Water Tax -- August 2017

Deadlines being what they are, this column was written before I had attended the meeting on water with David Parker

It’s strange to be contemplating paying for water as I survey the damage another 60mm of rain has done to an already waterlogged dairy farm, but here we are. It must be an election year.

What a bold and defining policy it is too: a levy on all commercial water users! A levy on water bottlers (but not Coca Cola), a levy on farmers (but only for irrigation, not for stock water), a levy on… well that’s the end of the list really, all other commercial users of water seem to have escaped for now.

Currently all water to everyone is free, you may pay for pipes and treatment and delivery but the water itself is free. This is a detail that seems lost on anyone with a residential water meter whose immediate response seems to be “I pay for my water, so can the farmers!”

It seems to be a detail lost on David Parker too, Labour’s spokesperson for Water and the Environment asserts that Coca Cola would not be subject to the levy as they already pay Auckland Council and “nobody should have to pay twice.”  Well I’m sorry David, but Coke don’t pay for the water, they pay for its treatment and delivery to their plant, the water itself is free. By the same logic anyone on an irrigation scheme should also be exempt as they already pay for the water and “nobody should have to pay twice.”

What exactly is the levy supposed to achieve? If it’s supposed to send a price signal that intensification is not the way to go, I fear Mr Parker is about to learn about unintended consequences.
About 70% of all irrigation in New Zealand occurs in Canterbury, some 385,000 hectares are irrigated, and by far the most profitable use of that land is dairying yet only about half that is used for that purpose.

I calculated that, at 2 cents per cumec, the farm I manage would be liable for between $50,000 and $60,000 per annum in irrigation tax, a figure that made my arable friends’ eyes water. “The thought you could come up with $60k ‘spare’ money for tax sickens me!” said one cropping farmer on twitter “none spare here!”

Low debt dairy farms may well be able to absorb the cost, lower margin arable farms might find it a little tougher.

If you’re an arable farmer faced with an extra tax for continuing to water, doesn’t converting to dairying look a little more attractive? As a dairy farmer that $60k adds 13c to my cost of producing every kg of milk solids: how do I claw that back? Intensification seems to be the simple answer.

If, as Mr Parker says, the revenue is to be used to clean up waterways nationwide, I hope Canterbury can withstand the sudden evaporation of tens of millions of dollars from the local economy.

Cowschwitz -- July 2017

Last month my wife and I were travelling south on the I-5 from San Francisco to Las Vegas. Like most holidays that involve me driving I was admiring the sights and looking for likely places to eat while my wife was encouraging me to slow down, stay on the correct side of the road and yellling ohmygodwhatareyoudoingweareallgoingtodie!

There was plenty to see; orchards stretching to the horizon, ten avocadoes at a roadside stall for a dollar, parched grassland and hundreds of hectares of blackened earth where another seemingly spontaneous roadside fire had taken hold. There were fire trucks continuously putting out these blazes on both the I-5 and the 101 as we travelled.

The GPS beeped to alert us that petrol and food were available ten miles ahead, but the name of the restaurant put me off and we pushed on to the next stop. I spent a few minutes wondering what sort of place would call itself Cowschwitz , sure that the negative connotations would put far more people off than those who would appreciate the “joke”. I filed it away as extremely poor marketing and soon forgot about it in the excitement of seeing a Taco Bell for the first time ever.
At Taco Bell I got myself a Double Chalupa Box, a feast which consisted of a deep fried wheat flour gordita shell filled with beef and vegetables along with two hard shell tacos and a drink the size of my head. I really wish Restraunt Brands would hurry up and bring this to our shores. The meal cost me $5, or it would have except for the annoying American habit of adding sales tax to everything, and left me unable to eat another bite.

My trip continued in this vein, cheap filling and plentiful food at every turn: hot dogs for $1.79 at the Seven Eleven, $2.99 cheeseburgers at In N Out, southern fried chicken and grits for $12 and all you can eat buffets for $25. There was so much food available for such little money that we usually weren’t even hungry when breakfast time rolled around.

When I got home I came across the snap I took of the GPS when it alerted me to Cowschwitz, and a quick google soon revealed that what I had passed was in fact Harris Ranch. It’s California’s largest beef producer and the largest ranch on the West Coast, producing  150 million pounds of beef per year. Cowschwitz is a phrase coined by animal rights activists to convey their distaste at the feedlot system of raising beef, drawing parallels between the feedlot and war time death camps.  Getting that phrase on a GPS map stopped me from going to California’s sixth busiest restaurant (57th busiest in the entire USA).

The feedlot was empty when we drove past so I didn’t see what the activists are upset about, but I do see that animal behaviour expert Temple Grandin calls the phrase “cowschwitz” a public misperception, saying that Harris Ranch does a great job of looking after its animals.
There are many reasons food is so cheap and readily available in America, and one of those reasons is highly efficient production on a truly massive scale.

It’s all very well to hold your nose as you drive down the I-5 and mock the farmers based on nothing more than an impression gained as you whiz past at 70mph, but I wonder how many Americans would be willing to forgo their affordable cheeseburgers and cheap Taco Bell in return for a less intensive pastoral based farming system.

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.