Town versus Country

Don't call it a rift, don't call it a divide, perhaps just a 'disconnect', says Southland sheep farmer Don Nicolson, the new Federated Farmers president.

Clearly, it is a sensitive issue and words need to be chosen carefully.

The outgoing Federated Farmers president, Charlie Pedersen, had some cheering, others clutching their heads, when he let rip in a parting speech last year.

The townies just don't understand any more, Pedersen told a Christchurch audience. You might expect farming would be treated with the same automatic respect as any of the caring professions. Nurses, teachers, doctors. Farmers also care for their animals, their crops, their land.

Yet there is now this horrible presumption of guilt. Farmers are a bunch of profiteering, red-neck, polluters until they can prove otherwise. They start in the wrong and have to make a case for their innocence.

Talk about double standards, said Pedersen.

"The hypocrisy of those consumers living in the most unsustainable environment in the world - a city - to eat the food we produce, but demand only we as food producers accept responsibility for the environmental effects of production just amazes me," he boomed.

Pedersen's point is that it is too easy to sit in town and pass judgment on what goes on in the countryside.

Look at all the recent controversies. The fart tax, dog microchipping, tenure review, the Resource Management Act, stream fencing, walking access, the knee-jerk opposition to dairy conversions and irrigation schemes. How is this not the imposition of an urban agenda on the rural community?

Then there all the other things a farmer could complain about, such as the slack biosecurity at our borders, the country-school closures, the lifestylers encroaching on good land and driving up land prices, and the credit card and mortgage splurge that has kept the dollar at export-killing highs.

Or even the little everyday slights against country dwellers. Like young people being told by career advisers that they are too clever to go into agriculture, or the council-sponsored education bus that asks you to lift spy- hole flaps to discover farming's dirty little secrets.

Speak to any farmer these days and you will hear about this town and country "disconnect" in even blunter language.

As the new face of farming, Nicolson says he is aware it's no good inflaming matters further.

But he has to ask why New Zealand, of all places, is shooting itself in the foot this way. He says it is shocking how dependent we are on food production as a country. Surely everyone knows that agriculture and forestry account for 65 per cent of New Zealand's exports?

You might think Australia is a farming nation, too. Yet, despite those outback farms the size of small European states, agricultural exports are not even 4 per cent of the Aussie economy.

We are quite simply the biggest dairy and sheep meat exporter in the world. Or, to turn it around, the society whose fate is most closely tied to what is going on in its paddocks.

Yes, it is an exceptionally difficult trick we are trying to pull off - to be a nation with a First World standard of living based on an industry that generally, unfortunately, pays a Third World return.

"So many people are coming with negative connotations as to how we farm. And yet the world needs food. Farmers get out of a morning, pull their boots on and produce food, the best way we currently know how," Nicolson says.

So - apart from the fact that 80 per cent of New Zealand voters now live in towns and cities, and have lost touch with the country's rural roots - why are we intent on giving our farmers such a hard time? Nicolson ponders the moment when farmers lost their mana, when the presumption switched from them being good honest blokes who knew what they were doing to being irresponsible duffers who required constant watching.

The hardships of the 1980s started the slide. Traditional markets disappeared. All forms of farming subsidy and protection were removed. Suddenly, it was adapt or die. Farmers had to get focused on the bottom line. At the same time, wider New Zealand was writing the countryside off. Even the Prime Minister, David Lange, was calling farming a sunset industry, not something you would be wanting your sons and daughters getting into.

The worthwhile jobs would be in town - high finance or the new creative and knowledge industries. Our children would be designing websites in funky converted warehouses. Or, at worst, employed as Hobbits and Gondorian rangers in Peter Jackson's latest blockbuster. As other developed nations had already managed to do, we, too, would put farming in our past where it belonged.

Then the next blow was MMP, says Nicolson. Minority parties came in pushing fringe concerns. Farmers became viewed not just as dinosaurs, but ecologically irresponsible, too.

National was not much help, as it could take the rural vote for granted and concentrate its efforts on wooing the swing voters, the city-dwelling middle ground.

Anyway, now we are a country where townie values dominate the policy-making and people are questioning why tractors don't have seatbelts yet.

Again, no point antagonising the city folk. But, Nicolson says, you have to understand how it all looks from the other side of the farm gate.

Nicolson says that, in the 1980s the whole country took a dose of the same economic medicine. The good old welfare days were over. A nation had to get used to standing on its own two feet.

This tough-love approach still applies in the countryside. Our farmers continue to be the least subsidised, the least protected, of any Western state.

They are also among the most innovative and productive. For the past 25 years, farming productivity has been growing 3.3 per cent a year compared with a measly 1 per cent for New Zealand workplaces as a whole.

Yet what has been happening in the cities? Subsidies, and welfare in all its forms, have been growing back like weeds. Really, says Nicolson, sometimes New Zealand seems to have two key industries - farming and bureaucracy.

"We thought we had cleaned all that out. Well now it's back, harder and larger than ever," he says.

It can feel like the whole country is living off the farmer's back. Ultimately, who is subsidising the ballet companies and beneficiaries, Nicolson asks.

And half the jobs in Christchurch and Wellington seem to involve the regulation of the countryside. The Resource Management Act (RMA) has become a job creation scheme for lawyers, planners and even activist organisations.

Did you know that advocacy groups like - to pick one of many names he has come across, the Friends of Nelson Haven and Tasman Bay Inc - can get public money to challenge developments on private land. The Environment Ministry can cough up grants of $33,000 from its legal assistance fund.

This is what is getting to farmers, says Nicolson, the feeling that they are even funding their own opposition. They did their bit just by surviving. They look around and don't see much else in the way of an economy. Yet now they are the bad boys. It makes you shake your head in wonder. "It's very odd how that could occur," Nicolson says. Town versus country. There are different levels to what is going on, says Massey University director of agriculture Jacqueline Rowarth.

She says we need to beware of getting too caught up in the media stereotypes - greens against red-necks, yuppies against cockies.

Dig down and you find that opposing camps such as Federated Farmers and Greenpeace or Forest and Bird have a better working relationship than you might expect.

However, Rowarth agrees there is stuff happening that does show New Zealand has a problem.

She says one incident showing how embedded an anti-farmer prejudice has become is Horizons Regional Council's Big Green Rig, a sustainable land-use display that has been touring heartland farming districts like Manawatu and Wanganui.

"You have these peep-hole windows labelled 'dirty little secret number four' or whatever. You lift the flap and it is erosion or effluent being released into rivers."

This is propaganda really. And all the more hurtful because it is done with earnest good intentions to educate school children about environmental responsibility. Farmers stand guilty until proven innocent.

It frustrates her. As Rowarth is speaking, Helen Free, one of her brightest young students, happens by the door. Now here is another prime example, she says. Free recounts how she was a student at Fielding Agricultural High School, though the "agricultural" has since been dropped from the name as the school chases international students.

Free says she had an inspiring horticulture teacher and decided that was what she would study at university. "But the career adviser was telling me I was too bright. I had other options, there were other things I could do in life."

Typical, snorts Rowarth. "This is what we're telling our kids. Agriculture is a sunset industry. So if you've got a bit of talent, go into something creative. If you've got a bit of brain, go into IT. If you're good with your hands, well then perhaps you can consider farming.

"Yet agriculture is still our future. It is where our brightest and best ought to be looking for opportunities." You want to see eco-terrorists? Take a walk around some suburban gardens and see how the chemicals are being tossed about, say the farmers.

Good grief, townies spray the whole outside of their houses with insecticide for fear of a few spiders. And what is it with the sprinklers flooding the lawns even in the pouring rain?

There are some sloppy and emotive attitudes emanating from the city concedes Greenpeace director Bunny McDiarmid. Yet if farmers are feeling pressured by an environmentalist lobby, it is not because the country has become too wishy-washy green, too politically correct, for its own good, but because going sustainable has become the necessary business model for the country. That is what so much of the RMA and other measures are about. Perhaps a little belatedly, agriculture is indeed again being seen as our mainstay industry. Even Aucklanders have woken up to the fact it is what we can do well in a rapidly changing world.

Yet, equally, it seems obvious that if we are going to escape commodity, Third World pricing, we need to tap into that clean and green branding we have been building. It is the only way we can charge premium prices. So, really, the interests of greenies and farmers are aligned.

"We're not talking about wanting to shut down farming," says McDiarmid. "We're actually talking about doing it in a way that we can do it for generations. So we have to find the middle ground. We have to have that constructive level of debate."

McDiarmid says corporate dairy farming is creating a new tension. The traditional small family farms are naturally more in touch with the character of the land. The corporate farms, with their big debts to service, represent a sharp intensification of the use of the countryside.

However, what has really notched up the heat on farmers is the necessity for the whole country now to be living up to its clean, green brand. That is the downside of a strong sales pitch. It takes so little to damage a pristine reputation.

Fonterra's problems with Sanlu and melamine-contaminated baby milk highlight the risks. "Even one farmer doing it wrong could now screw us all," McDiarmid says.

So, a divided nation? McDiarmid says it will surprise people that an organisation like Greenpeace is attempting to work with farmers. Greenpeace has a Smart Farming project now involving 500 Kiwi farms.

"These guys would run a mile if you called them organic or suggested they were doing anything special. But they're following a more traditional and sustainable biological approach. They're looking after the soil and farming for the long term," McDiarmid says.

Nicolson agrees. Federated Farmers has a long list of gripes. There is much that could be done to help the New Zealand farmer. But when he gets around a table with apparent foes like Fish and Game or Forest and Bird, the two sides find they agree on the broad principles at least. Still, there is no getting around this presumption of environmental guilt. An image has been created and it is sticking, says Massey's Rowarth.

It is quite unfair, she says. There are some mucky streams about, but New Zealand also has some of the cleanest water in the world.

Whenever you look closely at what our farmers are doing, on international comparisons we always tend to come out well. So our starting point ought to be a celebration of our successes rather than a hand-wringing that we are not yet managing to do even better.

It is an education issue, Rowarth believes. Children are growing up on a diet of sausages and chicken nuggets - food that no longer looks like it comes from real animals. Tomatoes and apples appear magically on supermarket shelves all year round. It has been a couple of generations since any uncle or cousin worked on a farm. The disconnection begins early. Then the only messages the children hear are the anti-farming ones, the ones about fat dairy profits and an industry's many little dirty secrets.

Rowarth believes the problem is that no-one really has the official job of representing our farmers. Federated Farmers is a lobby group. Its role is advocacy not ambassadorial, so too often it comes off sounding belligerent – town and country in visible conflict. Rowarth asks why we have not got a government body to promote education and understanding. "If agriculture is going to be our future, we need to be reaching the 11- to 13-year-olds, because that's when their world view is being formed," she says.

Federated Farmers has come to the same conclusion. March 1 this year has been declared national Open Farm day. There will be 24 provincial farms opened to the public so townies can see the country in action. The hope is that people will bring their children along and re- connect. Otherwise the alternative could be costly.

EXPORT STATISTICS

* At $10.5 billion, dairy was easily our top earner last year, accounting for 27 per cent of exports and 8 per cent of total GDP or economic activity. Rising prices boosted the sector by 25 per cent.

* Lamb and beef sales brought in $4 billion last year, making meat exports our second most important rural industry. But experts say meat could do much better if it could escape the commodity pricing trap.

* Forestry was our No 3 export earner, bringing in $2.9 billion in 2008. Overall, wood sales were down 7 per cent due to a high exchange rate and continued logging of virgin forests in Russia and Asia.

* Horticulture earned $2.8 billion last year. Wine is still expanding. Kiwifruit, then apples and pears, are the main exports.

* Wool, a traditional export earner, continues to dwindle in importance, sales falling to about $600 million. Although New Zealand remains second only to Australia in this market.#SRC#Source: Ministry of Agriculture