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.

Opportunity Knocks -- December 2017

I recently spoke at the Senior Prizegiving for our local college, I did this partly because I’m the Board Chair and it was expected of me and partly because it was my last opportunity to see the awards presented from on stage. I don’t particularly like getting up to speak in front of a couple of hundred people, but sometimes you’ve just got to do these things if only to see what it’s like.

Of course I had the coveted speaking slot between guest speaker Peter Datlen, an engaging, funny, relatable and highly successful former student now working for Rocket Labs, and the awarding of the special trophies and scholarships; I was quite literally the person everyone hoped would keep it brief so they could get to the good stuff.

And keep if brief I did, partly because they weren’t really there to listen to me but mainly because I forgot to write my speech until just before the ceremony.

In the tradition of speeches from the Board Chair I was expected to give the assembled senior classes a piece of advice for their futures, something simple and catchy that they could immediately forget as soon as I resumed my seat.

The piece of advice I gave them was this: take opportunities when they present themselves, live life and make memories, don’t look back and think “what if?”

Identifying and taking opportunities was something I came to late in life, it was something I learned from my wife who was forever searching out things for our children to try and putting in front of them, presenting them with opportunities and seeing how far it would take them.

I had the opportunity last year to travel to Germany with the college and I very nearly said no due to work commitments. I’m very glad I said yes instead, and Mr Pow the German teacher will be thrilled to know I picked up a couple of hundred new Twitter followers by live tweeting the entire journey. I may have missed some of his very important insights into German culture and history in the process, but I have made some wonderful new friends and have a trove of memories.

It doesn’t have to be a big thing like an overseas trip or taking a job offer or buying a farm, it can be a very small thing like following up on a suggestion made via social media. I almost declined the offer to write this monthly column because I didn’t believe I had anything of value to share, but I took the plunge and it has been very satisfying; my twitter advocacy of agriculture has reached a whole new audience. The reward is when people come up to me when I’m out and tell me how much they enjoyed a particular piece.

Opportunities aren’t always obvious, but nowadays I find myself saying “yes” to new things a lot more often than I used to. And subsequently I’m having a lot more fun.

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