Hey Farmers of NZ.
How are things?
Look, just wanted to touch base because I’m a tad confused about something.
Walk me through why you get all so pissy and shitty at the Left again?
Like I get the Left are not happy with you over your abuse of our water and pollution of our water and theft of our water and your climate creating gases that you point blank refuse to do anything meaningful about. I get that the Left are critical over your enormous political power and how synthetic milk and meat will utterly destroy your industry, I get all of that, but what Mungo no understand is where the Christ you all get off hating on the left.
Because from where I’m sitting, it’s YOUR National Party scumbags and corporate Bank wankers who have fucked you all good and proper, NOT the Left!
How banks peddled a product that killed New Zealand farmers
The disastrous impact of banks selling risky financial derivatives to farmers is still being felt in rural communities more than a decade later. How did it happen and how can we stop banks doing it again?
Your political party, the National Party, conned you all into believing John Key’s pump and dump economic policy and tricked you into dairy intensification for China while you were pressured into taking on enormous amounts of debt by the banks and when that China fantasy popped, you’ve all been left with that enormous debt, Fonterra melting down and depression levels that make you suicidal AND THAT’S ALL THE LEFT’S PROBLEM???
If you are incandescent with rage over how you were conned by National into dairy intensification, then maybe you should be taking that out on your lying and deceitful National Party MPs, and not the Left!
The Left are simply requiring you to stop polluting and stealing the water for that intensification and let’s not forget that YOUR Party, the National Party, sold off 49% of our hydro assets to fund you a $400million irrigation slush fund for that intensification so the Left owe you jack shit.
The position you’ve been tricked into isn’t the Left’s fault, it is YOUR National Party MPs who deserve the rage. Take your anger and put it where it deserves to go, your own scumbag National Party MPs and wanker Banks who have trapped you in a spiral of debt.
As the political landscape becomes warped by identity politics and the working classes of the West turn against globalisation, the left/right dichotomy is in flux.
What I see here is an opportunity for the NZ Left to make gains with the Farming industry. As climate change impacts destroy the agricultural calendar and synthetic milk and meat snap the spine of the farming industry, they will be left high and dry with enormous debt and no way to service it. Foreign speculators will be lining up to buy our rich productive land and if we want to avoid that and build new political alliances, the Left should be ready with a bail out package that takes on the debt IF Farmers move away from dairy intensification and plant forests and hemp instead.
There is no point our farmers feeding 40million people, with the coming climate crisis, we need to feed NZers first, no one else.
Farmers, you are are crucial to our survival in the coming climate catastrophe, but you’ve been damaged by your own political leaders and shat upon by the Banks. Your future is with a protectionist Government, not a free market one.
Not sure if true, but I heard that the shitty managers running Fonterra into the ground have decided to pour more investment into China, after already losing a fortune there… sigh
… meanwhile in NZ nobody can afford the $15 of that block of cheese… weird , the Fonterra strategy is low cost for overseas market share but in NZ the managers don’t care if they price themselves out of the market… weird..
also Fonterra still obsessed with putting gelatine in yoghurts and products so even if they choose to ignore the growing vegetarian movement shooting ahead for decades now, they also are out of odds with the growing Indian 1.3 billion community of which there are significant vegetarians….
Another issue, Countdown now have their own brand cheese, then low and behold they put their new brand cheese (which is probably from Fonterra anyway) in the Fonterra section of cheese and the ‘special’ on Fonterra cheese moved elsewhere. Commerce commission nowhere to be seen of course, they somehow failed to find anything anticompetitive in the supermarkets last time they looked, sarcasm, as more Kiwis are obese from bad food, hardship grands for food up 50% and alcohol costs less than milk.
Meanwhile the continual destruction from the supermarkets of range of products changed to their own products… using many devious ways.
Also heard a rumour (not sure if true) that Fonterra apparently don’t pay their organic milk farmers any extra for the milk…
Essentially you could run a tanker full of world trends that Fonterra miss, while paying out millions in big bonuses to bovine managers who are obsessed with creating more and more China and South America losses… meanwhile overseas brands pick up former Fonterra brands like Tip Top cheap, and Fonterra is apparently still reinvesting the money from selling their good businesses into the same failed China strategies.
I guess then, they are not putting a stop to paying managers bonuses for bad short term strategy that will end up bankrupting more and more farmers going forward!
Also Fonterra under Theo Spiering has done huge damage environmentally, as money could have been spend a decade ago to solve many environmental issues for farming, but was not because they wanted to avoid it on his watch. They had the money as the farmers apparently pay into a fund for innovation but it’s just wasted because they don’t want to innovate on anything and the managers over seeing it, just sit on their arses.
Now we have more polluted streams and farmers who are broke from Theo Spiering and Co, bad overseas investments and have less money to invest in environmental good practise! Disgusting!
Apparently Fonterra’s IT outsourcing has also been appalling waste of money and putting them into the dark ages as other companies speed ahead technologically.
Sigh.
The sort of thinking by the sort of thinkers in the photo won’t have them getting anywhere near the comprehension needed to understand a complicated article like this. Hell, Simon won’t even need Taskforce Raptor lathering and ‘taking my pet gun’ fury to get them going. You know that if they were in the USA the signs they’d be holding would be about Obama being born in Kenya.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Ydoh_5EjU
Look like doze farm sales done falled off a cliff Mungo. Cordin to interest.co, farm sellings drop by 32% over last 4 years (exclooding those purdy little lifestyle farms, day don’t count). Damn boy, we’s in real trubble now, I got mouths to feed. Hopefooly young Jacinda come thru for us.
What’s so great about farm sales? Unless you think that what amounts to a symptom of how desperate farmers are as a result of their support for an incompetent, duplicious, and utterly corrupt national party.. And if you don’t believe me, then look through a few overseas newspapers, and find out what everybody else knows that uncle ruperts whores in the fourth estate have hidden from you lot..
@Stefan, Just put in overseas managers like Theo Spiering, to destroy the company in the hope that the neoliberals can ‘rescue it’ with a sharemarket float so China and everyone else can get control of the company with greater ease than they can through the co operative model and buying up the farm land, (also working to buy up the land, but so, so, slow in the modern, quick flick, business world).
NZ can learn from selling off the state houses and 49% sales of state owned power generators, under John Key sarcasm which have proved to be a bargain, not for the tax payers, silly. Not to be outdone, Labour and Greens joining up with quasi companies like Panuku, to slowly build unaffordable houses that cost more than state houses and have limited appeal, while giving the land away as a bonus to an unaccountable quasi business. What great ideas these neoliberals have bought to parliament both for the right and the left. All roads lead to fire sales of public assets and higher prices for consumers. sarcasm.
Running down Fonterra for sale, has always been high on the neoliberals agenda. And they are trying to do it, from the inside out.
All true …but in same breath I can not think why we deem Labour Jacinda admin left wing.
Like National Labour is borrowing and increasing the debt cycle..
Like National Labour signed the TPPA (you know that thing they said they would walk away from if we voted for them..remind how that turned out).
Like National Labour has welcomed in the military industrial complex big time.
It was Labour who signed off the 20 billion National borrowed for defence. It was Labour who invited a B52 ( built largely to drop nukes) Wings Wairarapa as Winston Peter told Wellington Peace Action no we wont ask if they are carrying nukes.
Fact is Jacinda not a pretty communist (we wish), if ‘communism’ means a left wing who gave us a 40 hour week, free education and health. She come from the same cut as Roger Douglas and its no surprise to find the architect of the beloved migration pact (free sweat shops for every one) was UN special envoy Mike Moore Roger Douglas’s PR wing man. Moore the man whose ‘World Without Borders’ model got a firm thumbs down from the left in Seattle back in 99 by the left when it was actually left. Moore basically had done a shit job on packaging his Trojan horse so we would not see the damage it did to workers rights, the environments, indigenous people and democracy in general.
Farmers blame the left for the crap things bankers do.
Were as the Millennials (who did not live through Rogernomics), to days avante garde think they are left, as they embrace a model of liberalism that encourages ‘Moore’ debts to the banks, ‘Moore’ privatisation, ‘Moore’ of gap between rich and poor, all the while drinking their $14 dollar craft beers and $75.00 hipster haircuts. They are not left-wing they are spawn of Blair and it no surprise this cult of persa-ba-nality has picked one of Tony Blair’s entourage (sent courtesy of Basettville aka University of Waikato and Victoria) to lead the charge of the spin brigade.
As for climate change have you ever actually read the UN Climate sustainability model. Looked at who its ‘strategic partners’, ‘investors’, and ‘shareholders’ are. They are not left wing for sure and when you read the fine print and track down the core corporation Goldman Sach, Nestles, Bayer, Dupont, BP, Chevron, ect they are not people with a great track record for genuine liberalism, environmentalism, or humanitarianism. They are people who get along with bankers just fine. We gone and put the same junkies who got us into this mess back in charge of the medicine cabinet oops.
If the farmers are confused about the left you can not blame them and the left is confused about what being left means these days as well.
Fact is in horrible landscape dominated by two choices neoliberal (talk left walk right) and neoconservative (talk right walk right) racing to a finishing line of the few.
Captained by the cult of persa-banality in each case telling the rest of us to do as they say not as they do. Both parties ultimately take their orders from the bankers and corporations or as I like to call them bastards without borders.
Sorry the music died the day poor Leo got a ice pick in the back of his head in Mexico. Its being eye right ever since.
I cannot understand why the farmers put up with Theo earning all that ridiculous salary, he will be laughing for the rest of his life.
I know they aren’t allowed to do any more dairy conversions here in Canty, well I think that is right. But surely we should be looking seriously at reducing the number if necessary by a government hand out to those interested in getting out of dairy and into something else sustainable that doesn’t degrade our rivers and ruin the Canterbury Plains.
Just use the public waterways as your toilet going forward into the intensive farming that transfer the risk to the public in profit driven mega-farms…
“Consent documents state that while the company already has consent to discharge all its wastewater on to 404ha of surrounding farmland, the company has access to only 278ha and planned further expansion would increase the wastewater produced onsite.”
“Oceania has limited ability to obtain more land for wastewater irrigation purposes. The surrounding community does not support more wastewater being discharged on land. The consideration of the alternative options has identified that the only viable solution is to discharge from the wastewater treatment plant on the factory site via a pipeline and outfall into the Pacific Ocean.”
The viable solution is the environment in Canterbury is NOT suited to more intensive dairying and this farm obviously has too many stock if they have to discharge into public spaces with their waste. The precedent is being set for farms to have too many stock on land that is not suited to those numbers. Why farm environmentally when you can use the public sea as your toilet.
Dairy firm wants ocean wastewater outfall
https://www.odt.co.nz/rural-life/dairy/dairy-firm-wants-ocean-wastewater-outfall
The public takes on the risk, and it’s the public and environment that pay the most for mistakes!
Thousands of litres of dairy effluent discharged into stream closes popular Hawke’s Bay swimming spot on Christmas Eve
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12296437&ref=clavis
… ” Your future is with a protectionist Government, not a free market one ” …
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That’s it Martyn , – that’s it.
Like we used to have pre 1984. Before Roger ”Shit on YOU” Douglas , – the Godfather of Labour and Nationals plunder and rapine of the countryside. Odd that it was Labours Douglas that introduced all that , yet Nationals Bolger carried it on.
Like the one we had in Michael Joseph Savage ,Norman Kirk and even Rob Muldoon’s day. A Keynes based economy. Where farmers were subsidized even. Govt assistance to keep the farmers going strong, not going under debt and killing themselves. Not a neo liberal economy.
A neo liberal economy / political system is cancer for those in the urban as well as those in the rural.
There was a time when the backbone of the economy that is farming was well respected in this country , – BEFORE 1984. I see no reason why we cannot return to that status. The Scandinavians,… never really left it…. and are per head of capita , the wealthiest people on earth.
What has, and is, happening in the dairy industry will profoundly affect NZ’s future.
This is corruption on a scale never seen before on our shores.
Keep up the good work, and some great comments, mostly guided.
This should be in the top three election issues.
I believe that the program to turn farmland (as well as any other land they can get their mitts on, including protected land) into pine plantations “for the good of the environment” or to “slow climate change” is a scam and a swindle, and that somewhere down the line we’ve bought into a pack of lies.
The small amounts of reading that I’ve done on the subject so far, and things that I’ve seen, have convinced me of this.
I would like to see this topic (conversion of farms to forestry) examined and researched, to look at what it’s based on, and what the realities are. Something about it (the current forestry sales and expansion program) seems fundamentally flawed, fundamentally wrong.
Dairy is not the only animal farmed in NZ. Sheep, goats, buffalo, horses, birds…
I don’t have a problem with dairy farming in NZ, the problem is the recent drive towards low cost, intensive dairy farming in NZ which is driven by short term profiteering, stupidity and greed and not suitable for the conditions.
Lets not throw out the bath with the bathwater!
They’re already taking the water, – before we’ve even bathed in it.
Here is one article showing how forestry, in the way it is presently being done in NZ, is a bigger contributor to climate change than farming, in at least a couple of states in the US. logging study reveals huge hidden emissions of the forestry industry
By establishing these massive cloned-pine plantations we are creating a bigger problem for ourselves, for Aotearoa in the future.
Here is a local example of the harm caused: Councils Failure to Monitor Forestry Company
And another: Pine Trees Arent the Answer
And this one: Forestry Conversion Rules Totally Out of Control
There are more…
Farming is the only real thing in the NZ economy. The rest is tourism and property flipping. We are on track to become a vassal state of Imperial China whose purpose is to provide meat and milk to our overlords.
The future of the hobbits of NZ will be servicing our overseas masters and working “their” land
Technology is now New Zealand’s third largest export sector
https://www.nzstory.govt.nz/news/technology-is-now-new-zealands-third-largest-export-sector/
I don’t have the latest figures but in 2009 agriculture was a mere 4% of GDP
But is that really how we measure success. Best if we all stop consuming so much.
I want, I want, I want
You GOT IT!
Denis Glover said it all 70+ years ago – The Magpies.
When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
The bracken made their bed,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
Tom’s hand was strong to the plough
Elizabeth’s lips were red,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
Year in year out they worked
While the pines grew overhead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
But all the beautiful crops soon went
To the mortgage-man instead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
Elizabeth is dead now (it’s years ago)
Old Tom went light in the head;
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies said.
The farm’s still there. Mortgage corporations
Couldn’t give it away.
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
The magpies say.
E-clectic, you’re a treasure.
(Not even going to try and explain why.)
Perhaps farmers should stop delivering food to townies for a week, and see what will happen?
Animal farming today is so huge worldwide that it takes up an enormous biomass – humans and their farmed animals comprise about 93% of terrestrial biomass, leaving the remaining 7% as just wild animals. This is far from a natural predator/prey relationship. It is science fiction. In fact, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Given the levels of water use, animal feed required, deforestation, biodiversity loss, fossil fuel use, fertilisers, etc.etc. not to mention the sheer scale of the animal suffering, it is way out of balance and a long way from so-called ‘nature’. Our modern industrial society has been built on animal suffering. Alongside fossil fuels, animals have provided the energy for the massive expansion of the human enterprise. Animal liberationists like myself can only see this in the same light as human slavery. But as the huge consumption of fossil fuels is creating a warming atmosphere, so is the sheer size of the animal industrial complex, via greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. These are the changing realities for animal farmers, and I do feel for the poor blighters facing these issues and trying to hold onto their livelihood. Its gonna get tough, and many of them are not equipped with a broad and open worldview to accept that changes are occurring. We are seeing this play out in Australia in the face of the bushfire crisis. The narrative of climate denialism is so strong in Australia – even stronger than in Aotearoa – that everything else but climate change is being blamed for the fires. Fueled by the corporate media and the conspiracy nutters whom the farmers seem to mirror in their belief systems. Tragic for the human race, tragic for our entire living planet.
Top post. Thanks PJ.
Well put Paul
As humans delve into commercialised cruelty then they loose sight of their environment and other species that we depend on to balance the interaction of living things, a process of evolution we depend upon.
Plant based diet for humans is not only healthier but less demanding on resources. NZ can become self sufficient in growing food locally by developing an economy that focusses on plant based food crops and little need for transport nor fertilizer if permaculture is our mainstay.
Sounds impressive because your “facts” are bullshit.
Insects are the largest terrestrial biomass.
Coughs* second only to the largest biomass type of soil of course.
Neither insects nor soil are the largest biomass, soil isn’t even part of the biomass but biological organisms who live predominantly within are.
The biomass of bacteria is about 500,000 times that of humans.
The classification of living organisms is incredibly anthropomorphic and bears no relation whatsoever to reality.
All classification should be based around the prokaryotes (bacteria) with humans and animals just a blip to the side, if even bothered with.
Yes it’s all arbitrary bullshit isn’t it.
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