme is required, farmers and vets will be the first to be called.
Your View Steve Wyn-Harris is a Central Hawke’s Bay sheep and beef farmer. swyn@xtra.co.nz
