Farmers will be focusing on the Budget, but the Budget may not focus on rural priorities. However the Government will be relying on rural export revenues to pay for its urban 'catching up' priorities

The majority of bank credit creation in the UK [and NZ] is not even used for transactions that contribute to and are part of GDP, but instead is used for asset transactions. They are not part of GDP, since national income accountants require a ‘value added’ for inclusion in GDP, not just the shifting of ownership rights from one person to another. When bank credit for asset transactions rises, asset prices are driven up, because the loans do not transfer existing purchasing power, but instead constitute an increase in net purchasing power: money is being created and injected into asset markets. When a larger effective demand for assets is exerted, while in the short-term the amount of available assets is largely fixed, the price of assets must rise.

Such asset inflation can go on for several years without major observable problems. However, as soon as the credit creation for non-GDP transactions stops or even slows, it is ‘game over’ for the asset bubble: asset prices will not rise any further. The first speculators, requiring rising asset prices, go bankrupt, and banks are left with non-performing loans. As a result they will tend to reduce lending against such asset collateral further, resulting in further drops in asset prices, which in turn create more bankruptcies. When asset-based lending had become a major part of bank portfolios and when banks had already driven up asset prices by several hundred percent due to their excessive asset-based credit creation, then it is inevitable what will follow: bank equity is usually less than 10%, and thus asset prices need to fall only by a little more than that – which is not difficult, after rises of several hundred percent – and the banking system is bankrupt: losses from non-performing loans have to be made up from equity (if no other funds are available, which is usually the case in such situations).

Thus a full-blown banking crisis must follow after a bank-credit driven asset bubble. One does not need to be a central banker to know this very well. (Why, then, did the ECB allow 20% or more bank credit growth in Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece, for several years? Such high credit growth is clearly in excess of nominal GDP growth and hence it is clear that it must be creating unsustainable asset bubbles that result in banking crises – as the Quantity Theory of Credit has postulated since its inception in 1992; Werner, 1992, 1997; 2012, 2013).Link

On this basis, NZIER calculates that between 1991 and 2017, the average combined direct contribution of dairy farming and dairy manufacturing was 3.09 percent of GDP. Link

I keep reading articles crying about the lack of ability to bring in foreign workers for primary industries and find it very hard to be sympathetic. In my own industry dairy farmers have spent years keeping wages low and not training. Sure there are individuals that have but as a industry, fail. Many of the jobs offered on farmsource were still scrapping the bottom, particularly the contract milking, and as I've pointed out before some even advertising for less than minimum wage.
The last whine I saw on stuff was interesting in that I sympathised with the individuals involved but the owner owned 6 farms and couldn't get a kiwi manager to run all six for $100k. I'm not surprised as he found that's a big bloody job worth more than $100k. But really why 6 farms, sell 5 to individuals cause there's a heap of sharemilkers wanting to move on and surely you can make enough of one for a more than decent lifestyle.
Some of the farmers are sounding destinctly landlordish.
Perhaps it's really the business plans that broken rather than anything else.

It's not attacking farming - it's implementing standards to save our freshwater ecosystems from collapse. Most of the angst I read about is directed at corporate dairying and feedlots.

I don't know how many university student essays I have read this year, where students reflect on the fact that the rivers they swam in in their youth are no longer swimmable - and these students are generally younger than 30 years old. In far less than a generation we have 'lost' so, so much ability to enjoy and be proud of our freshwater resources. Not to mention our once popular urban swimming spots (beaches, harbours and rivers).

We're (urban and rural) are all in it together.

Farming appears to me as having descended into a break even exercise with reliance on capital gains..... sure farmers provide export revenue, but it would be nice if they paid some tax.

Can't see that happening with this government Kate.

There must be for any meaningful transition to occur. Our existing resource management law is useful when assessing the effects of new development but horrible at rolling back legally established activities that carry social and economic benefits. Likewise the RMA is very poor at legally providing for enhancement of natural resources rather than the status quo. Only an incentive based system can bring about the necessary land-use change that we expect in Southland, Canterbury and other problem areas.

I don't see where you are getting "Foresters got the big subsidy boost" from Kate. In fact farmers have been the big winners with fencing and planting subsidies. They are already available to any landowner who applies.

Hm .. I only see a weasel ?