A Sigh Of Relief -- September 2017

I imagine there was a collective sigh of relief from farmers up and down the country at about 11pm on Saturday night. I imagine this because that was my reaction, and I milk 1000 cows on the outskirts of Ashburton on an irrigated farm. The relief was tinged with shock at the loss of the Maori Party, who was the only other party in consideration for my vote, and disappointment that New Zealand First would once again hold the balance of power.

In an election campaign of misinformation, half-truths and outright lies it was often hard to separate fact from fiction. There were big audacious $11 billion fibs to sow doubt and confusion and there were lies of omission designed to pit different sectors against one another.

So why relief? Call farmers what you will, and I’ve been called many unflattering things during this election campaign, but we are first and foremost business people and we like certainty - something which was in woefully short supply.

The Green Party to their credit were honest with their policies; agriculture would be phased into the emissions trading scheme, commercial use of water would be taxed, a moratorium would be placed on dairy conversions and cow numbers would be reduced over a period of time. Pollution would also be taxed, a policy I’m in favour of, but they chose to target nitrate which is very difficult to measure. No other sector is asked to pay taxes based on broad guesswork and farmers sure as hell don’t want to be the first.

There are arguments to be made for and against each of the Green policies, but each of them require a very high level of trust from the parties that will be affected. When a Green MP posts videos on Facebook telling viewers that the dairy industry is the equivalent of 90 million people pumping their untreated sewage directly into waterways, one could feel that the trust required for my support hasn’t quite been earned.

Labour’s water tax policy was the one that got all the publicity and that was no accident. It was a calculated populist move with one aim: to halt their slide in the polls and to snatch as many votes back off the Greens as possible. Had the policy simply been “we think commercial users of water should pay a royalty” it would have been a very dry argument indeed.

Much has been made of National stoking the urban rural divide with wild stories of cow slaughter, but the Labour wedge was more insidious. Irrigation was constantly conflated with pollution despite all evidence to the contrary; Canterbury accounts for something like 65 percent of all the country’s irrigation, watering 11 percent  of its land area, yet only 4 percent of the rivers are deemed poor for swimming. In contrast Auckland irrigates about 1 percent of its land area but boasts a hefty 62 percent of rivers rated poor for swimming.

The focus was constantly on dairy farms of which about 2000 irrigate, little mention was made of the other 9000 farms that hold consent to water as they didn’t fit the polluting narrative. It worked too, I can’t recall a situation in New Zealand where people have been protesting the opposition.

Jacinda Ardern was quick to reassure urban voters they would not be charged the tax as they already paid for their water; a refrain I heard constantly on Twitter and eventually gave up arguing against. Nobody in New Zealand pays for fresh water; not the irrigator, not the water bottler and not the resident who takes a 15 minute shower, but when you receive a monthly “water bill” the lie that you do is very easy to believe.

David Parker was asked on election night if he regretted the framing of the water tax; he did not, the huge amount of publicity it drew kept water pollution at the front of voter’s minds he said.

It did its job; Ardern’s ascension coupled with support for policies like the water tax drew Green and NZF voters to Labour. We won’t know until the final results are in, but I suspect the publicity also galvanised National supporters to get out and vote. No matter which way you slice it, 46% of the vote and a potential fourth term is an impressive feat.

But still the concern lingers. Just under half of the country voted for change and just under half voted for stability, and with Winston holding the balance of power I fear neither will get what they want.

This article published by Newsroom, 25/09/2017

That Water Meeting -- September 2017

Last month I attended a water meeting in Ashburton hosted by David Parker, Labour’s spokesman for water and the environment. The meeting had been planned for months and would, I imagine, have attracted little interest were in not for Labour announcing their policy to tax irrigation just a few weeks earlier.

I know Labour call it a royalty on commercial water use, but as it only affects irrigators and some water bottlers I think irrigation tax is a fair summary. Many column centimetres have been written about this tax in the past month and it depresses me to see so many commentators still getting so many things wrong, but I’d like to focus on the meeting itself because it was truly a fascinating game of two halves.

Parker was on a circuit of the country to promote Labour’s plans to improve water quality and Ashburton was his latest stop. He started by taking us on a photo tour of dodgy farming practices throughout the country that were affecting water quality: beef feed lots in the Hawke’s Bay with sediment traps overflowing into waterways, cows being wintered in Southland with massive pugging next to rivers, high country break feeding of deer and ‘spray and pray’ cropping practices on hill country. There was, at the insistence of Federated Farmers, one slide showing a polluted urban waterway in Auckland.

With each new slide the confused muttering in the room became more audible; “that’s not Canterbury”, “that has nothing to do with irrigation”. It was becoming increasingly clear that Parker was there to talk about one thing and the audience another.

He showed an excellent grasp of the issues surrounding water quality but brushed urban pollution to one side. When the picture of Coe’s Ford popped onto the screen he again showed good knowledge, conceding that the river had always disappeared underground at certain points and that irrigation was but one factor in an extremely complex system, exacerbated by three dry summers in a row.

Parker surprised me by saying that he supported National’s decision to fire the ECan board and install a commissioner, the first time I’d ever heard anyone in opposition deviate from the “death of democracy” line.

Parker’s pitch was this: Regional Councils have all the power at their disposal to implement and enforce nutrient management plans and to manage land use change but, with the exception of ECan, they’re not doing it and he’s pissed off about it. Labour, he said, would issue a National Policy Statement outlining their expectations and this would force the councils to act. It shouldn’t be necessary to do this, and ECan have proved it can be done, but other councils had dropped the ball.

He was charming, he was persuasive, he was knowledgeable and he summed up by saying that we had nothing to fear from Labour as ECan was leading the way and nothing would change. Had a controversial new policy not just been released he may well have sewn up a few votes by that stage.

Parker then invited questions from the floor and, no surprise, the first one was about water pricing.

The mood changed immediately and the audience became “you people”, we were told the rural/urban divide was huge and it was mainly the fault of Federated Farmers for defending indefensible practices.

He conceded Labour had made a mess of the Foreshore and Seabed situation and this, combined with Brash’s Orewa speech and Tuhoe “running around with guns” had made it impossible to address water rights, but that time was finally here.

Parker expressed frustration at the wild speculation on pricing and felt pushed into a allocating a 1 -2c/cumec band, totally failing to accept that releasing the policy with a price would’ve avoided any speculation at all.

Farmer after farmer stood up to speak: some like myself spoke of cost to business and were told we were wrong, others like David Clark expressed concern at being labelled polluters and spoke eloquently about the effect on the community of losing that money. He was ignored.

Tiring of our questions Parker snapped “I’m not here to negotiate with you; if you push me the tax will be closer to 2c than 1c”

He soon called the meeting to a close saying that neither of us was going to convince the other, he clearly though our concerns should be saved for the consultation period.

By this point I was convinced of one thing; the tax has nothing to do with pollution. The money going to iwi and ECan would be used at their discretion as it’s not central government’s job to direct regional councils how to use their resources. First and foremost the tax was a tool to halt Labour’s slide in the polls by grabbing the urban, to snatch votes back off the Green Party. With 70% public support for the policy they’d be mad to back down no matter how ineffectual it will be in cleaning up waterways.

Parker had his supporters in the room too, and the comments of one rammed home to me how much work we have to do to connect with non-farmers. “You bastards” he said, shaking with rage and pointing his finger at the crowd, “have had it your own way for far too long. You deserve everything you’ve got coming to you.”

And Parker nodded in agreement.

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…