A DIRA Decision -- March 2020

As the world is faced with torrents of horrific news as the pandemic sweeps the globe, it feels like there is little to be positive about. But over recent weeks there have been two small gems for New Zealand dairy farmers.

The first piece of good news was Fonterra’s half year financial results, which are a remarkable turnaround from the Co-op’s first ever loss posted last year. The loss wasn’t insignificant or so small it could be dismissed as a rounding error, the Co-op lost over half a billion dollars which only makes the recent turnaround even more impressive.

At a time of mass uncertainty when many people don’t know if they’ll still have a job in a few months, it is somewhat relieving that these results will see Fonterra inject more than $11 billion into the New Zealand economy through milk payments to their farmers. Those farmers will in turn spend over half of that in their local communities, communities which need money now more than ever before. It’s not just Fonterra farmers who will benefit from the Co-op’s strong performance; independent processors around the country will be benchmarking themselves off the Co-op’s strong performance.

The second piece of positive news, which I’m sure many will have missed, was the Primary Production Select Committee’s report on the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act (DIRA) Amendment Bill. This legislation created Fonterra nineteen years ago and it subjects the Co-op to frequent reviews. I expected that the cross-party committee would tinker with the legislation, creating a hodge podge of barely workable compromises like previous committees have done. What I wasn’t expecting was unanimous clarity and sweeping reform from the cross-party panel of MPs.

The Committee have decided open entry should go except for genuine new farmers who have never supplied milk before. Fonterra’s competitors fought hard to retain open entry, the rule that forced Fonterra to accept milk from anyone who wanted to supply them, because it made it far easier for them to poach supply from the Co-operative. The open entry provision also drove a massive spike in dairy conversions as it forced Fonterra to collect all the new milk.

Now there’s no safety net, people are still free to cash in their Fonterra  shares and sign a contract with an independent processor, but they’ll be thinking a lot more carefully about the long term implications of that decision because there’s no guarantee Fonterra will take them back if they change their mind.

New processors who set up shop in New Zealand will no longer receive three year’s supply of raw milk at cost from Fonterra. This rule was designed to ensure competitive domestic supply but was cynically flouted, primarily by foreign owned processors, to get low cost raw material which they’d process and export for their products to compete against Fonterra’s on foreign supermarket shelves. Now they will only get this supply for one year, still not perfect but a vast improvement and something that levels the playing field significantly.

Goodman Fielder, a company that has had 20 years to secure their own supply chain yet failed to do so, complained long and hard that the 10 cents per kilogram of milk solids they paid to piggyback off Fonterra’s infrastructure was too onerous. The Select Committee disagreed and Fonterra have won the right to charge more for its services.

The Select Committee heard time and again that Fonterra, who are charged with paying their suppliers the highest possible sustainable milk price, were paying farmers too much. It was a common refrain from processors and their lobbyists seeking to drive down the price they paid their own suppliers in order to increase dividends for their overseas shareholders. The High Court found this was not the case when Open Country Dairy tried to litigate the matter, and the mechanism for determining milk prices remains largely unchanged in the new version of DIRA.

I don’t know if there was any one thing that convinced the Select Committee of the merits of Fonterra’s submission; strong support from farmers, excellent submissions by the Dairy Worker’s Union and Fonterra’s Shareholders’ Council or if it was just a committee unusually blessed with common sense.

Fonterra have weathered a lot of criticism recently for “cosying up to the Government”, for taking a leadership role in climate change, for working with the Government on fresh water and clean energy rather than fighting it every step of the way. I’ve been to enough meetings in recent times to know that not all directors or councillors were happy with this fresh approach to government relations, but this result with DIRA thoroughly vindicates the people who convinced the management team it was worth a try.

It’s not a done deal yet, the changes still need to be passed into legislation and things will be delayed due to COVID-19, but the fact it has cross-party support and unanimous endorsement from the Select Committee give me hope its passage through Parliament will be uncomplicated. After nearly two decades in existence, Fonterra will finally be free of some unnecessary constraints and can be left to focus on doing what it does best.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake, The Country -- March 2020

Every enthusiastic amateur cook knows the best time to experiment with a new recipe is when you’re having guests over for dinner, so when I heard Uncle Ken and Aunt Raewyn were coming to stay I promptly decided to bake my first ever cake.

There’s a certain type of confidence that’s particular to middle aged men, and it was with this certainty that nothing could possibly go wrong that I decided if I was going to bake a cake I might as well go the whole way and do it in my home built smoker.

I won’t pretend I attempted anything fancy, it was after all my first ever  crack at this cake business, so after a short search I settled on something so simple they use it in primary school cooking classes; pineapple upside down cake. Yes, I was going to bake my first ever cake in a converted 44-gallon drum and I was going to do it upside down.

My planning was meticulous; the roast beef would go in the smoker for two hours and come out at a piping 65 degrees (Uncle Ken is a medium-well done kind of guy), then while the beef was resting the cake would take its place in the smoker for an hour, coming out for dessert just as we were finishing dinner.

To ensure things went smoothly I started my preparation early. I poured 50g of melted butter into my newly purchased cast iron frying pan, I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw Briscoe’s had them on sale, and sprinkled ¾ of a cup of brown sugar on top of that. This was going to be the sweet sauce on top of the cake. Then I added a layer of pineapple rings, omitting the maraschino cherries the recipe called for because I’m not a monster, and got to mixing my batter.

The batter is so simple it’s almost embarrassing; 1.5 cups of self-rising flour, 1 cup of white sugar and a teaspoon of salt all mixed together. Then add 50g of melted butter, a cup of buttermilk and 2 eggs and stir it all like mad and pour it over the pineapple rings in your frying pan.

I proudly tweeted my achievements at about 3pm and was almost immediately asked if I was having the cake for afternoon tea, because apparently you can’t leave mixed batter just sitting on the bench for a few hours while you tell people how clever you are.

This led to a the smoker being hastily lit and the cake going in at 4pm while Ken and I watched in vain as the smoker obstinately refused to hit the desired temperature of 175 degrees, this cake was going to be cooked at 150 degrees or not at all.

An hour later, toothpick at hand, Ken and I eagerly lifted the lid to check on our golden brown creation. The toothpick was unnecessary as the sight that greeted us was almost indistinguishable from the raw batter that had gone in earlier.

After a quick conference we decided that cake or no cake we did actually want roast beef for dinner, so off came the lid again and onto the coals went a chunk of apple wood. The roast was plonked on the bottom rack, the cake back on the top rack and on went the lid.

This had all the hallmarks of a disaster, which was not a scenario that had occurred to me at any point during the day. Then a miracle happened, I had severely overestimated the cooking time for the beef and a mere 70 minutes later it was ready to eat.

Ken and I extracted the roast with the sort of teamwork and precision normally reserved for brilliantly executed All Black tries and were thrilled to see the cake was no longer a runny mess but actually semi-solid, so we replaced the lid and shut off the airflow to the coals and went inside for dinner.

After dinner I brought the cake inside, golden brown and oh so fancy in its bright red frying pan. I flipped the pan upside down and the cake slid effortlessly onto the waiting platter, drenched with thick sweet sauce, pineapple rings glistening proudly.

I’ve baked my first cake now and it was rich, sweet, hot, smoky and delicious. Maybe I’ll use the oven next time.

Tiwai Point -- February 2020

The various owners of Tiwai Point aluminium smelter have been out-negotiating successive New Zealand Governments since before the smelter was even built. The builders and original owners of Tiwai Point, Consolidated Zinc, reneged on their agreement with the Government to build the Manapouri hydroelectric power station, leaving the Government to foot the $135 million bill in order to make ConZinc commit to the construction of the smelter.

The smelter paid little to no tax from its opening in 1971 through to the late 80s and, due to its exposure to bauxite prices, electricity charges and fluctuations in the New Zealand dollar, frequently operates at a loss.

Despite its wildly changing fortunes the smelter has grown to be a significant employer in Southland, directly employing some 800 staff and 2000 contractors, and by some estimates it’s responsible for 10% of Southland’s GDP. This is one card Rio Tinto, the smelter’s current owners, play when negotiating with the Government. The other card is the Manapouri power station; without Tiwai Point the station is a stranded asset.

Tiwai consumes some 570MW of electricity annually, which is one third of the South Island’s consumption and thirteen percent of the nation’s, and uses it to produce the most pure aluminium on the planet. Without the smelter there’s nowhere else for the power to go. Every time closure is threatened blueprints to upgrade the South Island’s power networks are dusted off, and every time the threat is averted, as with the Government’s $30 million bail out in 2013, the plans are shelved again.

Almost every commentary I have read about a post-smelter New Zealand imagines the power being exported to the North Island, with Huntly power station being closed and the nation rejoicing as power prices tumble. The reality is much further from the truth; there’s no infrastructure to carry the extra power north and the inefficiencies in transporting it that far are huge. The best we can hope for, if the infrastructure upgrades in the South Island are completed, is cheaper prices in the South with Manapouri operating at a greatly reduced capacity. The worst case scenario would see the power station mothballed.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an option that allowed the Government to say “No, there will be no more handouts, we have another taker for the electricity and if you don’t like it you can leave”?

The Labour-led Coalition recently announced they were spending $10 million to replace the coal boilers in eight schools and two hospitals, reducing CO2 emissions by some 3000 tonnes (the equivalent of taking 1200 cars off the road). On the same day Fonterra announced they were converting their Te Awamutu factory from coal to wood pellets. This conversion carries a price tag of $11 million and will reduce emissions by 84,000 tonnes (32,000 car equivalents). I did the maths, that’s $8,333 per car equivalent for the Government and $344 for Fonterra. The private sector proves its efficiency again.

Fonterra’s Edendale factory in Southland is the Co-operative’s largest user of coal, it uses twice as much as the Te Awamutu site, but converting Edendale to an alternative fuel source is no simple task; there’s no piped supply of natural gas in the South Island and nowhere near enough readily available biomass to make wood pellets or similar a viable option. If only there was an abundant supply of clean, renewable energy close at hand and some way to get it to the factory…

Imagine if the Government dipped into their $200 million decarbonisation fund to build transmission lines to Fonterra’s Edendale plant, lines capable of bearing a load sufficient to allow Fonterra to convert their largest coal burning site to electricity.

There’s no downside; the Government would be investing in infrastructure, as they should, Fonterra would invest in a capital upgrade that reduces their coal consumption by a whopping 20% and the leverage Rio Tinto holds over our Government would all but disappear.

If Rio Tinto wants to stay then Manapouri could ramp up output and supply both Fonterra and the smelter, they’re capable of sustaining outputs of 800MW. If Rio Tinto decides to go, well there’s a little something they don’t tell you about the world’s most pure source of aluminium; each tonne produced comes with a price tag of 1.9 tonnes of CO2 emissions, and in Tiwai Point’s case that’s a whopping 570,000 tonnes per annum. Add that to the potential 170,000 tonne saving from weaning Edendale off coal and that’s the equivalent of removing 300,000 cars from New Zealand’s roads

If the Government are serious about climate change being this generation’s nuclear free moment then this would be a big step forward in taking action. Cutting CO2 emissions by a further 170,000 tonnes seems a lot more valuable to New Zealand than giving a gift to a billion dollar overseas-owned company.

Brisket Done Briskly, The Country -- February 2020

If you watch American sitcoms for any length of time, one character will inevitably invite another over for dinner with the encouraging phrase “Ma’s making brisket!”. The response is always overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and with good reason; slow cooked brisket takes a lot of time and effort but the result is melt in the mouth deliciousness.

Brisket, which is slowly becoming more available in New Zealand, is the group of chest muscles from a beef animal. These muscles do a huge amount of work; they’re in constant movement and support some 60% of the animal’s weight. They are dense with connective tissue and laced with fat, all reasons why in this country the brisket is usually ground up for mince or turned into sausages.

When I was queueing to buy barbecue in Texas, and I did this as often as possible, I would listen to the people around me speak in hushed reverential tones about the brisket they were about to buy. The only quandary they had was how many pounds they could justify purchasing, and this often came down to storage space. Brisket isn’t a food in Texas, it’s a cult.

Blissfully ignorant about the amount of effort that goes into cooking these massive slabs of meat, I asked my butcher to source me some and he happily obliged. Did I mention how big a whole brisket is? When you’re buying it at a barbecue joint you see a portion getting sliced, so I was quite unprepared for the two foot long, 8 kilogram behemoth that was cheerfully delivered to my freezer. The smoker I use is a home built affair made out of a 44-gallon drum and the brisket was so large it covered the whole cooking rack.

It might surprise you to learn that I’m not the world’s most patient man, so it was with a growing sense of despair when I realised recipe after recipe called for cooking times of 10 to 18 hours, there’s even a barbecue place in South Auckland that cooks their brisket for two days, and while I loved the brisket I tried in Texas I wasn’t sure I was quite that invested. The lesson here is to do your research before committing to an improbably large lump of meat.

I had just about resigned myself to the idea of the brisket staying in my freezer forever when I stumbled across a hot and fast recipe; this sounded like it was written just for me. Hot and fast in this context was five hours at 150 degrees C, but that was less than half the cooking time of other recipes and I was totally here for that.

While I was waiting for my smoker to come up to temperature I doused the meat in Worcestershire sauce to give it a peppery hit and to give the rub something to stick to; and that’s half the fun of this barbecuing lark, trying different rubs and finding the ones you like. I used one I’d brought back from Texas but there’s a huge array of local suppliers that I’m just itching to try. With my smoker sitting nicely at 150 degrees, in went the rub covered brisket and on went the lid. The neat thing about smoking food is there’s a long period where you can’t do anything but wait for the meat to take on smoke and develop some bark.

When I lifted the lid two hours later the meat had darkened considerably and started to puff up, so I took it out and wrapped it in tinfoil, pouring two cups of beef stock over the meat before I sealed the tinfoil and placed the package back in the smoker. This is when I inserted the meat probe, I hadn’t been worried about temperatures so far, but reaching an internal temperature of at least 80 degrees to dissolve the collagen and connective tissue is vital or you end up with chewy brisket, and nobody wants that.

Two hours later things started to go horribly awry; the brisket was cooked an hour early and I’d also allowed an hour for it to rest. No vegetables were ready and it was way too early for dinner, I’d almost accepted the indignity of having to serve cold meat for tea when I remembered a trick from the eighteen hour recipes; they rested their brisket in a chilly bin! I warmed a chilly bin up with boiling water and put the brisket in and covered it with a towel for added insulation.

This trick is nothing short of magical, that brisket went in at 90 degrees and came out a good three hours later piping hot at 70 degrees.

I highly recommend unwrapping and carving your brisket outside, it’s gloriously sticky and messy but well worth it for the rich, smoky, succulent and tender treat that follows. The meat stands alone without the need for barbecue sauce, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add your current favourite. My sons were home for this meal and the leftovers were, as they say, gone by lunchtime.

That may have been the first brisket I ever cooked, but it definitely won’t be my last

Fonterra Finds An Ally -- December 2019

I recently found myself in a pub with a group of people I’d only just met, and for reasons that still remain unclear found myself waxing lyrical about the myriad shortcomings of the Dairy Industry Restructuring Act (DIRA). I was as eloquent and convincing as only a man on his fifth pint can be, and when I finally paused for breath to consider whether I’d missed any crucial points, the woman next to me fixed me with a cool stare and asked “Is that your opinion or Fonterra’s?”

Less than a week later I was online watching DIRA submissions to the Primary Production Select Committee and saw National MP Amy Adams ask Federated Farmer’s Dairy Chair Chris Lewis almost exactly the same question. Why, Adams wanted to know, should the Select Committee take any notice of a Federated Farmers submission. “I’m just trying to understand,” Adams said, “how you ensure that it isn’t effectively the Fonterra Shareholders’ Council by another name.”
Was Lewis voicing Fed’s opinion or that of the Fonterra Shareholders’ Council’s?

Therein lies the problem for the Committee of MPs, how do they cut through the obviously self-serving nature of every submission and arrive at the decision of what’s best?

Fonterra, their Shareholders’ Council and Federated Farmers all spoke strongly in support of amending the legislation and, among other things, halting the subsidisation of new competition. Competition can set up shop in New Zealand, they said, but make them compete on a level playing field and stop making Fonterra, a co-operative, subsidise it.

While I fully support their submission and truly believe it’s in the best interests of farmers, the industry and the country, there’s no escaping the fact it’s also what’s best for Fonterra. The importance of changing this legislation was clear when both Fonterra’s CEO Miles Hurrell and Chair John Monaghan turned up and pushed the Co-op’s case to the committee.

The other processors and their advocates put forward arguments as to why DIRA should be retained as is, and it was pretty hard to watch: Goodman Fielder believe they shouldn’t have to pay a nominal fee to Fonterra for piggy backing off Fonterra’s supply chain, even though they have had 18 years to set up their own. Miraka voiced a complaint that is shared by most independent processors; that Fonterra pays farmers too much and uses this as a tactic to squeeze the competition. As Fonterra now has 10 competitors and their market share has dramatically decreased since the legislation was first passed, this isn’t a compelling argument, and under questioning Miraka admitted that they actually pay their suppliers more than Fonterra does.

Open Country Dairy, who is in the middle of a High Court battle with the Commerce Commission over milk price calculations, made the bold move of opening their submission by insulting the Select Committee chair. Even veteran Fonterra critic Peter Fraser, an ex-economist, failed to make any convincing arguments for the retention of DIRA.

The problem the independent processors all faced is they were arguing for legislation that clearly hamstrings Fonterra and the only beneficiaries are themselves, and it’s difficult to come across as the underdog when that’s all you’ve got. Given the lacklustre arguments from those who submitted in favour of retaining DIRA unchanged, it’s little wonder that Synlait, who have recently won the South Island contract for fresh milk supply from Goodman Fielder, decided not to front. Writing a submission is one thing but defending it in the face of tough questioning is another.

Things got better when actual farmers spoke; Don and Jess Moore were passionate about improving their farm and aspired to supply Fonterra when they could afford shares. They were passionate advocates of the cooperative model and, like so many other farmers who submitted, firmly believed that Fonterra keeps the independents honest. Fonterra is required to pay the maximum sustainable milk price; private companies by their very nature want to keep the cost of their raw product as low as possible.

Leighton Pye, a large scale vegetable grower and dairy farmer in the South Island, told a cautionary tale of how vegetable growers are paid for carrots and potatoes; the processors calculate the grower’s costs and pitch their price just high enough to ensure a 5% margin. This, he warned, was the future for New Zealand farmers should the cooperative model be replaced with private companies.

The Select Committee hearings showed two clear sides to the DIRA debate -- on the side arguing for reform were Fonterra and farmers, even farmers who supplied other processors, and on the other side were the independent processors who want to maintain the status quo. What this discussion needed was a submitter with either interests that encompassed the whole industry or no vested interests at all. At the eleventh hour that submitter came forward in the form of the Dairy Worker’s Union (DWU).

The DWU view the debate from a unique position as they have relationships with all the processors and their interest is in the wellbeing of the workforce. The DWU want what’s best for their members in terms of pay, benefits and health and safety. During their submission it became clear that Fonterra sets the standard for worker conditions. While the number of jobs in the industry may remain static as the milk flows from one processor to another, the DWU reminded the Select Committee that not all jobs are created equal. “We have a huge fear from our members inside Fonterra at the moment that they are seeing direct loss of roles while just down the road more and more operations are establishing who aren’t meeting industry standards.”

The DWU didn’t hold back when it came to naming names: “Fonterra is required to set and pay the milk price, and you have competitors such as Open Country that do not meet the industry standards, do not pay the appropriate wages to workers, and I could go into the health and safety record of the Talley’s family, but I won’t.”

It wasn’t just worker’s rights, the DWU obviously shared my concerns with Fonterra being required to supply milk at cost to new competitors and said: “It is hard to imagine, apart from trying to hamstring your opponent, why you would predicate a business case on three years’ worth of supply. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

To have one of the country’s biggest unions and one of the Labour Party’s biggest donors speak so strongly in support of Fonterra’s submission, and to publicly hold Fonterra up as the company that sets the standard for working conditions, is huge. I would like to think it’s a game changer, but sadly that’s not how this game is played.

Compelling evidence, facts and logical arguments are only enough to win you some concessions, but politics will always have the final say.

I hope Fonterra’s Board aren’t expecting to get everything they wanted; they’ll get some changes, their team has fought hard and deserve them, but there’s a long way to go and there will be another review before DIRA is consigned to its rightful place in the history books.

I Thought I Knew My Pork, The Country -- December 2019

I thought I knew a lot about pork: I know it’s a red meat, I know how to get perfect crackling on a pork roast and I know the destruction of three barbecues due to fat induced conflagration mean I should never be trusted with a pork chop again.

I’ve bought pork from a butcher, I’ve raised my own pork and I’ve eaten wild pork. I’ve had so much pork delivered to my house in a single day I seriously thought I’d need to buy a third freezer. I know my pork, or at least I thought I did.

I recently walked into a restaurant in Austin, Texas, and ordered a pork chop. It’s a meal I don’t cook often due to the high risk of catastrophic barbecue loss and it was a dish where I felt confident I knew what I’d be getting: a large pale slab of firm meat, possibly slightly greasy but delicious and filling.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, what appeared before me was definitely delicious and filling, but it was so dark I thought they’d mistakenly served me beef.  My waiter told me I was eating free-range Mangalitsa, a Hungarian breed of pig with a thick woolly coat like a sheep and marbled muscles like wagyu cattle. The meat quite simply dissolved in my mouth with a burst of flavour and just a hint of smoke from the oak fired grill it had been cooked on.

That single pork chop was so indelibly seared into my memory that on my return home I contacted Naya Brangenberg who, along with her partner Jeremy Wilhelm, has spent 10 years breeding free-range Duroc pigs on their Wairarapa farm, Longbush Pork. Naya gently broke the news to me that Mangalitsa genetics weren’t available in New Zealand and probably never would be, but she spoke with such passion about her Duroc, Hampshire and Large Black pigs that I felt I had to try some.

Since it was clear from my Austin experience that I knew far less about pork than I originally thought, and having been paralysed by the range on offer through their online retailer Woody’s Farm, I gave Naya my budget and asked her to make the selection for me.

Two days later I was excited to open the refrigerated box the courier had dropped off, and the first thing that struck me was the deep rosy pink hue of the meat, these pigs had obviously been getting a healthy dose of iron from rooting in the soil. The second thing I noticed was the heft of the cuts; the chops were thickly cut but felt way heavier than they had any right to. I’ve watched enough of Jeremy’s (@Longbushpork) videos online to know the pigs are well exercised and appear very happy. The density of the chops was testament to their free-range life.

Finally I noticed that Naya must have cheerfully ignored my budgetary constraints because not only did the pack contain four loin chops and four shoulder chops, but also two racks of competition St.  Louis-style pork ribs. Unlike spare ribs, St. Louis-style is basically the middle of the pig, the pork belly stays attached which makes it a very meaty but expensive cut in New Zealand: the belly is generally worth far more to the butcher as bacon than left attached to ribs. To get St. Louis-style you often have to buy imported pork, usually from Canada or Spain, and while I’m all for consumer choice and keeping prices down you have to weigh that up against the much lower animal welfare standards Spanish producers are required to adhere to.

I set the ribs aside because I was nervous about tackling such a majestic cut and told Naya I was going to cook the pork chops first. Nice, she replied, what brine recipe are you going to use?

Brine!? I had never brined anything in my life but the link Naya shared with me claimed it was the secret to juicy and tender pork chops, so into a tub of salt water and rosemary leaves they went for a relaxing overnight bath.

Given my propensity for destroying barbecues with pork chops I decided to cook these ones over charcoal. Not only was it a prudent safety measure, it also allowed me to tweet that I was cooking over charcoal made from sustainably harvested organic heritage apple wood, in reality I’d picked up a couple of dead branches from the orchard.

There’s no point comparing the Duroc to the Mangalitsa, they’re bred to produce vastly different types of meat, but those Longbush pork chops were the best I have ever cooked: meaty and flavoursome, tender and juicy, big and bold. Far better than anything I’ve bought from a supermarket and better than any pork I’ve raised myself. I brined some of my own chops a little later and cooked them the same way; it was a vast improvement over my normal scorched earth method but still didn’t elevate them to the level of those Duroc chops.

YouTube was my saviour when it came to cooking the ribs; the process was almost as much fun as eating them. I broke out some of the rubs I’d brought back from Texas and liberally coated both racks before placing them in my home built smoker for a couple of hours. Then I wrapped them in tinfoil with brown sugar and half a block of butter each and a liberal application of espresso barbecue sauce from Franklin’s in Austin. Back into the smoker they went for another hour before being unwrapped and cooked some more to allow the glaze to set.

I don’t know what to tell you except those ribs have ruined my sons and me for all other ribs. They were so meaty they did us for dinner that night and lunch the next day and induced a request to buy more before the boys head back to university.

With Christmas just around the corner and free-range hams available on the Woody’s Farm website, I strongly suspect that a Longbush ham may turn my family against all other hams, but it’s a risk I’m happily willing to take.

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.