National and Freshwater -- November 2019

I was less than enthusiastic at the thought of attending National MP Todd Muller’s water meeting in Ashburton last month. This wasn’t through any fault of Muller, National’s spokesperson for agriculture, but rather his party’s approach to the raft of challenges farmers are currently facing.

National’s proxies have been advocating for public protest both openly on social media and behind closed doors with industry groups. Protest was a disaster for farmers at the last election and, no matter how good it may have been for the National Party, I still don’t see it as a constructive or useful tool.

Another reason for my antipathy was the recent policy announcement coming from the National Party leaders; the dog whistling has been so loud my Labradors are in a constant state of confusion. Even if there was evidence unvaccinated children of solo mums had caused the measles outbreak in Auckland, and there isn’t, cutting the benefits of those parents still wouldn’t have prevented it.

Of course dog whistle politics isn’t confined to the Nats, at the last election Labour plumbed new depths with their “Chinese-sounding names” housing attack and immigration policies across the spectrum seemed to be a race to see who could be most xenophobic (the Greens, to their credit, pulled out of that race and Labour won by a nose).

I did attend the meeting though. The fact that Muller had drawn a line in the sand and committed to ending DIRA played almost as big a part in my decision to go as the message from a twitter friend saying they’d be there and were looking forward to meeting me.

I’m glad I went. I was expecting a partisan call to arms and an exhortation to drive my tractor to Parliament in protest at the oncoming new regulations. Instead I got reason, pragmatism and encouragement to respectfully engage with the process.

It was obvious Muller had been giving it his all, fresh off a North Island tour he was in Ashburton after speaking in Timaru earlier in the day and Oxford the day before. Barely able to speak above a hoarse whisper he regularly sipped from a glass of water, joking at one point that it was a delicious 2.5% nitrate. I couldn’t imagine David Parker getting away with a comment like that, let alone getting a laugh from the 70 or so people that had come to hear him speak.

The meeting wasn’t strictly about water, it was meant to address the many issues facing rural New Zealand today, but if a politician is going to address a crowd of Mid-Canterbury farmers there’s little doubt it will become a meeting about water.

Muller set the scene by harking back to Helen Clark’s statement some 20 years ago that agriculture was a sunset industry and built on this theme the idea that the current Labour Government does not like farming and want to see it gone. Whether that’s accurate or not, it was an idea the crowd was receptive to.

He lamented that the progress made by farmers had not been acknowledged and congratulated the room on the way farmers around the country had engaged on the proposed freshwater regulations in a respectful and informed manner. This, he said, was the way forward; engaging with facts and science, not pitchforks. Leaning in, he called it.

My friend and I looked at each other when he said this because this was astounding. This is a radical departure from what I had been seeing in public until very recently and it is a philosophy that I could get behind.

National, Muller said, would not be put in a position where they oppose the freshwater proposals simply because of their economic impact. This would be just as wrong as the situation we currently find ourselves in where targets are being set with no regard for their social OR economic consequences. A balanced solution must be found that takes everything into account.

He’s right of course, I just hadn’t heard National say it out loud until now. ECan currently have a nitrate target of 6.9mg/litre, and shifting that target to 1mg has a diminishing positive effect on the environment while the economic and social costs increase exponentially and potentially catastrophically.

I’ve said before that farmers just want to be left alone, but barring that we want certainty which is why a bipartisan agreement on water policy must be reached. I’m very glad to see National are taking this approach and are there fighting for the economic and mental wellbeing of farming communities.

I look forward to seeing them apply this approach to all communities.

Texas Barbecue, The Country -- November 2019

If you’re ever in Texas you owe it to yourself and your taste buds to try Texas barbecue, this isn’t Kiwi style barbecue, there’s no gas and no hotplate, this is charcoal, mesquite, smoke and hours and hours of cook time.

There’s a whole culture attached to Texan barbecue; it’s about friends and family coming together, welcoming people into your home and taking the time to get to know what’s happening in people’s lives, it’s about friendship and community.

The most well-known barbecue place in Austin is Franklin’s, established in 2009, Franklin’s have sold out of brisket every single day since they opened.  While they’re famous for brisket and ribs, they’re more famous for their queue; think Queenstown’s Fergburger on steroids.

By happy coincidence my accommodation was only a 5-minute walk from Franklin’s, so I arrived at 11:30 on a Wednesday morning, half an hour after they opened, and joined the line. As we waited and shuffled forward I eavesdropped on my neighbours; the family in front of me were excitedly deciding how many pounds of brisket and how many sausages they would buy and fretting over whether the ribs would be sold out before they reached the counter. The two young men behind me were in an earnest and highly technical discussion about the dimensions of their RV’s cooler which, they finally concluded, would hold 3 pounds of brisket.

By the time I reached the counter I was relieved the ribs hadn’t sold out so I added a pound of them to my original order of a pound of brisket and 2 sausages. It was then I learned a valuable barbecue lesson: just because they sell it by the pound doesn’t mean you have to buy it by the pound.

Everything was delicious, as you’d expect. The pork ribs had a nice hit with their spice rub, the sausages were dense and heavy with just a hint of smokiness and the brisket was amazingly succulent and tender. All the meat stood alone without the need of additional flavour, but I helped myself to their famous coffee infused barbecue sauce just the same.

Was it worth the $60? I don’t think you’re paying for just the meal; you’re paying for the whole experience. I walked past a few days later and there were over 200 people waiting their turn. They had lawn chairs and chilly bins, umbrellas and sunhats. Kids were running in and out of the line and everyone was thrilled to be part of the experience. I know the British like to queue, but this was the first time I’d ever seen standing in line elevated to entertainment.

The day before I left Austin I went to a totally different barbecue joint, and only then because the one I’d set my sights on was closed on Mondays. As I walked further east into an area where gentrification only just had a toehold, past colourful murals of local African American heroes, I came across a weatherboard building with peeling white paint and a faded Pepsi sign on a precarious lean bearing the legend “Sam’s BBQ”.

I joked that it looked sketchy, but as soon as I stepped through the door I was in love; the walls were covered in photos of long past local events, there were booths with sagging vinyl benches and a pedestal wash basin next to the counter for the very necessary post-barbecue ablutions. Above all I loved it because it was welcoming, it felt comfortable and friendly.

I was greeted warmly by a tall, rangy African American gentleman in his late 60’s. His wide smile was full of gaps and when I asked him what was good he laughed like I had made the best joke in the world. Everything at Sam’s is good, he told me. Having learned my lesson from earlier barbecue experiences I opted for a mixed plate which let me choose two sides and two meats. The sign out front proclaimed that Sam’s sold Austin’s best hot sausage, so how could I resist? I rounded the order off with mutton and potato salad and green beans as sides. You should always get the potato salad, it’s unlike anything I’ve tried before, cold mashed potato with a creamy consistency and bursting with flavour.

The sausage was excellent, and the mutton was all I could have asked for -- a rich, deep flavour and not at all greasy or fatty which is no mean feat when you’re cooking mutton flaps. For the first time in my life I enjoyed green beans, I don’t know what he did to them but they were crisp and delicious.

It wasn’t until later when I was sent a news article about Sam’s that I realised the man who served me was David Mays.  His family bought Sam’s BBQ in 1976, and every morning Mays now struggles with the dilemma of whether to keep serving barbecue to the community he loves or takes the five million dollars developers have offered him so they can build apartments where his building now stands.

Of the barbecue places I tried in Austin; Franklin’s, The Salt Lick, Stubb’s – it’s Sam’s to which I’d return. Honest, delicious and with such a deep sense of history and genuine warmth that I didn’t want to leave.

While Sam’s was my favourite barbecue shop in Texas it wasn’t the most memorable experience.
Katy Kemp, a twitter friend, invited me to visit her family ranch: Kemp Angus Farm.

I knew I was going for lunch and a farm tour, but I was expecting maybe some sandwiches and a coffee. Katy’s father and her brother Kurt had prepared a home grown Angus chuck roast in the smoker they’d built out of an old propane tank, a truly impressive wheeled contraption that could be towed anywhere you felt the need.

Oh Lord! The smoke ring on that roast was perfect, the meat was tender and juicy and the famous Kreuz sausage was thick and dense and absolutely did not need the mustard that Kurt liberally applied to his plate. The delicious meat was served with a corn bake and stem to tip roast carrot, and I sipped my iced tea while listening to Mr Kemp talk about the trials of farming in Texas. Lunch was topped off with Bluebell ice cream, another Texas institution, and followed with a guided tour of the Angus stud.

At the end of the day, no matter how good a barbecue place is, nothing beats being welcomed into a person’s home and sitting down to a home cooked meal. I hope to return the favour one day

Time To Effect Meaningful Change -- October 2019

Bashing Fonterra in the media is so prevalent it’s almost a national pastime; farmer shareholders keen to share that phone call they got from the chairman, commentators sticking the boot in at the behest of their dairy processor clients and any politician looking for some airtime will happily have a crack.

If the payout is low it’s due to the incompetence of directors and management, if the payout is high it’s because Fonterra is screwing the scrum and forcing their competitors to pay more for milk than it’s worth.

While there are legitimate criticisms to be levelled at the Co-op, and they’re not above scoring own goals in that department, it’s so easy that writing a column panning them is almost lazy. I make no secret that I’m a fan of Fonterra’s new direction; the honesty that is largely on display at shareholder meetings, the way they now engage with the government instead of the ‘Fortress Fonterra’ mentality of old and their willingness to show leadership and vision in areas that affect their farmers.

When this newfound engagement and sense of purpose draws praise, who ever thought we’d see headlines from a Green MP commending Fonterra for their leadership, it also draws a barrage of criticism: bloody Fonterra is cosying up to the Government!

An agricultural journalist recently tweeted that Tatua “… will pay out $8.50, $2.15 more than Fonterra”. While I’m a huge Tatua fan and am happy to celebrate their success, that sort of linear and uncritical comparison is pretty unhelpful.

“Imagine,” I replied, “if Tatua had the same regulatory constraints as Fonterra and had to accept milk from everyone who wanted to supply them.” Unfortunately it seemed the journalist couldn’t imagine this scenario and the point I was making was somewhat lost on him.

I think the point has been lost on a lot of people, with all the noise about fresh water and emissions and Zero Carbon, the fact there is a very important issue under consideration by parliament at this very moment has slipped under the radar.

The continuation of the Dairy Industry restructuring Act (DIRA) in its current form runs the very real risk seeing New Zealand with too much milk processing capacity. Fonterra is obligated to supply new processors with at-cost raw milk, essentially subsidising the competition and allowing them to enter the market with almost no risk. This subsidised supply doesn’t benefit domestic consumers; the processed product is shipped offshore along with the profits.

In the face of a static or declining milk pool, excess processing capacity can only lead to one thing: plant closures like those we are seeing across the Tasman.

I don’t understand the reticence of successive governments to radically reform DIRA; after nine years in power and a bit of tinkering, National have finally promised to repeal DIRA. They did this after realising that Labour were more proactive with deregulation than they had ever been, but that doesn’t do us any good while they’re in opposition.

The Greens should support the wholesale reform of DIRA; it has had the unintended consequence of being the single biggest factor in driving land use to dairy by compelling Fonterra to take all of the new milk. Labour should support the reform of DIRA if only  because Fonterra has a highly unionised and happy workforce whom they look after very well, and a strong Fonterra means a strong dairy worker’s union. Of all the parties New Zealand First should be leading the charge, subsidised foreign companies coming into New Zealand and exporting the profits is anathema to them.

Legend has it that Shane Jones once quipped every time he attacked Fonterra he went up in the polls, and he’s not the only politician to have had a crack in recent times. It’s time for the politicians to take a serious look at what’s holding Fonterra back and do something about it.

Taking action is not as easy as snide remarks and soundbites, but it’s their job, they can effect meaningful change and it’s time they did.

My Nemesis, The Country -- October 2019

Roast beef has always been my nemesis; no matter how hard I tried it was either overcooked and chewy or an undercooked lump mocking me from its bed of crispy roasted potatoes.

Not for me the perfectly pink, tender slices of succulent goodness that the online recipes promised, my roasts of beef were garnished with sadness and regret and served with a side of wistful unfulfilled promise.

This was the case until one day a few years back I was watching a TV show where the host visited people’s houses and had dinner with them, and after he’d had dinner with them he cooked the meal they had served but he did it better. On this day it was roast beef and I watched intently. Reader, I even took notes.

The trick, he said, was a meat probe. A thermometer to measure the internal temperature of the roast, a device without which most roast beef is doomed to abject failure. A scenario with which I was all too familiar.

I rushed out and bought one. I defrosted a bolar roast, I pierced it and poked bits of garlic and rosemary inside, I massaged it with oil, I seared it, I preheated my oven and I inserted my meat probe. When the probe told me we had hit perfection I removed the roast and let it rest, it had been quite a journey and the poor thing deserved a wee lie down before the moment of truth.

Then I cut into it and OH LORDY! Faultlessly medium-rare! Instagramable af.

I instantly tweeted that I had finally mastered the dark art of roasting beef, part science and part black magic, I was finally in the club.

“Oh,” replied Trudi Bennett in the truly annoying way that only Trudi can, “I do mine in the crockpot. Never fails, perfect every time.”

What the actual what!? You can’t cook roast beef in a crockpot, it’s an abomination. It’ll never work, it’ll be horrible. Of course I had to try it.

The recipe is so simple it makes me cry. You take your crockpot, you empty a sachet of onion soup into the bottom and place your roast beef on top. Then you smear some cranberry jelly on top of the beef, put the lid on and set it on low for 9 hours. That’s it. Seriously. I weep.

Somehow when you lift the lid the meat has miraculously browned, it smells distractingly delicious while it rests and you make gravy from the large amount of liquid that has accumulated in the pot. Trudi just stirs in the onion soup, but I add butter and flour to thicken my gravy because I’m fancy like that. The meat is pink and tender, slightly sweet from the cranberry. I’ve taken to adding garlic as well, but the beauty of the original recipe is its simplicity.

If you’re on Twitter you should check Trudi out on @WardrobeFlair, she’s a personal stylist and fashion blogger, she may be annoying but she knows her way around a crockpot.

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.