Insidious Trolls -- June 2017

I enjoy being on twitter, by and large it’s a fun place to share my experiences and learn from other farmers. I get to answer questions from people who want to learn, I get to hear other people’s perspective and I’m often challenged by opposing viewpoints. The disagreements are honest and open; sometimes I can find no common ground with the person I’m talking to but that’s okay, we each know where the other stands and we go our separate ways.

There’s a more insidious side though, the troll who tries to undermine your position by claiming to be something they’re not. The first instance I came across was a person claiming to be a dairy farmer with the delightful handle of @TownieHater. The persona they created was as thoroughly unpleasant as the name suggests, and that was the point; they wanted to portray dairy farmers as boorish, arrogant self-centred narcissists who believed they could do no wrong. Ironically many would say those are exactly the traits the creator of the account exhibits herself.
It had some small success, mainly amongst people who wanted to believe that sort of thing, but by and large it was soon seen for what it was and, when it became apparent people were ignoring the account, the creator claimed it was satire all along.

A more recent example is @pureNZdairy, an account purporting to be from a dairy industry PR person. They went out of their way to bait anyone who wasn’t a dairy farmer and the account really took off with this gem: “Get real – who actually swims in rivers anyway?? That’s just romantic idealism from the Greenies. People swim in chlorinated swimming pools”
Farmers were horrified and blocked the account, urban twitter were horrified and took the tweets at face value. No matter how often I pointed out the account had to be a very bad parody, people were more than willing to believe a dairy industry representative was saying those things.

Who was the genius behind @pureNZdairy? Who would want to portray dairying advocates as offensive trolls while in fact being offensive trolls themselves?  GreenpeaceNZ of course!
Fortunately their supporters don’t like being taken for fools, so a campaign that was largely ignored by farmers while annoying potential allies probably wasn’t the smartest move. Since they’ve owned up and put the obligatory “parody” line in the account’s bio I’ve seen nothing but scorn for the attempt and dismay from people who have donated to them in the past. Greenpeace of course are claiming it as a brilliant success, cutting satire that was easily discerned by all but rural folk.

The important thing here though isn’t the attempts to subvert rather than have an honest discussion; it’s the fact that people are so willing to believe the worst of us and how difficult that impression is to shake.

You’ll have seen the furore around advertisements in the Timaru Herald; situations vacant looking for workers with three years’ experience on minimum wage and live in a rodent infested Portacom. My twitter feed blew up with indignation over poor working conditions, substandard housing and arrogant farmers.
What’s the truth behind those ads? The most likely answer is the farmer in question had happy staff who wanted to stay but needed to renew their work permits. Renewal of those permits requires you to try and recruit local staff, so the ads were designed to discourage applicants while fulfilling immigration formalities. Of course that’s not how the public sees it, and the headline from the very paper the ad was placed in screams Canterbury dairy farm reveals grim details of working conditions!
Of course the ads weren’t proof of poor working conditions, they were a sign of frustration at what people need to go through to retain good staff.
The ads were ill conceived and blew up far beyond what was intended, but we can’t rely on people to look beyond face value and see that. We can’t even rely on the media to dig deeper and report that, so we’ve got to be very careful what we put out there. Greenpeace don’t need to launch coordinated stealth campaigns when we so often inadvertently shoot ourselves in the foot.

Find The Innovators -- May 2017

Back in the good old days I’d go to discussion groups. We’d have a look at somebody else’s farm and have the same arguments about rotation lengths that we’d had at the previous month’s discussion group, then I’d be back home in time to help the bobby truck driver lift the calves onto the truck. Back then there were mechanical scales next to the door so you could weigh the ones the driver rejected as too light; he was always right and invariably took the weighing with good humour.

I haven’t been to a discussion group in a long time, but last week I was invited to a focus group by an agricultural company looking to develop apps for farmers. I sat in a room full of successful and intelligent people and listened as they discussed the challenges facing farming; environment, staffing, immigration, animal welfare and, after the reality of all these things, the public perception of them. Payout was only mentioned briefly and I assume the debates over rotation length have long been settled because it wasn’t mentioned at all.

By and large we agreed the apps the company were looking to develop weren’t that useful and if they did develop them we certainly wouldn’t pay for them. The facilitator looked on with increasing despair as we drank her coffee and took the conversation off track into areas we found more interesting.

Not going to discussion groups doesn’t mean I’m out of the loop though, I’m watching with interest as the farmers on Twitter show how they’re complying with the new bobby calf regulations. Of course I interject smugly that we’ve had raised platforms in Canterbury for 8 years now, driven by health and safety concerns from the trucking companies, and I haven’t seen roadside calf collection since I came to the South Island 14 years ago.

Some farmers aren’t content with merely complying with bobby calf regulations, they’re intent on eliminating bobbies from the farming process altogether. Jenny Aplin, a farmer I follow on Twitter, is well on the way to doing this with Wagyu sires. After some conversations with Jenny and others who use Wagyu I’ve looked into it myself. At $150 for a week old calf compared with $50 on the bobby truck for a 4 day old calf the numbers really stack up, minimising the number of calves going as bobbies is the icing on the cake but an animal welfare advocate’s dream.

I may not go to discussion groups and I may be guilty of not being fully focused at focus groups, but I take notice of the innovators out there like Jenny. I have access to the thoughts of hundreds of farmers via Twitter, from the mundane to the brilliant, and they’re happy for people to pick up their ideas and run with them. We’ve all got the same concerns and there’s people out there sharing truly imaginative ways to address them, you’ve just got to be prepared to listen.

Adding Value -- April 2017

One of the advantages of being a dairy farmer on a social media platform like twitter is getting the benefit of everyone’s expertise, and by expertise of course I mean hearsay and half-baked opinions.
By far the nugget most commonly shared with me is “Fonterra should value add” or “Why don’t you guys add value to your product?”

When I press for detail they lecture about the dangers of relying on commodities and the advantages of high value, low volume production.
I tell them that New Zealand is unique as our industry is predominantly pasture based, unlike the rest of the world our dairy products are yellow because of the carotenoids in the grass; anyone who has been to North America will have seen the sickly pale butter found there. Our milk powder is yellow, pungent and sought after enough that it can command a premium on the world market. No they reply, that is not value added but merely a premium commodity.

Fonterra do of course develop markets and make value added products, from mozzarella for pizzas to sheets of butter exactly matching the size of a sheet of pastry for a French baker, a full 20% of liquid production is diverted to consumer food production.

Commodities are an essential part of the mix for dairy farmers; they allow our co-op to process a lot of milk very quickly which is essential when production is linked to grass growth. We have huge market share in whole milk powder, and moving away from that only opens the door for somebody else to take our place.
Many years ago my third form economics teacher, an Englishman by the name of Mr Maynard who was deadly accurate with a piece of chalk from any range, promised to reveal to us the secrets of prosperity. We sat in rapt attention, those who had been chatting displaying a smudge of chalk on our foreheads  as Mr Maynard laid bare the path to wealth for our country.
“It makes no sense” he opined “for New Zealand to be exporting raw logs overseas, for those logs to be milled overseas, turned into chairs overseas and imported back into New Zealand. We should be exporting chairs; the secret is to add value!”

At the time I thought Mr Maynard was a visionary, but now I realise every third former in 1983 heard the same thing and continues to repeat it to this day. I even saw a press release from a political party promising they would “shift the focus from volume to value”, a bold statement with not a single indication of how they would achieve it.

I was in the market for a new dining suite and I went to a local manufacturer to see what they could offer. After choosing a large square table in knotty pine with eight matching chairs I struck up a conversation with the owner. I admired the table and chairs and said how great it was that if a chair broke they’d be able to make me a new one. “Oh no” she replied, “They only made the tables. Chairs were too intricate and time consuming and therefore expensive to manufacture, so they imported them from Malaysia and made the tables to match the chairs.”

While value add makes sense as part of our business model  it’s never going to be the whole package, and it worries me that politicians still trot out lines I learned in the third form seemingly without any appreciation of the nuance and realities behind their statements.
Every time I hear the words “value add”, my hand twitches and involuntarily reaches for a piece of chalk…

You're Wrong -- March 2017

One of the greatest gifts the internet has given us is the ability to tell complete strangers they’re wrong, and let’s face it, they often are.

Sometimes they’re so wrong the rest of the internet lines up behind you to tell them exactly how wrong they are. I recently tweeted that a Kiwi job applicant had failed to turn up for a job interview, I then doubled down on that by betting the Uruguayan applicant would be on time. He was and he got the job. For reasons known only to him, a senior Labour MP thought it would be a good idea to tell me my working conditions were so atrocious that Kiwis wouldn’t even apply and I was exploiting immigrant labour with slave wages.

He was wrong, and I felt obliged to tell him so. He didn’t like that and kept arguing, so I let the rest of the internet tell him he was wrong too. It was beautiful to witness: Left, Right and Centrist Twitter were united in the common cause of telling a politician exactly how wrong he was, in great detail, while other politicians chortled from the side lines.

The next day I woke up to an apology tweet where he said he was very sorry for engaging with me (but not quite apologising for what he’d said). The next week Labour issued a directive that all of their MP’s should review their social media and delete anything potentially embarrassing. Nice try, but a friend in Wellington saw a National MP refer to the Twitter spat in one of their speeches. And the internet is forever.

Not all my correcting of the internet has been so successful or satisfying: I’ve been telling people for 3 years now that rainfall is measured in mm, not ml, and yet they persist. Even farmers who should know better continue to use ml, though I’m certain a percentage of those just do it to annoy me.
It’s got to the stage I’ve had to create a hashtag, #splainfall, and write a series of explanatory tweets that I can pull out when needed. I’m sure the readers of this column understand that rainfall is a measurement of depth and not volume so I won’t replicate my tweets here. WeatherWatch took pity on my lonely crusade and enlisted the services of former MetSevice Weather Ambassador Bob McDavitt to help write a tutorial explaining exactly why I am right. Okay, that actually is quite satisfying.

Occasionally someone will try to tell me that I’m wrong. There’s only one way to handle this of course, I covered it in a previous column: I ignore them.

Political footballs -- February 2017

It must be election year, all the same political battlefields are being occupied with the opening salvoes being fired over Law and Order; every political party is promising more police. This plus health and education are the areas where politicians make bold positive promises to spend more and do more; the triennial lolly scramble.

The flipside to these traditional battlefields are the political footballs; those who can be blamed for all manner of woes in order to score political points without upsetting too much of your base. Immigration is getting a good kicking and is shaping up to be a major football this year and the Greens have dairy farmers squarely lined up.

Twitter can provide an interesting window to exchanges that would have otherwise totally passed you by, I don’t know if politicians use it as a testing ground to float their ideas or if it’s just a place where you get to see their unfiltered thoughts. A senior Labour MP recently tweeted that New Zealand was experiencing record immigration and it was “an uncomfortable fact that this was related to the recent rise in unemployment”.
He remained stonily silent when presented with the facts; the previous 3 years had seen rising immigration and falling unemployment, and got downright petulant when it was pointed out his comments were dog whistle politics bordering on racism (because when we talk of immigration nobody is talking about the English family that just moved in next door).

It took less than an hour for his premise to be totally destroyed and the MP to leave the subject alone. Had his tweet been a press release there would have be no instant discussion, it’ll be interesting to see if his framing of the subject changes closer to the election or if he chooses to double down.
Prior to that DairyNZ had been tweeting some good positive messages about dairy farmers spending $1 billion on riparian planting and fencing of waterways. A Green candidate decided to chime in and, rather than ask how much was left unfenced or what measurable effects these initiatives had had on water quality, he took DairyNZ to task over the figure of $1billion, demanding they show their working much to the delight of his supporters.
Interestingly the last NIWA summary I saw put the industry’s spending on water quality measures at closer to $3 billion, but he was so focused on being negative and scoring points that he failed to accept that the amount spent doesn’t matter; it’s the effectiveness of the program that counts.

We’ve never had so much information so readily available to us; there should be no need for politicians to be spinning the story. Until they stop the spin it’s up to us to check the facts for ourselves and hold them accountable. Social media gives us unprecedented ability to engage with our politicians and I’m thankful they do so, it gives us a voice every day rather than every 3 years.

Don't Feed The Trolls -- January 2017

One of the interesting things about being on a social media platform like Twitter is watching different groups interact and seeing the different ways they deal with potentially negative situations.

Fonterra run an excellent Twitter account that happily engages with farmers and consumers alike, I’ve seen them come back to answer a question a few days after it was asked because they were researching the answer. They promote the good stories, both their own and those of farmers, and ignore the inevitable dairy criticism that comes their way. Fonterra will happily provide facts and references but they tend not to engage in debate.

The Green Party are also very good at maintaining that discipline; if for example a Green MP should suggest homeopathy as a viable cure for Ebola they will not even attempt to defend it. In fact they won’t even mention it on social media despite the storm of jokes and baiting. There may be a link to the single press release that addresses the situation, but like Fonterra there is no public engagement on the embarrassing issue.
While I’m sure there are spirited discussions behind the scenes at both Fonterra and The Greens they rarely spill over into the public arena, because to engage publicly just fans the flames of a negative story and keeps it visible for longer.

So when Greenpeace NZ ran a series of advertisements targeting the dairy industry I was very surprised to see DairyNZ lodge a complaint with the Broadcasting Standards Authority. I can guarantee you that Greenpeace were delighted with the news. A series of ads that were preaching to the converted and designed to put money in Greenpeace’s coffers were suddenly being talked about in print, TV news and social media. When DairyNZ inevitably lost the case the whole thing gained fresh legs, Greenpeace openly goaded DairyNZ on Twitter and happily and publicly rubbed our noses in it again and again. Of course an appeal has been lodged so more free publicity will be had.
The better strategy is to concentrate on what we are doing well and where we are headed, litigating is only ever an option if you’re sure of a win.

There are plenty of good farming stories out there; I watch videos on social media of dairy farmers all over the country confidently drinking water from the streams that run through their properties, quite rightly proud of the effort and expense they’ve gone to to maintain the environmental integrity of their farms. Those men and women are the farmers we should all aspire to be like and the ones I’d like to be reading about in the mainstream media, not that our lobby group picked a losing fight with another lobby group.
As individuals we’ll continue to promote our good stories to those we can reach, but I’d like to see our voices amplified rather than drowned out by a side show that, ironically, we’ve paid for ourselves.  

Embracing Change -- December 2016

Spending any amount of time on a social media platform like Twitter is akin to having all your conversations in a community hall, everyone can hear you and anyone can chip in. Actually, judging by some of the opinions sent in my direction it’s more like talking in a public bar, I swear half the people are well on their way to being drunk.

There’s something about the relative anonymity of a computer screen and keyboard that emboldens people to share their view on everything. I’ve seen people explain earthquake proofing to civil engineers, describe the Electoral College System to political scientists who live in America, and of course not a week goes by without some urbanite educating me on best practice farming methods.
You have to learn to ignore the bulk of the interruptions or you risk being sucked into never ending arguments about the right way to peel an orange or, far worse, endless lectures on exactly why Andrew Little is the saviour of the Labour Party (spoiler: he’s not).

There are some gems out there, and some fantastic advice on all manner of things if you just ask the right questions. And that’s the flip side; it’s also much easier to ask for advice from the relative anonymity of the computer screen than it is in real life.
Asking for advice can be hard, especially in your professional life when you know you’re doing your best and can’t for the life of you see how you could be doing anything different to improve things. Finding the right advice for you can be harder still.

For decades now DairyNZ have provided discussion groups as a means of getting ideas and advice to farmers, but I always found they were much like Twitter: a nice day out with lots of opinions floating around but hard to pick the right advice for me.
As an infrequent user of DairyNZ resources I was surprised to get an email from them asking to interview me. They wanted to know how I’d taken a Mid Canterbury dairy farm from average performance to a sustainable 18% increase in production with a corresponding drop in expenses. They’re interviewing a whole range of farmers in a whole range of systems, trying to find the best advice to put in front of farmers.

I told them that number one factor in getting a positive result was the willingness to change: unsolicited advice and opinions wash over you and wear you down, but once you decide you want to change seeking the right advice become much easier.
The second most important thing is finding someone you trust. Be it buying a car or running a farm, taking advice can be daunting. It took us two attempts to find the person that was the right fit for me but it was worth the effort to keep looking, the rewards were immense.

The opportunity to change is there for all of us if that’s what you want, and now more than ever the resources to do so are at our fingertips. Taking stock of where you are and where you want to be can be scary, but taking the first steps and doing it can be exhilarating. Just take the time to find the right people to listen to, and filter out the weirdos on the internet!

Quietly Caring -- November 2016

I often see farmers, mainly dairy farmers, portrayed as an uncaring profit driven bunch with little interest in what’s happening outside their farm boundary. You only need to watch the news to see an animal rights group accusing us all of being complicit in animal cruelty, read The Herald to find an angry columnist insisting we’re single handedly  destroying New Zealand’s waterways, or open my inbox to discover that I personally am responsible for global warming.

 The truth is we do care but we’re not inclined to talk about it very much, even amongst ourselves. Tonight I’m taking the farm staff out to a dinner, partly as a thank you for the hard work they’ve done to date, but mainly because the farm I manage donates calves every year to the local rugby union and this evening is a celebration of that fact. A total of 70 calves have been donated this year to ensure Mid Canterbury rugby has the funds to keep junior rugby solvent and able to encourage youngsters into the sport. Farmers donate the calves, local businesses donate prizes for the most weight gain, the local vet and silage contractor donate their time and equipment for weighing, the transport company trucks the calves for free and the stock agent waives his commission.

All of this is done by volunteers and with little to no publicity, because we care about our community.
I’ve been dairying for 21 years now, and every single farm I have been involved with donates at least one calf annually to IHC. I have never seen a farmer hesitate when the IHC volunteer comes calling, except maybe to apologise that times are tight and it might only be one animal this year instead of two or three. Again the calves are transported at no charge, and again the auctioneers waive their commission.

We don’t talk about it, it’s not publicised, and we do it because we care about our community.
I was in the Manawatu during the floods of 2004 when thousands of cows were suddenly on the road escaping the rising water. Those of us that were out of danger willingly opened our gates to let the stock have a feed and a breather overnight before continuing on their way. We took what stock we could to keep them milking and gave what we could spare to those that had lost everything. The same thing happens in times of drought and will happen again with the recent devastating earthquake. We care what happens to our neighbours and fellow farmers.

For every negative article I see reported, I think of the good the farming community quietly do for those around them. Despite the glee with which the demise of the dairy industry was predicted, farmers just got on with it and checked if their neighbours needed a hand. These people are the silent majority and they care deeply about what goes on both inside and beyond the farm, I just wish they’d stop being so damned quiet about it.

Time Off -- October 2016

I’ve just come back from a three week holiday on an overseas school trip with my son. It was a fantastic opportunity that I couldn’t pass up, but it was also the longest amount of time I’ve spent off farm since I broke my leg 8 years ago. It’s fair to say this break was much more pleasant.

Taking that much time away from a dairy farm isn’t easy and the farm owners, while supportive, understandably had some reservations. I was nervous too and came close to cancelling the trip on several occasions, so I spent a lot of time making sure everything was in place to keep the farm running smoothly in my absence.

Competent and reliable people that you can trust are the key. I’ve been lucky enough to retain nearly all the staff from the previous season and they’ve proven again and again that they’ve got what it takes, even when a spanner gets thrown in the works.
We also have an excellent consultant who, since he came on board, has guided the farm to two record seasons in a row; he’s the man with a plan.

Supportive farm owners, excellent staff and a consultant with a proven track record to steer things: what more could I need to be comfortable going away? Technology of course! Oh. My. God. The technology that’s available to us now is just amazing!
I would be able to check production every day, keep an eye on the cell count, compare production to previous seasons and current targets, monitor pasture covers and growth rates, email the consultant and be instantly contactable anywhere in the world any time of day or night! Exciting stuff! So, armed with a shiny new phone of the non-exploding variety loaded with all the latest versions of all the apps, I boarded my flight confident my bases were covered.

During my first week away I checked the production figures daily, took note of the pasture cover and even emailed the consultant before something dawned on me: what was the point of employing engaged and skilful people if I was just going to monitor them from afar? More to the point, why was I spending so much of my holiday time thinking about work?

I turned the Fonterra notifications off, switched my phone to silent and set about using my data plan for something far more productive: tweeting my every move to an audience that was no doubt thankful I was in a different time zone.
For someone who loves gadgets and whiz bang apps as much as I do, this was a real revelation: just because the technology is available it doesn’t mean we should always use it. Sometimes you’re just better off trusting the people; it makes for a much more relaxing holiday.

Rural/Urban Divide -- September 2016

 I recently read an article about the rural/urban divide in New Zealand, the disconnect that exists between farmers and their counterparts in town. The piece was written by Blair Drysdale, a Northern Southland farmer whom I know through interactions on Twitter. Blair is a passionate advocate for farming and, while he was writing an insightful, intelligent and well thought out piece calling on farmers to bridge that ever increasing divide, I was cramming ever increasing numbers of gingernuts into my mouth and posting the pictures to social media.

I like to think we were both working towards the same goal.

Blair is right: there is a divide and the traditional ways in which it was bridged have all but disappeared, but new methods of engaging with non-farmers are available to us and they can be very effective.
What we’ve all been guilty of in the past is preaching to the converted, talking to other farmers, chatting amongst ourselves. It’s fair to say city dwellers have a stereotypical view of farmers and it’s not very flattering.

As a collective, farmers on Twitter reach an audience numbering in the thousands, and I give a light hearted view into dairy farming that many of those folk might not otherwise get.  I also share the tweets of others doing the same: the cow drinking Milo from a travel mug in the middle of a paddock, the farmer sneaking into cow sheds in the middle of the night to leave baked goods and encouraging notes, the calf club calves being hand fed marshmallows and, of course, me covered in cow shit.

We can achieve so much just by sharing the good things we do: the annual donations of calves to IHC, our universal condemnation of animal cruelty, our constant striving to work smarter and do things better and, to the surprise of many town folk, our passion for the land we are farming.

This is how we’re engaging a diverse audience: with humour, with light hearted pictures of our everyday work, with amusing anecdotes about our careers and by answering their questions directly and honestly. The feedback we get from sharing our farming lives online is heartening, people are truly amazed at some of the things we see as mundane: be it calving a cow, shifting the effluent spreader or saving calves that got stuck in a tomo. While I’m by no means the best advertisement for farming in New Zealand, I can truthfully say I’ve given more people a deeper understanding in the last 12 months than I have in the previous 20 years.

The Little Things -- September 2016

Back in May I waxed lyrical about how I always strive to put a good team together, about filling the workplace with enthusiastic people who smile and make my life easier. Fine words indeed, but it’s not until the pressure really comes on that you find out whether or not you’ve actually succeeded.
Last month I was laid up for a few days with an injury, the timing was terrible as calving was just starting. My 2IC had booked that weekend off in the North Island well in advance and my calf rearer was away on a fishing trip and not due to start work until the following week.

What a scenario: 1060 cows to look after, over 30 calves a day to pick up, the farm manager is in hospital, the 2IC is away and there are only  3 staff members left to sort it all out
The first thing that happened was Paul, my 2IC, offered to cancel his trip. No big deal he said, that’s just farming. Of course I assured him I’d be back at work the next day once I’d been stitched up and he should take his scheduled break, but in the end I was out for four days and it was a lot longer until I was operating at full capacity.

So how did they cope? They all stepped up.  Alison, a very confident young lass, took over the springer checks and feed allocation. Kishor, a hard working Nepalese man, did what Kishor always does: he kept working until all the jobs were done and then went looking for more with a smile on his face.  Carlos, the Argentinean chef turned dairy farmer who was rostered off that weekend, gave up his days off and joined in the fun.
My neighbours Todd and Alex brought their kids around and fed the calves twice a day, and looked genuinely horrified when I suggested they send an invoice for their time.

Everything was running smoothly when I got back and I mentally congratulated myself for pulling together such an awesome crew, but I noticed that one team member wasn’t his normal enthusiastic self. He seemed off and I constantly had to ask him to improve.
Finally I pulled Carlos aside and asked if there was a problem, maybe something I could help with.
“Craig,” he said, “Can I be honest with you? I’m feeling very sad.”
I feared the worst ¬– a death back in Argentina or a sick family member.
“While you were in hospital I came in to work on my days off, and I was very happy to do this, but you have never even said thank you to me.”
I was mortified; all I could do was apologise and thank Carlos for letting me know what was troubling him.

I do all the usual things to keep people’s spirits up: I buy dinner and beer during calving, I thank them at the end of the day and I make sure they get plenty of time off to recharge their batteries. My 2IC bakes a cake every week and leaves it in the shed for all to enjoy. Staff members are valuable assets, as my team proved, and it takes no effort at all to recognise that and thank them for it, but not recognising their hard work can be detrimental to them, your relationship and ultimately your business.

You don’t have to make grand gestures to your staff, you just have to be genuinely appreciative and let them know you’re thankful when they go the extra mile. I forgot and I feel terrible about it, so here’s a test to see if Carlos reads my articles: come and see me, I’ve got something for you by way of apology.

Written In A Tramadol Haze -- August 2016

Last month I wrote about the need to get proactive with health and safety, and I’m pleased to report that I have done just that. The manual is coming together nicely and a staff meeting to identify and discuss hazards has been scheduled. I’ve even found a place that makes up hazard identification boards for the cowshed wall and I have statutory declarations ready to send off to all my contractors, along with instructions to check the hazard board before starting any work on the farm.

Despite all this and 20 plus years of farming experience, I’m writing this column through a tramadol haze while recovering from general anaesthetic.

Wednesday morning was beautifully warm and clear, I was up at 5:30am to feed the season’s first load of bobby calves and I even tweeted how bright the stars were that morning (you’d be surprised at how many people are awake and online in the early hours).

I got the calves done quickly and as it was getting light I set off to see if there were any fresh calves in the springer mob. I soon spotted a new calf and set about doing something I’ve done tens of thousands of times without incident over two decades. I wrote the mother’s number in my notebook and approached the calf with a numbered neckband. I kept the calf between me and its mum and walked up to the calf confidently while keeping an eye on the cow, who had backed off a few steps.

As I bent over the calf to put the band around its neck, an idea for this month’s column hit me in the face. The idea took the form of a hard bony skull with a half-tonne of agitated beef behind it, so I couldn’t help but pay attention. I’d like to tell you I shrugged it off and swatted the cow away, but instead I immediately collapsed to the ground while my eyes filled with blood, fighting the urge to vomit as cow number 7 proceeded to perform a tap dance routine on my ribs. Curling up into a protective ball and whimpering seemed to convince her she’d won, and off she trotted happily with her calf. I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful to be wearing a bike helmet. I collected my shattered glasses, limped back to the bike and headed home to assess the damage.

Was I complacent? Maybe, but I was doing a routine job in the same manner that has worked flawlessly for years. We work with animals every day, we have our favourites that we scratch behind the ears and rub their noses, but they can get stroppy too.
Cows can be very protective mothers and I took my eyes off one for a couple of seconds with very painful results, please be vigilant during calving and stay safe.

Health and safety -- July 2016

I’ve always prided myself on being a go-ahead kind of guy: embracing new ideas and technology, moving ahead with the times, an early adopter if you will. I had to rethink all of that when a friend in Wellington tweeted me a mock-up of a health and safety warning sign that, bar the spelling mistake, I thought was pretty funny. “Hey Craig” she said, “do you have one of these on your farm gate?”
In part the sign reads: “We have a very good H&S policy in place, it is called common sense. If you do not possess any common sense do not enter. You must use your common sense whenever necessary.” I laughed and retweeted it and watched things snowball as it struck a chord with the recipients. Everybody wanted a copy for their place, my phone kept lighting up as the tweet was liked and passed on.

Then I thought about it and realised I wasn’t actually being very go-ahead, unlike all the other farmers on twitter who have been proudly displaying their proactive approaches to Health and Safety. Sure I require everyone on farm to wear a helmet while on their motorbike, but if I’m honest I still don’t see the point at 3km/h on flat ground behind a mob of cows in 30 degree heat.

Then I got to thinking about all the near misses I’ve had over the years, ones that with the passage of time become amusing anecdotes. Like the time I was managing a farm in the Manawatu, it was a herringbone shed and one of the lightbulbs exploded. Apart from it being a bit dark at that particular place in the pit it didn’t really bother me, so I ignored it. Then one day I had reason to climb up on the rails during wash-down. I was wet and holding on to steel pipework when my head came into contact with the exposed live filament, blue sparks danced prettily across my knuckles and I hardly even noticed when I came crashing down to the concrete yard. The twitching took a while to subside, as did the return of coherent speech, but it motivated me to change the lightbulb.
Another time I was getting the cows in at 4am, it was dark and foggy and I knew there was a rotorainer in the paddock. The fog disoriented me and, as I went up a slight rise, I heard a whooshing sound. Luckily I instinctively ducked as the irrigator’s boom brushed past my head close enough to knock my hat off. I blame the irrigator for the fact my pants were still damp on my return to the cowshed.

Despite these close calls, I was bemoaning the level of paperwork required for compliance when a friend gently chided me for my views. He pointed out that a near miss register alerts you to issues and allows them to be remedied before there’s a major accident, and that a hazard identification sheet might just have prevented my near electrocution. “It’s not about paperwork” he told me, “it’s about keeping people safe and doing your best to prevent these things from ever happening.”
So it’s time for me to catch up with rest of the farmers of twitter and proactively get on top of health and safety, because it’s not about paperwork and it’s not even about covering my butt if something does go wrong, it’s about keeping people safe in one of New Zealand’s most dangerous work environments.
Anyway, I hear there’s a Health and Safety app for farmers now so I can do most of it from my phone!

Building Relationships -- June 2016

A couple of months ago I was a bit player in a copyright dispute involving one of Twitter’s most beloved and popular accounts, @dog_rates. My involvement was sufficient to warrant an email from Washington Post reporter Abby Ohlheiser asking for a bit of background information, but minor enough that the story could quite easily be written without my input.

I had the day off and I was bored, so I set about writing a reply that was so chock full of information that my name just had to be mentioned in the article. The following day I was delighted to see that not only had I been quoted, but I warranted a couple of paragraphs in the story. I gleefully shared the link on Twitter, and we all had a week’s worth of amusement out of it, though I think for Abby it was more a case of bemusement.

We’ve kept in touch, which I don’t imagine she does with all her sources, and Abby kindly gave me feedback on the first column I wrote for the Ashburton Guardian. In fact, I woke up recently to a message from Abby that read: “Hello! I have an important question for you: is there some sort of insult in New Zealand involving calling someone an ‘egg’ or something like that? Believe it or not this is for an article.”
I was happy to inform her that calling someone an egg is a kinder version of calling them a dick, and pointed her towards the trailer for the movie Boy for full cultural immersion. An hour later the story was online, I was once again quoted in the Washington Post as the “Chief New Zealand Twitter Source” and Twitter once again convulsed with laughter.
It’s a win-win relationship:  my friends and I get a good laugh and Abby’s stories get a few more clicks. I suspect there may also be a prize for the reporter that mentions New Zealand most times in a year.

And so, as with social media, that’s how I like to do business: win-win relationships. The crash in commodity prices has forced us all to take a hard look at our costs, and this has impacted on the people we do with business with. It’s easy to just look at the dollars and go with whichever supplier is cheapest, but there’s so much more to it than that.
That’s one reason I’ll never use FarmSource’s online ordering system, I want to go into the store and have a coffee and a yarn. I want to get to know the people there and have them understand my business and understand me. And it pays off in the form of superior service and access to deals, or getting that thing you really need delivered a day early. And I reciprocate with loyalty.
I’ve spent years developing a relationship with my grazier. We discuss prices and crops well in advance and come to a mutual agreement. Neither of us wants to be seen as trying to take advantage of the other, and so we work closely together to get the best possible outcome for both businesses.

In tough times like these, relationships that you’ve built up over the years really pay dividends. They allow you to speak honestly and make cuts where needed, and they should be strong enough to allow things to return to normal without missing a beat when the good times finally come back.
To me, that’s far more important and less stressful than chasing every last cent.
If I’m ever in Washington, I wouldn’t hesitate to drop Abby a line to see if she was available for coffee and a chat. I feel the same way towards people I do business with, and hope they feel the same way about me.

Employing Staff -- May 2016

A couple of weeks ago, Bill English made the headlines for attending a Federated Farmers meeting in Feilding and voicing the opinion that there is “a cohort of kiwis now that don’t look to be employable.” He went further and said that these (mainly) young males were pretty damned hopeless.
Cue the predictable howls of outrage from some quarters of the community who believed these folks weren’t being given a fair go, and quiet mutterings of assent from others who had seen them with their own eyes.

I seem to have interviewed, and occasionally employed, my fair share of the people Bill was referring to, and it’s that time of year again as dairy farmers recruit for the upcoming season. Hopefully I’ve had enough experience now not to repeat my mistakes, though I’ve been known to occasionally cut interviews short when it’s obvious a person just isn’t a fit for the team.

I had a young man turn up 30 minutes late for an interview. He slid out of his lowered car with the coffee can exhaust, ran his hand through his slicked back hair, popped his collar and shook my hand. I suggested that gumboots might have been more appropriate footwear than what he was wearing. He assured me that gumboots never sullied his feet unless he was getting paid.
Narcissist? Check. Entitled? Check. Employed? Not by me!

Sometimes it isn’t until after you’ve done the reference checks and actually employed someone that the cracks begin to show. A couple of years ago I received a 4am phone call from the hospital, two of my workers had been involved in a car accident and subsequently wouldn’t be able to make it to work.
It was a single car incident and they had been found on the side of Beach Road, next to their overturned car, both naked from the waist down. Understandably, neither was keen to discuss the details with me or the police. We never got to the, er, bottom of the situation.
One of the pantsless pair left quietly a short time later, and the other subsequently booked a two week holiday to Thailand. I never heard from him again.

I seem to have hired them all; the one who told me the electric fence wasn’t working because birds were sitting on the wires, the young man with gastro who thought he could make it home and not use the cow shed toilet (he couldn’t) and the two who thought a box of beer and a bottle of vodka were the correct way to limber up for milking (it’s not).

Though Bill’s Bunch are definitely out there, thankfully they’re the minority, tempered by people like the attractive lass I once hired who, it turned out, had a burning desire to milk wearing nothing but gumboots and an apron.
I always strive to put together a good team who will work well together, knowing full well that the nature of my industry means the really good ones will quickly move onwards and upwards. I take pride in watching them progress. In the meantime, I want to fill my workplace with people who always have a smile, despite the hour and the weather. The ones who burst into song while milking and dance at cups off when they think you’re not looking. The ones who always stay behind to give you a hand, or see the shed lights on at 10pm because you’re calving a cow and come to check on you.

Those people are out there. They’re young, they’re enthusiastic and they make my life easier and give me something to smile about.  I’ve had enough of Bill’s Bunch, and it’s worth taking the time to do the recruitment right to make sure I never get saddled with one of them again.

Dealing With Stress -- April 2016

I recently got paid the most wonderful compliment: “You, Craig, do seem to sail through obviously-infuriating levels of shit (often literal) with a Pythonesque élan. It is most admirable.”

We were discussing stress and how I deal with it, and I think we can all agree it has been a very stressful year. Obviously stressful for dairy farmers, of which I am one, but also for families of farmers and all the businesses that rely on the money going around. The pressures are huge, and we’re all making tough decisions in the face of factors beyond our control; be it a lower pay-out, rain during harvest, reduced turnover, or trying to allocate dwindling hours of work amongst your employees.

Often, it’s not these big things that cause us to snap and yell at the staff or the cows, or go home in a bad mood and pick a fight. It’s the little things, the things that shouldn’t have gone wrong because you’re good at your job and know better. The little things that wouldn’t have mattered, possibly even wouldn’t have happened, without that ugly background of things happening beyond our control.

I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t always displayed an admirable “Pythonesque élan”, but I’ve finally found my release valve that lets me laugh at getting kicked by a cow, or copping a load of shit on the head during milking, or even filling the cab of the ute with effluent. I still haven’t learned to laugh at impossibly tangled Rotorainer cables, but surely that can’t be far off.
There’s that moment during milking when you’re distracted, your head filled with impossibly complicated and important management decisions, and you don’t even realise a cow has lifted her tail until it quite literally hits you in the face. Past-Craig would have washed it off and quietly fumed, Present-Craig snaps a picture and tweets it, preferably with a witty heading. And waits. It doesn’t take long for the replies to come back; “trying a new anti-aging face pack?”, “thank God cows don’t fly” and, my favourite “Farmers eh? Shit faced at 6am”

I enjoy making other people laugh, and I don’t mind if it’s at my own expense. I was recently unblocking the effluent spreader and, having finally got it sorted, I called the shed and asked them to switch it on. Too late, I realised I’d parked the ute too close. With the window down. And the door open. It was nothing that couldn’t be sorted with the high pressure hose, but at last count over 7,000 people had seen that picture and presumably laughed at  (hopefully laughed with) the idiot farmer who found himself in that situation.
I share my mistakes for the amusement of others. You might bake, or collect stamps, or hunt, or coach children’s sport. Whatever it is, I can’t encourage you enough to find that release valve that allows you to let off steam. It’s a stressful year, and it’s dangerous to let the pressure build up.

In The Beginning -- March 2016

In the past couple of months I’ve had an article written about me for the IHC newsletter, had lunch with a freelance writer from LA, engaged in banter with an award winning documentary maker and been quoted in the Washington Post for an article about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). All because I spend too much time on my phone.

I joined Twitter, the social media site that restricts your musings to bursts of 140 characters, in the lead up to the 2014 election. I mainly followed politicians and political reporters (quickly ditching most of the politicians) and as a consequence, soon stopped watching the news. Every story of note was discussed, dissected and debated during the day. By the time it made it onto the evening news, I knew what angle the reporter was going to take and what bits they were leaving out.
From there, my Twitter habit has grown. I’ve found a large and diverse farming community, both in New Zealand and abroad, who are willing to share information and discuss any issue. We don’t always agree, but the debate is always entertaining.

I’ve made some great friends and fantastic contacts via Twitter. My daughter was recently accepted into Broadcasting School, and two prominent journalists were happy to spend time on the phone with her to coach her for the interview process. In her first week at Broadcasting, the guest lecturer was the aforementioned award winning documentary maker. Needless to say ,selfies of the two of them were tweeted at me directly after the lecture.

Two years ago at the Mid Canterbury Rugby Union’s Bobby Calf fundraising dinner, a marketing professor from Canterbury University gave a stunning speech on social media and rural mental health. I had only met Dr Ekant Veer online, but social media gave me the chance to get to know him and invite him to be our guest speaker.
Twitter has expanded my world greatly. A teacher from Upper Hutt has taught me to cook the prefect pork belly and make the most amazing beef patties, I’ve learned the nuances of parmesan from an Italian, been invited aurora hunting in Dunedin and requested a specific whisky for the next tasting at the Somerset Grocer!

I now think twice about telling my kids or workers to stop staring at their phones. I don’t know if they’re playing a game, sharing a joke with someone in another country, learning a new skill, sharing information or just making a new friend. But I do know one thing: they literally have the world available to them in the palm of their hand.