Bullshit Billboards -- December 2018

As you travel north into Ashburton you are greeted by a stark black billboard with large white lettering making a very bold claim: Ravensdown & Ballance Pollute Rivers.

The billboard is in a 50km zone so your passenger may even get the chance to read the hashtag in the bottom left hand corner, #TooManyCows, and see Greenpeace’s distinct logo in the bottom right.

Shortly after passing the billboard you’ll drive over the bridge that spans the Ashburton River and through a flock of wheeling and squawking gulls in a scene reminiscent of the rubbish dumps of my childhood. You could take this opportunity to explain to your travelling companion that the guano from the thousands of gulls nesting in the braided river below is as thick as the irony contained in the billboard’s simplistic message.

You see, from State Highway 1 to the ocean it’s those native seagulls that are polluting our river, not a fertiliser company. There’s not as many nesting this year as have in the past, only an estimated 8000, but that’s still equivalent to 4000 cows pumping E.Coli into the river every single day.

That’s right, two seagulls excrete as much E.Coli per day as a single dairy cow, which is still far preferable to ducks, a single one of which poops out nearly 16 times as many of the nasty organisms daily as a cow does.

Up river you can still happily and safely swim, but once you reach the colony of seagulls the danger of getting sick becomes very real.

I guess NATIVE SEAGULLS ARE POLLUTING RIVERS wouldn’t cause the type of outrage their disingenuous offering is hoping for.

After you’ve explained this to your passenger they might turn to you and say “Don’t be silly, the billboard is obviously referring to nitrogen and not pathogens”.

Once you’re over the bridge you’ve got three sets of traffic lights to explain to them that nitrogenous fertiliser isn’t the main source of N leaching on dairy farms, it’s cow urine, and the cow doesn’t care whether the source on nitrogen is organic chicken poo, fixed from the atmosphere by legumes or applied by a truck: it’s still going to get ingested and excreted.

Further, your passenger might like to know that every farm in Canterbury has to submit an environmental plan and a nutrient budget to the regional council, and not only is the amount of nitrogen leached from their systems capped it is expected to fall and it’s audited annually to ensure it does. Ballance and Ravensdown are doing everything they can to help farmers achieve this.

“But too many cows!” your passenger sputters.

“Did you know that market gardens can leach three times the nitrate of the average dairy farm”, you say as you pull over, giving them something to ponder on their long walk to Christchurch.

Words Matter -- September 2018

How you say something is just as important as what you’re saying, and sometimes it can even be more important. Your tone and the words you use frame the narrative, subtly bringing the reader to your point of view even as you maintain you’re just impartially relaying the facts.

If you’ve read a major newspaper recently you could be forgiven for thinking New Zealand farmers have a drug problem: we’re addicted to palm kernel, we’re addicted to phosphate and we’re addicted to nitrogen.

 Addicted.  It’s a nasty little word than conjures up images of no self-control and utter reliance.

It’s funny because when I was feeding maize silage as a supplement I wasn’t addicted to corn, pasture makes up 90% of my cow’s annual diet and I’m not addicted to grass and when I graze my cows on oats during winter I’m not addicted to porridge.

A little less than 5% of my cow’s diet is made up of vegetable waste, because that’s what palm kernel is, and I use it for a variety of reasons: it’s significantly cheaper than other supplements by about 5c per kilogram, it’s energy dense and provides a greater milk solids response than silage and there’s almost no waste when I feed it out. Give me a comparable feed, preferably one where I don’t have to closely monitor intakes, and I’ll ditch PK in a heartbeat. That’s how addicted I am.

And why is palm kernel so readily available to me? Because the world is addicted to palm oil: almost every product you use from shampoo to infant formula, from soap to perfume contains palm oil. Next time you’re at the supermarket check the ingredients label, there’s a secret code for palm oil: vegetable oil. That’s right, there’s no requirement for manufacturers to disclose the use of palm oil in their products, which makes it far simpler to yell at farmers who don’t hide behind the euphemism of “vegetable waste”.

Omission is another trick to sway the reader; you’ll hardly ever see the world’s appetite for palm oil mentioned in an article deriding PK. A classic example of omission some months back was a story on our waterways with this frightening sentence: “If every stretch of river in the country deemed unsafe for swimming was linked into one long chain, it would be 14,000km long”. While that may be true, the author omitted to mention we have over 175,000km of rivers, but 92% unpolluted doesn’t have quite the same dramatic ring.

I’m not for a minute suggesting these issues shouldn’t be discussed and our shortcomings held up for inspection, we need to reflect on our practices and sunlight is a great disinfectant.

However when I read several hundred words in a major paper about nitrate levels in Hinds, Mid Canterbury, and see the author has interviewed only Dr Mike Joy and a recreational fisherman I do begin to wonder.

And when I read further and see no mention of ECan, no mention of farm environment plans or nitrogen baselines I begin to get suspicious.

And when I reach the end of the article and see the author seems unaware of the Hinds Managed Aquifer Recharge Scheme, the scheme that reduced groundwater nitrate levels by 75% in 6 months, I have to conclude that his bias is showing.

As the saying goes, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you!

The Effects Of M. Bovis -- August 2018

The effects of mycoplasma bovis continue to ripple through communities, making itself felt far beyond the farm gates of the unfortunate few whose herds have tested positive. These people quite rightly attract the bulk of the media attention for, through no fault of their own, they are facing huge stress levels, devastating stock losses and an uncertain financial future.

One of the side effects of M. bovis is that here in the South Island 4-day old Friesian calf prices have taken a tumble. Calf buyers have backed out of the market, their reluctance to rear calves this season fuelled by a number of factors: fewer contracts available for 100kg calves, milk powder is expensive, cheap penicillin milk is off limits and there is the fear that the person you buy from could test positive for the disease.

Calf club days and fund raisers, community events and the life blood of some clubs, have been cancelled up and down the country. Some smaller ventures like the one run by Mid Canterbury Rugby Union have found a way to go ahead, ensuring the annual injection of some $25,000 into junior rugby continues. Larger ones however, like that run by IHC, have been put on hold at a cost of well over a million dollars to the organisation.

I had the opportunity to speak to the IHC Calf Scheme organisers before they made their decision public and was blown away by their compassion, decency and sheer desire to do the right thing. During that conversation I kept focusing on the money they were missing out on, but that never factored into their decision to suspend the event this season. Farmers, they reasoned, had been backing them for 30 years now and it was only right that IHC did what they could to protect the industry that had shown them unwavering support for so long. Yes it was a big financial blow, but a bigger blow would be to facilitate the spread of the disease.

I tweeted about IHC’s decision and said I’d still rear the two calves I’d pledged and donate the proceeds, urging other farmers to do the same. The response from the farming community was universally positive with some continuing to rear calves and others pledging a “virtual calf”, a $300 donation.

It wasn’t just the farming community that was moved by IHC’s selfless call, North Island teacher Jacky Braid saw my tweet and resolved that twitter should pitch in and help, so she set up a bank account and a goal of buying a virtual calf and asked for donations.

With the first virtual calf easily bought Jacky kept the ball rolling and donations poured in from Kiwis all over the world. Soon she had her second, third, fourth and fifth virtual calves.

She didn’t stop though and set her sights on seven virtual calves, a total of $2100 for IHC, and she fittingly reached that goal on her birthday (which also happens to be mine).

I like to think that with support like this the financial impact of IHC’s decision will be negligible and maybe, just maybe, that urban/rural divide isn’t quite as big as I thought it was.

Industrial Farming -- July 2018

Greenpeace have been running a series of TV advertisements lately in which they oppose the development of land in the McKenzie Basin for dairying. It’s dystopian, dramatically shot in black and white and it pisses me off every time I see it.

It doesn’t annoy me because of their opposition, after all a fair chunk of dairy farmers find themselves in agreement with Greenpeace on this issue, even Fonterra have said they’d rather the conversion didn’t go ahead. As an aside, Fonterra are legally obliged to pick up the milk from these new farms because of the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act, despite their market share in the South Island dipping below 80% some years ago. Maybe that’s a topic for another column.

No, the advertisement irritates with its use of the phrase “industrial farming”, a term that is never defined yet seems to have found its way into almost every discussion about dairy farming in New Zealand. I personally think its disingenuous and lazy language unsuitable for describing New Zealand’s pastoral dairying, but I was curious to see what Twitter thought.

“I move”, I tweeted, “the term ‘industrial farming’ be struck from use until the people using it can provide a clear, concise definition. It’s hyperbole, pure and simple.”

The response was immediate. “I move”, replied Amanda, the less funny half of the comedy duo The Fan Brigade, “the term ‘DairyMan’ be struck from use indefinitely.”

The other responses I got ranged from Wikipedia definitions (high density farming in sheds or feedlots) to outright pearl clutching (the practice of farming where the operator is not entirely contained within its boundaries and can no longer be run solely by one or two people).

No two people could agree on a definition and the replies were characterised by a worrying lack of knowledge about how we actually farm. Irrigation was a common theme despite most dairy farms in New Zealand not being irrigated, as was scale. When I asked if a one hundred cow farm stocked at 5 cows per hectare was more or less industrial than a thousand cow farm stocked at 3 cows per hectare I didn’t receive a single reply.

Megan Hands, a Canterbury based consultant, chimed in with some facts and figures that were met with disbelief. People simply couldn’t accept that the average stocking rate in this country is 2.9 cows/ha.

The replies came in for several days, it transpires the terms industrial farming and factory farming have been used to great effect in the USA to demonise the agricultural sector there and it saddens me to see it being so eagerly adopted here.

I know Greenpeace saw my tweet, they liked several of the more negative replies I received, but they didn’t see fit to provide their own definition. As farmers all we can do is engage politely and try to educate others while understanding where they’re coming from, but it’s getting harder by the day.

Blame and Bullshit -- June 2018

For me the defining aspect of this government’s response to M. Bovis has been their ability to lay the blame squarely at the feet of farmers, positioning us as villains that they’ve had to swoop in and rescue from our own incompetence.

It’s not a bad tactic, it plays well with the urban base, it sows distrust amongst and it pays huge financial dividends: industry has agreed to foot 32% of the bill to eradicate M. Bovis compared with the 15% agreed previously. I guess we should count ourselves luck, the Minister of Agriculture was gunning for 50%

A little over a week ago Damien O’Connor told Parliament’s Primary Production select committee that a “farmer he had spoken to had taken four non-NAIT compliant herds onto his property for grazing.” He went further and, backed by MPI officials, said he was aware movements of non-compliant stock were occurring and the problems were “very prevalent”.

This sort of unsubstantiated bollocks casts farmers in a very bad light, and the lack of definition around what “non-compliance” means makes it very hard to hold politicians to account. I doubt Mr O’Connor could provide a definition if pressed by reporters.

Michelle Edge, Chief Executive of OSPRI which manages NAIT, says that criticisms being levelled at the system are “significant extrapolations of the facts” and a “misinterpretation of the NAIT review”, she said those things because it’s not a career enhancing move to simply tell a Minister he’s full of it.

Take the meat processing industry as an example; they’re 90 to 95% compliant. Surely as an end point they should hit 100%, what’s the story with the 5 to 10% of dead animals that are non-NAIT compliant? The answer is those animals aren’t lodged with NAIT within 48-hours of movement, and that’s the measure of compliance.

On May 2^nd my heifers came back from grazing and on May 7^th my grazier transferred them back to me via NAIT. Those animals are legal and in no way obscuring any potential for tracing disease, yet Mr O’Connor could quite correctly slam me for having non-NAIT compliant stock because the transfer didn’t happen within 48-hours of movement.

Mr O’Connor is not alone, though his rhetoric is more fiery than our PM, her calm assertion that M.Bovis arrived illegally flies in the face of all reports we’ve seen from MPI.

Despite MPI having identified seven different pathways M.Bovis could have entered the country, most of them legal, and saying they still hadn’t isolated the method of incursion, the PM chose to make this bold statement on the radio:  “There is no question this has come into New Zealand by someone along the way breaching our rules and regulations”

I’m the first to put my hand up and say we farmers need to up our game, but is it too much to ask for our politicians to deal in hard facts rather than blame and bullshit?

Time To Stop Killing Cows -- May 2018

The clearest indication for me that the government is about to change tack on its response to mycoplasma bovis came not from the horrifying map projecting the forward trace of the disease, but from Damien O’Connor’s scathing indictment of farmers in the media and how well his comments played with the public.

The disease and attempts to eradicate it were, he admitted, a disaster. On top of the 38 infected farms there are about 70 more that are likely to be affected, 300-odd that are under investigation and another 1700 that are of interest.

70 percent of farmers were not tracing cattle properly through NAIT, he said, and a black market trade in livestock was also hampering efforts to trace animal movements. The reaction on social media was immediate:  the bloody farmers had brought this upon themselves and why should the taxpayer be in the gun for $1b to help bail them out?

This gives the government a position from which they can impose a higher share of the costs than agreed to previously and the ability to back away from an eradication program.

The fact of course is 100% NAIT compliance wouldn’t have halted the spread of the disease, but it would have given us a clearer picture much sooner. MPI now believe M. Bovis has been in the country since 2015 and perhaps even earlier, and the bulk of the farms being inspected received animals well before the disease was even known to be in New Zealand.

A bull calf born in 2015 may well have gone to a calf rearer disease-free, but if that rearer had bought milk from an infected herd then all bets are off. That newly infected calf could well have been used to mate heifers in 2016 and then again to tail off a different dairy herd in 2017 before heading off to the works undiagnosed, leaving a trail of infected animals in its wake.

We need to develop a quick and effective test for M.Bovis and I predict we’ll then move to system much like we use to control Tb: test, contain and control.

Michelle Edge, Chief Executive of NAIT, recently defended the NAIT as being “philosophically well designed”. By this she meant the system has got 4 things right; you need to tag animals, register animals, register properties and register movements. Where it falls down though is when people actually have to interact with it: a recent survey by a rural publication found over 80 percent of farmers hate NAIT with the burning intensity of a thousand suns.

The M.Bovis genie is well and truly out of the bottle and I can only hope we as an industry have learned our lesson about the importance of traceability. The system we have may be a clunker, but we’ve got to make the effort to ensure it works as best it can.

Six Dollar Coffee -- April 2018

It makes a nice change to see a coffee chain in Wellington being excoriated on social media for raising the price of a flat white by ten cents in response to the recent increase in the minimum wage, I’m used to seeing dairy farmers get a kicking for everything from the price of butter to the imagined harsh conditions we subject our employees to.

If anything was going to distract people from a $6 block of butter, it was going to be a $6.10 cup of coffee.

 When I started dairying in 1996 I had no idea what the minimum wage was, Google tells me it was $7, and my first job in the Waikato gave me 2 rostered days off per calendar month. This wasn’t necessarily the same two days every month, sometimes it could be the first weekend and then next month it could be the last: working 40 or 50 days straight was by no mean uncommon.

When the farm owner at the time suggested that getting a full day in lieu was a bit generous as I only worked half a day on the public holiday, I readily agreed. I’d given up my $36,000 job in Wellington to move to the outskirts of Hamilton and start again as a dairy farm assistant and I was happy for the opportunity. I was only paying $40 a week rent for a sprawling 4-bedroom house; this meant that despite the $10,000 cut in salary I was better off financially than when I was in Wellington.

Despite the roster I was also happier and healthier than I had been in years, and in my opinion nothing beats watching your kids grow up in the country.

None of this is to say that these practices should persist today, just that they are part of our very recent history and today’s employers are people like me who came up through those systems.

Helen Kelly used to name and shame dairy farmers on Twitter, she would find an ad on the internet and analyse it; time off, hours worked, hourly rate and quite frankly it was embarrassing. Sometimes she was wrong, but most of the time she was exposing some pretty old fashioned employment ideas like annualised hours and value of accommodation as part of the package.

Times have changed very quickly and poor employment practices amongst farmers are becoming less and less common. I noted the increased minimum wage with interest but knew that no action was required on my part as each of my employees earn well in excess of that, and I am writing this column on my regularly rostered 3-day weekend.

Unlike coffee shops, dairy farmers aren’t in the position to pass the costs of production on to consumers. We have to farm smarter and spend our money where it will have the most impact on our profitability. Over the years we’ve come to realise that a happy, stable work force is money well spent, it’s rarely a place to look to for savings.

As for coffee, nothing can beat 2 teaspoons of Nescafe Classic in a travel mug at 4am in the cowshed.

Pick Up The Damned Phone -- March 2018

I was recently enjoying a drink with my wife and my employers at the Ashburton Hotel; we had just finished a fun day at the races courtesy of FarmSource and Ecolab and were contemplating where to head for dinner.

A hand clapped down on my shoulder and a voice boomed in my ear “Craig! Good to see you!” as is wont to happen in a crowded pub. I turned, expressing my pleasure to see them also, only to come face to face with a complete stranger. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not very good with names, but I’ll usually have a nagging feeling that I should know somebody or that I’ve met them before. Not this time.

Luckily for me the gentleman in question had thoroughly availed himself of the hospitality at the races and was having enough trouble remaining upright, let alone wondering why I wasn’t introducing him as my best friend to the others at the table. He knew my name, he knew I had booked annual leave for the next day and he inquired after my children. It wasn’t until he lurched off to the bar that my wife pointed out his parting farewell had been “We really should get a selfie together” that it finally clicked; he follows me on Twitter.

The encounter got me thinking about how much I share online. Despite the fact I’m a fairly prolific tweeter I’m also pretty private, what I do share is generally superficial; you might see what I’m eating or read my views on farming, you’ll see how proud I am of my children and get treated to jokes on every topic under the sun, but you’ll almost never read about things going badly in my life or how I’m feeling.

Plenty of people online share extremely personal things to their followers but that’s not me, either in real life or in the virtual world. It’s something that extends into other aspects of my life; I like to nut things out for myself, I tend to focus inwards and I’m reticent about asking for help. Unfortunately these are all things that can be bad for business.

We haven’t had a flash season on the farm this year, especially coming off the back of three record years, and the shareholders are understandably disappointed.

Some people who know me well online picked up that something was off, I didn’t post as often as I usually do and I was less ready with a joke, more inclined to snap.

I sat down with the farm consultant to review our season to date, and we pinpointed several things that in isolation don’t mean very much, but together they add up to something; we reared the calves ourselves instead of hiring help, we had key staff leave unexpectedly (one to pursue true love, the other because he got an offer he couldn’t refuse), we had trouble finding good replacement staff (we didn’t have a full complement until Christmas)and when I did find good staff I told them what to do instead of why we do things because it was expedient.

These things all meant I was focusing on the wrong area, I turned in and tried to solve problems rather than reaching out and asking for help. I didn’t share.

I didn’t focus on the single biggest driver of our production; hitting a 1600kg residual, instead I focused on trying to solve problems by myself. And it shows.

None of this means I’ll be any more inclined to share online when things aren’t going well, that’s just not me, but it does mean I’ve learned my lesson; that you can’t coast on previous successes and that if support is only a phone call away you should pick up the damned phone.

A Government Department In My Pocket -- January 2018

One of my favourite things about social media is the easy access it gives me to information from government departments: WINZ, IRD, Customs, they’re all there. Most of them treat Twitter like a help desk and merely answer questions during business hours but some, MPI in particular, manage to be brilliantly funny and genuinely helpful at the same time.

MPI is one of the accounts I have notifications turned on for, which mean whenever they tweet I get an alert on my phone. As soon as there is a development with mycoplasma bovis I know about it, and if I have a question it is answered very quickly.

The flip side to you and I having access to an incredibly responsive government department is that every other muppet on the internet does too; I’ve seen the people who run the MPI account subjected to endless bouts of ill-informed outrage on Twitter. This, however, is far better than Facebook where they get threats of actual violence, a nice reminder why I’ve never signed up to that particular platform.

In the wake of the mycoplasma bovis outbreak I’ve often found myself defending MPI on Twitter, partly because their social media team is so effortlessly brilliant and don’t deserve the vitriol sent their way, and partly because they’re unfairly copping it from all sides: the general public and farmers alike.

The general public’s concern seem to be divided into two camps; outrage that the disease incursion occurred in the first place and outrage that the infected cattle are being processed for human consumption.

MPI resolutely plug away dispelling myths, referring back to the science, pointing out the differences between M. Bovis and BSE.

Blaming MPI for the incursion itself is ridiculous, they don’t randomly send officers to farms to check for diseases that we don’t know are there on the off chance they might find something, and the disease itself is very difficult to test for. M. Bovis requires multiple tests over a period of time, a positive test means you’ve got it but a negative test doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe. Given the stakes for the country and the individual farmers we all want the testing to be thorough and accurate.

Farmer concern has largely been centred on wanting to know how the disease arrived and why it has been allowed to spread as far as it has. As far as how it was introduced, speculation is rife but ultimately we may never know.

The disease has spread through the country via stock movement, and farmer expectation was that MPI would press a button on the NAIT computer and know within minutes exactly which animals from an infected farm had gone where. Unfortunately, while NAIT compliance of stock transfers from farm to slaughter sit at something like 95%, compliance for inter farm transfers is around 30%.

There are many problems with NAIT, from the decision to use low frequency (FDX) tags when every other country rejected them in favour of HDX to the clunky user interface, but at the end of the day it has been low industry compliance that has led to delays in tracing stock movement. We should all be extremely grateful Foot and Mouth wasn’t the disease to expose the flaws in NAIT.