By Bruce Wills*
The great thing about New Zealand farming is that we don’t do it by numbers.
It isn’t about doing things exactly as your parents did but improving things for the next generation.
You can say the culture in New Zealand farming is an open one.
If it can be farmed here and farmed better, someone will give it a go, conventionally, biologically or organically.
I’m no exception, as you will see on July 21 when Country Calendar comes to our farm. My brother and I do not tail our lambs yet fly strike and ‘daggy’ lambs are the first thing farmers think about when they hear ‘long tails’. Our lambs, like cattle, successfully use their longer tails as ‘fly swats’.
For those who don’t know what I am talking about and unsavoury as it sounds, the rear of a sheep or lamb has a magnetic attraction for blowflies over spring and summer. Their maggots create terrible sores that are as bad for an animal’s health, as it is for farmer morale. We have experimented with longer tails of varying lengths for five years now; some breeds having shorter tails than others. Like all experiments there are pluses and minuses but we find our lambs develop better muscling in their rear quarters, don’t have the usual ‘check’ that cutting off an appendage causes, suffer less fly strike and are generally, less daggy. The minuses are a little added time spent crutching and shearing.
I am the first to appreciate that what works for us may not work for all sheep farmers. Farming is as much a creative art as it is a science.
My point is this culture of farming innovation makes New Zealand the Palo Alto of global farming.
Look at how solid our dairy industry is compared to what’s happening around the world.
While conversion to dairy remains a big talking point here, in the UK, around four dairy farms are being forced to leave the industry every week. The worst United States drought since Ronald Reagan was president will seriously hurt feed grain production. That is significant because the U.S. dairy and beef industry is largely grain dependent.
Our dairy chair, Willy Leferink, has heard estimates a modest 0.2 percent growth forecast for U.S. dairy production could turn into a two percent drop. WeatherWatch’s Philip Duncan says half of the continental United States is now in drought and this affects the world’s largest corn crop. While this drought continues to unfold, the U.S. Farm Bill, estimated by the New York Times at nearly US$1 trillion over ten years, grinds its way through their legislature.
We farmers, especially sheep farmers, learned the hard way that subsidies distort markets and behaviour. Over the past six years U.S. dairy farmers have received something like US$4.9 billion in subsidies.
It is a similar story in Europe where hundreds of dairy farmers from Italy, Germany, Ireland and France created a milk lake outside the European Parliament. They did this to protest the phase out production quotas, farmers there blame for releasing a lot more milk onto the market lowering prices. As this lake was emptied onto the street and milk poured into stormwater drains with applause, it tells me Belgium doesn’t seem to have the equivalent of our Resource Management Act. The fact overseas is that the producer is being squeezed white. UK dairy farmers in their thousands marched on London mid-week to protest milk payouts lower than the cost of production. This is down to a vicious supermarket price war. It is a war which reached Australia last year after ex-staff from the UK supermarket giant Asda, took up senior positions with Coles. The UK’s Asda is a fully owned subsidiary of U.S. retail behemoth, Walmart.
So despite our many issues here in New Zealand, strong cooperative-led business models have helped most farmers to control their future through joint ownership of processing and marketing.
We see this in our inputs too, with co-ops dominating fertiliser and even farm supplies.
While local consumers may bemoan what they see as higher prices for meat and milk at the supermarket, the cost of food as a percentage of income has never been lower.
What’s more, they are paying the real international price that has not been gamed up or down.
Higher prices also generally mean increased returns for ‘NZ Inc’ but with the commodities wave now flattening out due to an ugly international trading environment, less pain at the supermarket checkout may mean less gain for us all.
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Bruce Wills is the President of Federated Farmers. You can contact him here »
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