Water, Protest and Engaging with the Process -- September 2019

The Ministry for the Environment is holding a series of meetings around the country as part of their consultation process for the discussion document Action for Healthy Waterways.

Once the consultation has finished and all the submissions have been summarised, the Ministry will pass their advice on to Cabinet who will then issue a National Policy Statement for Freshwater.

That’s it. There’s no select committee hearing and no need for a law change, the NPS will provide direction to regional and district councils as to how they should carry out their responsibilities under the Resource Management Act.

Realising I needed to learn a lot more about the proposals I attended the Ashburton meeting along with some three hundred other concerned locals, and I’m very glad I did because I learned a lot. Not from the officials giving the presentation, as you might expect, but from the well informed members of the audience.

From people like Ian McKenzie and Colin Glass I learned that the current NPS nitrate target of 6.9mg/litre represents a reduction of roughly one third for Canterbury, and setting a new target of 1mg/l DIN (dissolved inorganic nitrogen, which includes nitrate, nitrite and ammonium) is physically impossible if you want to continue farming.

I learned that the science behind the 1mg DIN target hasn’t been made public; I learned that the economic impact of trying to reach that target hadn’t been modelled, and I learned that the inclusion of that target had not been warmly welcomed by the Freshwater Leader’s Group.

Getting any kind of useful information from the panel was a frustrating endeavour: one person asked if Canterbury’s 3,000-odd kilometres of stock water races would be treated as rivers and therefore subject to a 5m fencing setback. The answer was “I don’t know.”
An industry representative stood up and, citing the definition of a river, said they would indeed be subject to the setback. I tweeted his opinion and was contacted the next day by a freshwater scientist who contradicted this assessment.

Getting information from the people who wrote the proposal shouldn’t be this difficult.

Above all I learned that farmers are annoyed. The crowd were polite and respectful but the underlying tension in the room was palpable. Freshwater, agricultural emissions, reducing waste, hazardous substance assessment and more are all happening at once, it’s little wonder that calls for farmer protest have been growing on social media. As one lady in the audience put it, “when is it time to start acting like the French?”

The obvious answer is never, it’s never time to act like the French.

People fondly recall Shane Ardern driving his tractor up the steps of Parliament in 2003 to defeat the proposed “Fart Tax”, and ask why we’re not doing it again. Apart from the security bollards and the high likelihood of the tractor falling through Parliament’s forecourt into the new subterranean carpark, there’s the small issue that the protest didn’t actually work. Sure farmers weren’t asked to pay for emissions research via taxation, but our industry bodies agreed to pay for it via levies instead, with the government reserving the right to reconsider the tax should payments ever stop.

Protest is most successful when you’ve got something the Government wants, which is why teachers and other unionised bodies protest and go on strike when Labour are in power, they know the Government is scared of losing their votes. A successful farmer protest would be one that happened when National are in power, Labour don’t have the rural vote and aren’t scared of losing it.

Protest can be harmful too, just look at the disastrous water protest in Morrinsville leading up to the 2017 election. I don’t know who organised it but they should be ashamed, it was pure muppetry in motion.

The protest drove a wedge deeper into the urban/rural divide and lifted Labour’s urban vote. NZ First got an easy win when they used the policy as a bargaining chip in coalition negotiations, and Labour were more than happy to drop the proposal because they knew charging for water was buying a war over water ownership that they weren’t prepared to fight.

Farmers were the losers from that fiasco, painted as greedy buggers who wanted to make a profit from resources taken for free, and forever remembered as misogynistic dinosaurs who thought the Leader of the Opposition was a “pretty little socialist”.

Forget the idea of organised marches, who wants to protest against protecting the environment anyway? Attend the meetings and fill the venues to overflowing, more than a hundred people sat outside the full bridge hall in Winton, and engage intelligently and respectfully with the process.

The consultation period has already been extended by two weeks, extra meetings are being scheduled and bigger venues found. Ministers are aware of how intently this is being watched and DairyNZ and Beef & Lamb are presenting a united front for the farming sector.

We can all agree with the high level objectives being proposed, and we’ve certainly let the Ministry know their first attempt at a plan to get there is sadly lacking. This is our only chance to mould the proposals into something we can all live with, and you only get to do that by talking to people, not shouting at them. Let’s not waste our opportunity.

F@#k Haloumi, The Country -- September 2019

Food is a great flashpoint on Twitter, a lightning rod attracting people holding passionate views that they are willing to defend in the face of all opposition. Unlikely alliances have been formed on the basis of whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza (it most definitely does), and I will assert it as my Kiwi birth right that putting a slice of pineapple on anything makes it Hawaiian.

Christmas mince pies are another source of great division both online and in real life: I still vividly recall the sense of utter betrayal when, as a small child, my mother offered me a mince pie. I eagerly took the proffered treat, not noticing the tell-tale dusting of white on its crust, bit deeply and immediately spat the offending pastry on the floor. I have tried to like them, sampling them again as a teen and as an adult, but they continue to be a blight on the taste buds of any right thinking person.

I think we can all agree that sponge cakes are pretty good and custard is sometimes the only thing that hits the spot, fruit is universally loved and who has ever turned down jelly? But some people insist on combining these four things and end up with trifle – the only dessert in the world where the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Despite these deeply held beliefs of mine, I can still accept there are divergent opinions; some people have the stomach for minced up fruit in inedible pastry, others  cannot appreciate the sweet delight of cooked pineapple, and some even unpatriotically choose Vegemite over Marmite! While I can bring myself to accept all of these differing views, I have to draw the line at my friend who keeps their Vegemite in the fridge, that’s just weird.

While I can understand these differences and accept people might have an opinion that doesn’t match mine, there is one food that I simply don’t understand: Halloumi, the pointless cheese.

For those of you fortunate enough to have never come across halloumi, it’s a cheese with a high melting point that’s made to be grilled or fried. Presumably the next logical step is to put it in the bin, but if you do decide to bite into it, it squeaks. I’m not even kidding, it squeaks at you in pitiful protest as if to say “haven’t we all suffered enough already?”

Apart from the fact you shouldn’t be putting anything described as “semi-hard” in your mouth in the first place, it just seems so senseless; there are plenty of bland, rubbery foods out there already without introducing one that yelps as you eat it.

“But you haven’t tried the original cheese from Cyprus,” defenders of halloumi will tell me. Well, no, I live in Ashburton. “It’s a great carrier of flavour! Try the chilli one!”, they cry. You know what else is a great carrier of flavour? Steak, that’s what.

It’s not as though I haven’t given halloumi a chance: I’ve put it in salads, eaten it in restaurants, I even ordered halloumi from a street vendor in Germany and at all times the reason for this most pointless of cheeses eluded me.

I can only conclude that halloumi is an ancient Cypriot practical joke that the modern world has fallen for, and all I can ask is that if you’re going to insist on eating it then please buy the one that Fonterra makes. At least that way I can have the last laugh.

Watching My Meat Rotate, The Country -- August 2019

Last summer my friend Wayne helped me build a deck. When I say “helped” I mean I provided the concept and Wayne made sure everything was straight, level and square. And then he built it. Turns out I’m more of an ideas man than a handyman.

I flooded Twitter with progress reports of the build and everybody loved Wayne and my #DeckPics. The project was finished just in time for the farm’s Christmas dinner and, with a brand new deck complete with a paved barbecue area, I really had no choice but to buy myself a new barbecue.

Buying a new barbecue is a serious business, I’m not one of those “it’s summer let’s dust off the barbie” type of people. No, barbecue is a year round event no matter the season or weather. In fact I go through so much LPG I took Labour’s ban of offshore gas exploration as a personal attack.

If there was one thing I knew about my new barbecue it was that it wasn’t going to be a Weber. I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram of Weber owners and iPhone users is a perfect circle and I wasn’t going to be the one to upset that delicate balance.

Obviously I bought a Masport, a good Kiwi brand that’s been around for over a hundred years, and of course I bought a stainless steel model, the hardest known substance to keep clean when you live in the country on a gravel road. More importantly, dear reader, my stainless steel Masport barbecue has a hood, and in that hood there is a window, and through that window I can watch my meat rotate and sizzle on the rotisserie that came as an added extra.

“Put it on Trade Me,” my father said,”you’ll never use it.”

Never use it!? That rotisserie is my go to method for cooking 24-hour marinated rolled roast beef. I’ve cooked pork belly on that thing, I’ve cooked chicken, I’ve cooked lamb and I’ve even googled “what can I rotisserie next?”

There’s just something about impaling a couple of chooks on that stainless steel skewer, tying them up with butcher’s string while making the obligatory dad joke (trussed me, I know what I’m doing) and forcing garlic butter up under the chicken’s skin that is so satisfying.

Of course we can’t stop there, all that juicy garlicky chicken-y goodness that’s going to drip down from the slowly spinning meat must be caught, and what better way to catch it than with a tray of cubed and par boiled potatoes? A tray of cubed and parboiled potatoes that have been coated with garlic seasoning, that’s what!

My cheap little rotisserie groans under the weight of two stuffed chickens (if they’re not stuffed I recommend putting whole lemons inside to give the skewer purchase), but the three hour cook time on the lowest setting gives me plenty of time to post progress videos to social media.

I’m not saying a rotisserie is the battery operated appliance in your house that’s going to bring you the most joy, but it’s surely got to be in the top five and I think you should give it a crack.

I hear you can pick them up quite cheap on Trade Me.

Not Just A Southland Issue -- August 2019

Last week the Minister of Agriculture announced the members of his taskforce that will investigate the practice of wintering cow on crop in Southland, their brief being to “do a stocktake of the multiple initiatives that are already underway to promote good winter grazing practices and identify why those are not currently working for all.”

The issue has of course been brought to a head by environmental campaigners in Southland releasing drone footage of cows up to their hocks in mud along with pictures of cows calving in similar conditions.

The reaction from farmers on twitter has been starkly divided; Southland farmers believe it is an issue for their region to tackle without interference from central government or advice from outside experts, let alone from the lone environmentalist appointed to the taskforce. They are not interested in the opinions of non-farming urbanites whose only experience with wet weather grazing was that one time they got caught in the rain during a picnic. They seem surprised by the swift reaction from the government after such a brief spell of negative publicity and feel as though they haven’t had time to address the issues before having conditions, presumable unreasonable, forced upon them.

Famers from outside the region, of which I am one, expressed surprise too. Our astonishment was that anyone could be surprised by the announcement and that it was Minister O’Connor taking the lead under the Agriculture portfolio rather than Parker leading the charge as Minister for the Environment.

David Parker travelled the length of the country prior to the election talking about water quality, during which he showed pictures of cows in Southland collapsing river banks as they crowded to drink, and mourning the lack of willingness from Regional Councils around the country to use the considerable powers at their disposal.

This is far from a Southland issue, it’s a farming issue. If the public perceive an issue with winter grazing practices then we all come under scrutiny. When irrigation was under the spotlight the public didn’t differentiate between irrigated and non-irrigated farms, every farmer was tarred with the same brush, and the same is true now.

If I knew prior to the election that winter grazing in Southland was a fight waiting to happen, then the Southland Regional Council must have known well in advance of that. David Parker is not the kind of man to keep quiet when something is annoying him.

The whole point of Regional Councils is to use their local knowledge and expertise to develop guidelines specific to their unique environmental conditions, and when they do that there is no need for central government to get involved.

That it has now escalated into an animal welfare issue as well as an environmental one is not just the fault of a drone flying busy body, nor is it the fault of the public for forming opinions without all the facts, the blame lies largely with the Regional Council for not taking steps to address issues that had been clearly signalled to them for a very long time, failing all their constituents in the process, farmers and urban dwellers alike.

I know too well the frustrations of wet weather wintering and calving, but the farmers who think it’s acceptable to keep cows in those conditions must also shoulder their share of the blame.

Putting aside the futility of convening a taskforce to look into a practice that is ending just as they start their investigation, I hope the people of Southland work with the team to get the best possible outcome for them, the environment and their animals.

Meat Column, The Country -- July 2019

Is there a cut of meat more polarising than corned silverside? Whenever I tweet about corned beef, and to be fair I tweet about it quite a lot, I’m greeted with either nods of approval or disturbingly graphic approximations of people retching. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

Some people don’t like the smell, others find it too bland or too salty and the detractors are universal in their disapproval of “boiled meat”.

If you’re fortunate enough to occasionally fill your freezer with an entire cattle beast, you’ll be familiar with struggle of utilising the least favoured cuts. For some it’s schnitzel and for others it’s stewing steak, but in my household it’s always been corned beef, possibly because I’m the only one who will eat it.

Even I have to admit that corned beef gets a bit boring after you’ve cooked your sixth or seventh for the year and there’s still more sitting in the freezer. I swear my butcher sometimes gives me other people’s just to mess with me.

In order to liven things up I started experimenting, adding chilli powder to the recipe for a bit of zing, substituting jam for the sugar component in a quest for fruitiness, even adding whole oranges to the crockpot when I thought nobody was looking.

My biggest corned beef breakthrough came when, after a party, we had a surplus of wine cluttering up the pantry. What the hell I thought as I tipped a whole bottle of sauvignon blanc into the crockpot, thus doing my bit to conserve water.

The result was amazing: rich, tender and fruity. I tweeted my discovery and twitter was soon abuzz with people experimenting with different wines, thank goodness for the $7 clean skin! If you’re thinking of giving it a go I highly recommend trying it with a cabernet sauvignon.

All these were merely variations on the same boiled beef theme and I wanted to try something really different, so the obvious solution was to build myself a smoker.

Most smoking recipes you find on the internet are American, and I soon learned that corned beef in America is made from the brisket, not silverside, but I’ve never been one to let details like that get in my way. Through twitter I also learned that American recipes calling for the use of chilli powder actually mean a chilli seasoning mix, this is not something you want to learn through trial and error!

The recipe itself is dead simple:
First, build your smoker
Defrost and soak your corned silverside in water for 2 hours
Mix together two tablespoons of ground black peppercorns, half a tablespoon of ground coriander seeds, half a tablespoon of onion powder, one teaspoon of dried thyme, one teaspoon of paprika and one teaspoon of garlic powder.

Remove the beef from its bath and pat it dry. I smeared the meat with mild American mustard as a binder, but that’s purely optional. Cover the meat with the rub and wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

The next morning allow the meat to come up to room temperature as you fire up the smoker, I aimed for a temperature of 120 degrees C. Remember that smoking is inexact, my corned beef would be ready when the internal temperature hit 90 degrees, which in this case was about 7 hours.

Once off the smoker I wrapped it in foil and let it rest for another hour.
I couldn’t resist trying it hot and it was truly glorious. The fat had rendered out, there was a chewy smoky exterior and wow, aren’t coriander seeds a true spice revelation?

The true delight came the next day after the meat had spent the night in the fridge and the flavours had matured and set. The keen eyed amongst you may have recognised the rub as essentially a pastrami mix minus the sugar, I’m not claiming that’s what I made, but it’s close enough that I’ll never have to buy pastrami again.

It's Time To Be Pragmatic -- July 2019

I was visiting family in Sydney recently and, having thoroughly annoyed everyone with my lack of enthusiasm for shopping, was sent packing to the pub where I’d arranged to meet a couple of Twitter friends from Wellington.

Over the course of a few pints Hadyn, who was there for a Sony product launch, asked me how my politics had changed since I’d been on Twitter. He asked me this because I am a white, middle-aged male who votes to the right and the majority of people who follow and interact with me tend to vote to the left.

Maybe the third pint is the charm because I didn’t even hesitate with my answer, “I’ve become far more pragmatic” I replied. Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s being exposed to other people’s points of view, or maybe it’s plain old cynicism, but I no longer reflexively defend the blue team.

I’m more inclined to acknowledge when the Right does something silly or just plain dumb, though I’m far more likely to tweet about it when the Left mucks up because the reactions I get from the partisan lefties on twitter are hilarious.

I’m also far likelier to praise the red (and green and black) team if they get something right, or accept that they’re committed to doing something I don’t like and I just have to do the best I can to work with it.

As farmers we don’t like being told what to do with our land, our animals, and our businesses. We get grumpy and we tend to stick our toes in and fight, to let the people telling us what to do that we don’t like it and they can just bugger off. It’s part of who we are and, since Fonterra is a farmer owned and farmer run co-operative, it’s also who Fonterra have been since its inception.

Submissions have just closed on the Zero Carbon Bill and, like it or not, it will pass into law. We knew this government was committed to this legislation when the Prime Minister stood up and declared that climate change was her generation’s nuclear free moment. You don’t have to agree with her, but you do have to accept that she’s got the will and the numbers to make it happen.

I’m very pleased to see that, like me, Fonterra have a new found pragmatism. They could have reverted to type and pointlessly fought the government over this legislation; instead they have chosen to support the Bill and will seek to have some amendments, such as setting methane targets at the lower end of the scale, made at select committee.

I suspect that given their recent announcement to not install any further coal burners and to embed sustainability at the heart of the Co-op, Fonterra are well ahead of the curve as far as meeting the targets set in the Bill go.

I’m pleased too to see the Shareholders’ Council, who I have been critical of in the past, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Board in a joint press release about their submissions on the Bill. That press release highlighted the common ground they shared, their differences are there if you care to read their separate submissions, but those tensions are quite rightly being kept private between the Council and the Board rather than being aired publicly.

The Bill will pass, but having the support of New Zealand’s largest company will certainly make things a lot easier for the government. I can only hope the various ministers acknowledge the goodwill Fonterra are trying to build.

Fonterra’s Board’s first duty is to the health of the Co-operative, and the biggest threat I see at this point in time is the government’s failure to adequately reform DIRA. The current government certainly went further than the previous one in making changes to DIRA, but they went nowhere near far enough.

I understand that being pragmatic is about give and take, I just hope Fonterra have built up enough goodwill with present government for them to start giving too.

Oh DIRA -- June 2019

As a Fonterra supplying dairy farmer you have every right to be disappointed with the release of the Government’s changes to the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act (DIRA).

Fonterra will still have to supply raw milk at cost to new, presumably foreign owned processors who can then export value-added product in direct competition with the co-op, all without having to establish their own supply chain.

Fonterra will still have to accept new milk under the open entry provision, albeit with a few tweaks around new conversions and environmental concerns, which is worrying enough, but wait until you delve deeper: the flawed reasoning behind keeping this provision is MPI’s  belief Fonterra can already control supply through the milk price. How this belief persists when legislation exists specifically to prevent milk price manipulation is beyond me, and this is where my disappointment turns to anger.

How the Minister can be expected to overhaul vitally important legislation when the people in MPI advising him seem to have little understanding of the dairy industry and the rules constraining it defies belief. On one hand there’s a recommendation the Minister appoint someone  to sit on the milk pricing panel, and on the other there’s a recommendation that totally ignores the reason for this panel’s existence.

So I’m disappointed and a little angry, how should I react?

I could get on twitter and give Damien O’Connor a serve, I know he does his own social media and interacts with the public. In fact when Genevieve Toop, Greenpeace’s sustainable agriculture campaigner, tweeted that the government’s stance on open entry was a disaster, the Minister interacted quite forcefully: “Absolute bullshit”, he replied.

While cathartic, getting angry on twitter is ultimately pointless. The Minister would probably ignore me, but there’s always the chance I could make him think farmers are dicks and that’s possibly not the best approach when he’s got something I want.

Let’s not forget that only a year ago this government really did think farmers and Fonterra were dicks, Shane Jones launched a sustained and blistering attack on Fonterra’s chairman at the time, John Wilson, and when he wasn’t reined in by his party’s leader or the Prime Minister he doubled down. Fonterra had spent the better part of a decade acting like a farmer advocacy group rather than a politically neutral, multi-billion dollar international company and the incoming Labour-led coalition government didn’t like them and weren’t afraid to show it.

What interests me is how our industry leaders have reacted to the DIRA annoncement, they are representing my views and theirs is the lead I should follow. They are the ones who get to meet MPs and will make submissions on my behalf.

Federated Farmers who can always be relied on for a good bit of outrage were, surprisingly, not outraged at all. They expressed disappointment with some parts of the release, highlighted the parts that gave them hope and expressed enthusiasm at the prospect of making submissions on the changes.

John Monaghan, Fonterra’s Chairman, was the epitome of diplomacy. He voiced cautious optimism and signalled a willingness to work with the government to make changes that were not only good for Fonterra, but good for the country and good for the environment. If John was disappointed he hid it well, his was the response of a man who knows Fonterra have come a long way in the face of a hostile government and Fonterra will ultimately gain more from having a constructive rather than combative relationship with the Government. He recognised the progress made for what it was and welcomed the opportunity to take those changes further.

Then we have Fonterra’s Shareholder’s Council. It has always been my understanding that they are there to represent farmer’s views and concerns to the Fonterra board, to review the board’s performance, to create a healthy tension and keep the board accountable, but they seem to have been popping up in the media lately expressing opinions on all manner of things.

In contrast to Federated Farmers and Fonterra, the Shareholder’s Council wrote a very angry press release containing phrases like “continue to kick the can down the road”, “a step too far” and “in direct conflict”. It read like a declaration of war, that they were there to fight, to argue, to be outraged.

It feels to me as if for every two steps the industry takes forward there’s always someone willing to take us a step back. Now is the time for diplomacy, to put forward reasoned arguments for change. As an individual who will never come face to face with a government official I can afford to throw some angry words at MPs, the people advocating for my industry cannot.