Farmers need to tackle biggest issues

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CAUTIOUS: Farmers are by necessity conservative. Rash, sudden changes can lead to disasters that can take years to recover from.

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OPINION: Speaking to the Federated Farmers conference, Agriculture Minister David Carter urged farmers to "adopt new ideas, abandon old ways of thinking and embrace different farming methods".

Much, much easier said than done. Farmers are by necessity conservative. Rash, sudden changes can lead to disasters that, because of the nature of the animal life cycle, can take years to recover from.

Many sheep farmers in drought country are learning that lesson. Those who joined the rush to highly fertile hybrid breeds 10 years ago have discovered the difficulty of coping with high numbers of weak lambs when feed is short. So they're breeding the solid reliability and strength of the traditional maternal breeds back into their flocks.

They're changing, but only because the change has been forced on them. Change has got to come. It always does. But the key is to control the change, not have it imposed on you.

Mr Carter was making that point to the Feds conference, which is probably the best chance he has all year of speaking to such a geographically widespread selection of farming leadership.

To my mind, the big problems facing pastoral farming today, at least the ones farmers have it within their power to act on, are: sheep and beef - the structure of the meat of the industry; dairy - the perception of poor environmental stewardship.

It is leadership that is needed to fix this. The restructuring of the meat industry has been a hot topic for the past couple of years. Too many meat plants are competing for a diminishing number of lambs over a narrow time frame and then competing with each other again to sell the meat in the same markets.

There's been a lot of talk, some proposals and counter-proposals put up, but still nothing has happened. The mood for change among farmers hasn't gone away but the leadership to push for that change is lacking.

Two of the biggest meat companies are farmer co-operatives and one way to bring some stability to the industry would be for them to merge.

Southern farmers organised themselves into a fierce ginger group, the Meat Industry Action Group, and last year elected their leaders on to the co-operatives' boards. But then they went quiet.

The biggest co-operative, Silver Fern Farms, has recently urged MIAG to take up arms again and its leader John Gregan is making the right noises, but so far with little effect.

LIKEWISE, Federated Farmers has an enthusiastic and vocal meat and fibre leader in Bruce Wills, but it seems to have become sidetracked into basing its arguments on the nebulous aims of a $150 lamb.

That target will be more achievable if the industry is restructured at the top.

The dairy industry resolved these issues with the creation of Fonterra eight years ago. The result was a surge in milk production as the new co-operative flexed its marketing muscle.

But the industry had underestimated, or chosen to ignore, the legacy of environmental damage as well as the political power of the Green movement. It took a no- holds-barred "dirty dairying" campaign by Fish and Game to force changes.

But those changes are seen by many as being too little and too late. Nitrate-spoiled Lake Taupo will be generations in the mending.

The campaign against dairying continues. Environmental activists fashion statistics and scientific opinions to suit their own agenda and prosecutions of the few transgressors are given widespread publicity. The perception is of an industry of polluters.

This is an issue that won't go away - here or overseas. Relying on generic marketing of our "100 per cent pure" mountains and rivers is not enough. The advertising needs to be more detailed.

It may be just a matter of explaining ourselves more clearly. Farmers returned from talking to shoppers in United States supermarkets saying that once they've heard how we farm, the Americans consider us to be organic. No doubt, compared with them, we are. But here, we have no such illusions. I believe the misguided notion of dairy farmers as polluters has become so widespread that the industry has to act. A campaign highlighting the industry achievements is needed.

I have criticised the missed opportunity of the Fieldays when environmental farming award winners were ignored. This year's winners were honoured recently with a dinner at Parliament and Mr Carter thanked them for "dispelling the myths" perpetuated by interest groups and some political parties.

I had earlier met the farmers and was impressed by their humility at being recognised for farming in a way that they considered was not out of the ordinary.

Many were dairy farmers who had fenced off their streams, planted riparian strips to catch nutrient runoff, matched their fertiliser use to weather and soil conditions and protected native remnants and planted more.

But this wasn't all they did. A common quality was innovation. I heard of the designing of a "weeping wall" effluent system, the purchase of an onion-peeling machine by a vegetable grower, the use of an equity partnership to gain farm ownership, investment in a cross- slot seed drill, housing cattle in herd homes, use of the intensive TechnoGrazing bull-finishing system and a two-pond spray system to counter iron in bore water.

Any one of them would make a positive story for an advertising campaign. Their time has come.

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