The planet burns on a bonfire of farming regulations
Many are rising to the challenges of making all our economic activities climate compatible in ways that also restore our natural environment. But the main bodies in the dairy and meat industries are draggers, rather than drivers, of that vital work, argues Rod Oram.
The Biggest Lie in NZ Politics is that NZ Dairy is the cleanest and greenest in the world when the reality is that it’s a cherry picked nonsense that leaves out pollution so NZ Dairy can get to the numbers to pretend to be clean and green.
Russel Norman’s take down of this Dairy propaganda on The AM Show recently was just ruthless…
“NZ is the biggest seller of a simple commodity called dried milk powder, the cheapest of the cheap, and if you look at what is happening in food production around the world they are looking for more environmentally sound food products.
They are looking for higher value products.
We’ve gone down the pathway of the lowest quality commodity you can produce in the world.
NZ is mid range in terms of its environmental cost per kilogram of milk solids, there is nothing special about it, and we do feed a small number of people compared to the billions on the planet and the economics is very clear that you can be just as profitable if you pull back on the stock rate, pull back on the amount of fertiliser and actually produce a higher product.
Organics is in fact doing incredibly well globally, so why don’t we become a producer of dairy rather than the producer of the cheapest commodity on the planet which results in us trashing our water ways and being big climate producers, that’s a better pathway isn’t it?
…he’s so right!
We always ignore that the 40million number is based on us selling milk powder as a base line ingredient filler for the manufactured food industry. The PR spin pretends it’s wholesome NZ cheese and milk and meat those 40million are eating when the truth is the vast majority of what we export is basic bitch milk powder used as a filler ingredient!
The 3 pillars of NZs economic success:
Alongside our biggest political lie, there are 3 pillars of NZs economic success:
- Stealing Māori land and never paying the true value of that theft back
- Exploitative low wage economy thanks to deunionising the NZ workforce and becoming reliant on exploiting migrant workers
- Rigged Capitalism which IRD showed us allows the richest to avoid taxes.
Theft, exploitation and rigging the system for the rich, those are the 3 pillars that hold up the NZ economy.
Unfortunately for our biggest lie and 3 pillars, there are some grim threats coming.
The Grim Threats:
Dairy sunset industry: The danger, as TDB has been pointing out for years is grant this is a sunset industry and the millisecond those big manufactured food players can make a synthetic dairy ingredient, the entire industry will go belly up…
The dairy industry’s biggest export success may also be the cause of its greatest future concern, as whole milk powder can now be copied and replaced by precision fermentation methods, research shows.
Anna Benny, technical account manager at The Kellogg Rural Leadership Scheme, said in a recent paper that the dairy industry was ripe for disruption because it was over reliant on exports of whole milk powder.
Whole milk powder could be replaced by proteins produced from precision fermentation, that in future would be cheaper and more climate friendly.
…we are economically dependent on an industry that will become a taxi in the age of uber.
There are better ways for us to be advancing dairy but all the industry wants is the cheap option that causes huge pollution and are relying on their political muscle to never have to change.
My bet is that the same shit will keep happening right up until the breaking news headlines that researchers have a synthetic version of our milk powder and the entire country has a share market plunge that is a depression era level meltdown.
And when that happens, oh sweet Jesus won’t the Farmers scream then!
Geopolitical shockwaves: Despite the recent warm welcome from our Economic Overlords in Beijing, alarming new laws China have just passed allowing them to use any powers they see fit to protect the rights of their diaspora sounds like a legal pretext to invade South Pacific nations. Russia is still gambling in the Ukraine and the continuing failure of states left to fend for themselves will cause never ending waves of fleeing refugees. We are no longer in a benign environment and continued global shockwaves will have ongoing ramifications.
Climate Change: Ultimately it is the climate that will determine all and we are seeing spikes in temperatures and climate events that are beyond our capacity to repair in time for the next weather event.
We are seeing this in real time right now in NZ!
The Climate Crisis was some event we feared at the end of the century, what we are seeing is an unleashing of heat events well beyond what we feared…
As climate envoys from the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters prepare to meet next month, temperatures broke June records in the Chinese capital Beijing, and extreme heatwaves have hit the United States.
Parts of North America were some 10C above the seasonal average this month, and smoke from forest fires blanketed Canada and the U.S. East Coast in hazardous haze, with carbon emissions estimated at a record 160 million metric tons.
In India, one of the most climate vulnerable regions, deaths were reported to have spiked as a result of sustained high temperatures, and extreme heat has been recorded in Spain, Iran and Vietnam, raising fears that last year’s deadly summercould become routine.
…there are mega fires burning in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia, SIBERIA, Spain and Chile.
All in the past few months.
Siberia holds one and a half trillion tons of carbon and methane in the permafrost, what happens when it burps all that enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere?
We know from the ice record this has happened in the past, 635million year ago and it caused catastrophically abrupt climate change.
We are seeing enormous craters of methane erupting already.
Look what is happening in Turkmenistan…
The US is in negotiations with Turkmenistan over an agreement to plug the central Asian nation’s colossal methane leaks.
Turkmenistan was responsible for 184 “super-emitter” events in which the powerful greenhouse gas was released in 2022, the highest number in the world. One caused climate pollution equivalent to the rate of emissions from 67 million cars.
…singular events that produce the pollution of 67million cars?
What happens when these events get triggered?
There is just no plan to adapt to this new reality when it should be the driving force to begin immediate and radical adaptation for what is coming.
We have no comprehension of what is coming and we are simply not prepared for the age of consequences.
Watching National, ACT and Corporate Farmers use their economic and political muscle to avoid responsibility for what comes next can only be resolved by civil unrest and a campaign of civil disobedience against those interests.
This is the age of consequences.
Just consider how the Corporate Farming Lobby have managed to avoid any tax on their pollution since mid 2004!
They have pushed and pushed and pushed it off for 20 years!
National have already promised ANOTHER 5 year extension which will mean the agricultural industry have managed to stop any tax on their pollution for quarter of a century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That photo of a National MP driving tractor up the steps of Parliament was a declaration of political war and they have lived up to that declaration.
John Key sold 49% of our Hydro Assets to create a $400million irrigation slush fund that was used to intensify dairy farming while polluting our water and generating climate changing gasses!
The entire economy is forced to bend over backwards for a sunset industry that will crash the millisecond the fast food industry can create a synthetic milk powder!
Claiming that NZs emissions mean nothing in comparison to China and India isn’t a justification to do nothing, it’s an acknowledgement that radical adaptation is the only move left because those Goliath economies have already doomed us to a dangerous climate change future!
We are out of plays and the focus surely must be self sufficiency over trying to eternally trade on a burning planet.
The Left must force a bargain with Farmers for strategically essential reasons.
They are going to feed us when the famine comes.
A recent report on food security found NZ had incredibly low food security because it was so open market driven and refused to subsidise farmers.
Which is where we on the Left must drive the debate.
We should absolutely consider subsidising food grown by NZ farmers and horticulturalists and our seafood and meat and dairy that generates a 15% price reduction for all NZ produce consumed here.
Rebuilding a direct link between the harvest grown here, the people who grow it and a grateful local market who enjoy the product WITH a 15% price reduction.
Climate change will kill global free market supply chains, we are locked into hyper-regionalism. We need to build new economic structures, subsidising NZ kai for the domestic market would lock in certainty for producers while strengthening food security for the population.
We have to find new ways of working together to ensure we can survive what’s coming.
We are a nation of fatherless children raised by angry solo mothers, a low imagination horizon juvenile settler culture built upon stealing indigenous land and polluting it without restraint. A rugged individualism dependent on exploiting a low wage economy and rigging under-regulated capitalism for the rich.
The old greeds, the old hates and the old exploitations will no longer hold the system together if that system is melting in real time.
Super-rich warned of ‘pitchforks and torches’ unless they tackle inequality
Global elite told at London’s Savoy hotel of real risk of ‘civil disruption’ if more is not done to help struggling millions
This is the age of consequences.
They won’t be pleasant.
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Martyn – again, you are correct…yet Labour knows this, and does stuff all.
“The entire economy is forced to bend over backwards for a sunset industry!”
The problem is that we have nothing else that makes the country any decent money. We don’t do anything. Nothing. Jackshit. No oil industry. No gas industry. No minerals and natural resource exploration. No large industry. We don’t make e-cars. We don’t make computers. We don’t make anything. We have woked ourselves into an uncompetitive corner. Our future viability has been fucked by Greens and other zealots and politicians who pander to that. Whereas your Norways and Australias are sitting back and laughing as they swim in money. And soon as we get a lot of tourists to help pay for our excessive govt spending, all the lefties scream and call it hypertourism. We’re fucked.
Good points. Activists love tearing everything apart but couldn’t produce a thing themselves let alone join a piece of lego together. So how does this country earn a living without farming in that case? I guess their superior uni educations will see them though in lala land!
XRAY good comments except I don’t think those commenting here finished secondary school let alone graduating from a university.
The Labour Government have demonstrated their inability to build anything proving your point.
Rubbish, we’ll just print money, who needs to earn it?
Worked out great in Zaire and Zimbabwe.
Yep thats it in one..
As a country we have to pay for all the imports
Virtualy everything except food is imported.
All we have to do the paying is pretty much farming full stop , all the others have been all but shut down. So why not kill farming too
Cf
The lucky country Aust digs their wealth out off the ground,
We could too , but NO NO NOT ALLOWED
Well said Clifford but unfortunately your factual statements are beyond the comprehension level of many on this site.
What an absolute load of crap by the idiot resident German. Maybe a return to your homeland is in order and leave us kiwis to have the adult conversations.
Still voting National, better them than this incompetent bunch of useless *****.
Stupid is as stupid does…
Yes a vote for National is a vote for a prosperous New Zealand,a vote for Labour is a vote for a third world New Zealand.
Picture has nothing to do with Dairy – might want to look at difference between Dairy and Cattle Farming.
Martyn’s vision of ‘hyper-regionalism’ and short supply chains would mean that the vast majority of goods would need to be locally manufactured. Imports would mainly be raw materials that were impossible to source locally.
The Pentagon has been complaining for years that very long supply chains are a national security risk. It is particularly a problem when the neo-cons are still obsessed with Wolfowitz’s doctrine of forever remaining the sole world superpower. You cannot invade and balkanise China, if you have no other way to produce armaments than to use parts imported from China.
Perhaps the biggest barrier to returning to an advanced, diversified economy — and reviving the high-wage prosperity that came with it — is another kind of war: the propaganda war. The financial establishment have succeeded in ensuring a multi-decade blackout in the press and many parts of the education system, regarding non-globalist theories of development (see Dr. Fred Hirsch’s reports, published by C.F.R. Project 1980s, on his theory of ‘controlled disintegration’).
This censorship is so extreme that barely anyone under the age of 55 is even aware of the previous levels of prosperity, economic development and labour rights that were locally achieved only a few decades ago.
Both involve cattle though…
“Picture has nothing to do with Dairy”
Whoa there precious
Nothing to suggest it does .
Cattle continue to shit in rivers while triggered farmers argue about words.
Be careful who you call ‘Precious’. If I could, I’d have every farmer in AO/NZ on strike for a minimum of 12 months. To make an impression, you know how it is.
How would you feel then? A bit precious would be my guess. Also no money, no food, no means of paying for the borrowed off-shore funds re directed to the teaming logical fallacy that’s city people to spend on the foreign owned banks so you and your ignorant kind can live in grotesquely over priced plasti-houses.
There’s nothing [wrong] with being ignorant, I hasten to add. ‘Ignorance’ is, or at least should be, a brief state occurring before enlightenment. The desperately dire problem is when people determinedly try to remain ignorant.
The exploitation of the Cows of Farmers are what you get when you get unchecked banking and privateer greed interfering with regenerative and holistic agrarian enterprises. And yes, it was thing in AO/NZ.
Now, because of banker greed and the pointless need to build urban multi-billionaires and urban multi-millionaires you must ramp up the exploitation of the primary industry.
So, dear scotty, your ignorance is leading you astray. See that *cow? See her standing in nice fresh water? You know who put her there? You did. You and the other 5.15000 other non farmers did. You don’t complain about your lavish city lifestyles, your multi million dollar houses, your first-world economy. You don’t complain because you have no real idea what the fuck it is that goes on, on the farms around our AO/NZ. You just work to spend to fuck and breed then die. Repeat.
* That cow is a beef cow, a Poled Hereford. So not Dairy.
Farmers, are you there? Here’s what you do. Do nothing. Strike. Simply stop work. Keep the vet from the dairy herd, keep the rams from the ewes, park up the tractors. And then wait, with video cameras preferably, at the ready and see what happens. Because if you farmers do strike, you’ll get footage that’ll make international news.
I didn’t read TDB’s guff above because I already know what it’s trying to show. That it’s our beastly famah’s what’s done it. Well, if you’re a farmer reading this, take comfort from the literal fact that you didn’t.
You didn’t, and They fucking did. The greedy elite, the cunning, bully scum many of whom were once farmers but they found it far more lucrative to take your money while they used their new found influence to manipulate you farmers from your money and your chosen profession and a shitting cow in a creek’s just another logical fallacy to further distance your selves from the only protection against such polite tyranny and that is yourselves, each other. The very act that’s most deadly against those who exploit you is that when you get together and YOU DO NOTHING! THAT YOU STRIKE! And demand a royal commission of inquiry before one single kg of product leaves your farm.
Hear that? That kind of squishy sound like dropping an organic chicken breast onto the Kauri cutting board in Herne Bay or Remuera ? That’s the sound of a big, fat, rich, lazy, Urban arse hole snapping shut in fright.
Vulgar? Yes. But then I am a farmer, not a multi-billionaire, a multi- millionaire of one of the four now foreign owned banks making record net profits annually from an agrarian primary industry country with a scant few 5.2 million people mysteriously living bloated, first world lifestyles.
Farmers. One last word. .
STRIKE.
One more little thing.
The Guardian.
“Invest in small farmers or world will face regular food crises, says UN agency chief
This article is more than 8 months old
Billions needed for water and soil conservation to boost resilience in small farms, says new head of UN’s agricultural financing arm”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/oct/06/invest-in-small-farmers-or-world-will-face-regular-food-crises-says-un-agency-chief?utm_source=pocket_saves
That’s fine .
I don’t live in the city
I live beside a farm polluted river – that now has permanent signs warning off any contact with the water and the presence of dog killing algae.
Ive spent $6000 upgrading my nitrate poisoned water supply .
But yeah – poor farmers
Bank debt farming systems are the problem – not the people calling out the resulting filth.
Move.
Think
Fake meat and dairy have a far higher emissions profile than real meat and dairy because they rely on a huge increase of arable farming to provide the basic raw ingredients. Arable farms always have far higher fuel use, more soil compaction, more fertilizers, more herbicides, more pesticides, and far lower soil carbon levels (ie they are losing soil C to the atmosphere, while most dairy farms are sequestering it).
There is a contradiction in the argument that fake food is good for the environment while real food is bad, but also that organic farms (including dairy) are good.
If we use the now firmly debunked GWP metric to determine NZ farming emissions we get a figure of about 48% of NZ total emissions. If we use the newly recognised GWP* metric the figure in under 10%, and if on farm sequestration was taken into account most farms are close to carbon neutral or carbon positive. At present all C sequestered by trees and pasture are not counted, all we get is simply the emissions in isolation as if the cattle were fed on a feed lot isolated from the ground (this is where the international emissions came form, US feedlots).
This argument is saying we need to replace our low emissions farming system (on GWP* metric) with fake food production which some studies suggest have 20-25X the emission profile. This is in contrast to the latest IPCC metrics that show the lifecycle of methane, and now use the GWP* metric. Science has moved on but NZ Green Party and NZ Greenpeace still use the old debunked GWP metric for no obvious reason except possibly to confirm their anti-farming bias.
My farm is Carbon positive, more carbon is sequestered than emitted. If I was forced to remove cattle and produce arable crops for fake food production my carbon profile would change towards far higher emissions. I don’t see that as a good thing for anyone. And this is not even starting on the nutritional issues… will fake food really be good for us? A lot of us will prefer to stick with GE-free, organic food where ever possible.
I don’t know where the photo of the cow in the river came from, but allowing that to happen is illegal in NZ already.
Anyone who has stolen Maori land should be reported to the police and prosecuted. Luckily most of us have never stolen land, and those of us who do have land access have a lifetime of mortgage payments to prove the point.
Well said Ben.
Fabulous Ben.
Utterly imperative that free speech is not censored by the politicians and their bought media hacks.
This has to be a bottom line in making electoral choices, and even then, few parliamentarians are transparent or trustworthy.
Organics is a shyster dream for suckers, advocating NZ rebrand as organics because markets pay more for it is despicable and cynical capitalism.
Plus…the Maori Party on 7%.
The Indigenous populations globally have had the answers to our problem all along but the problem is that those resources that were and are necessary to containing methane levels etc.. have been eroded by over industrialization, colonization, greed!!
In NZ/AO the amount of trees culled to facilitating hooved animals Cows, sheep, horses, etc.. as well as towns, cities roading in the late 19th century impacting our country is coming to fruition ask I write. The large rimu, pohutukawa, totara, kauri, etc..that held the land together have been decimated along with the ‘kaitiaki’ that called these forest there homes.
This country is only 183 years old from the signing of the TOW that only 3 generations give or take and the land is caving in to the pressures of greedy shortsighted overlords from europe who let’s be frank are the main perpetrators to this disaster that affecting every single life on this planet.
You make a salient point, I’ll come back to this. It is not enough that we took our fill from our natural resources but the amount we took, oil, gas etc. Now gold has been ” Rediscovered”
Our natural resources are not everlasting, Perth has discovered this.
My main takeaway from your point is greed and as we know greed is the root of all evils and at least the Greens have a principle to protect our resource( our country)rather that frack and crack it mentality, until we have no country left.
That’s emotional garbage.
Thank you for showing your intellectual insight, all three words.
Fabulous 3 words, confirming brevity is the soul of wit.
Thanks for the acknowledgment.
I can acknowledge you’re a fuck wit.
The Maori burnt many acres of land as they cleared it for their own use and to drive animals to their death into rivers and over cliffs. Their impact was small because their numbers wee small and their living standards were not advanced . They were great navigators and knew how to survive but their live style could not support 5 million people through summer and winter . The colonization of the country meant a better and longer life for all .
This is the 21t century. Try and keep on course.
Maori burned NZ to about 50% of its forest cover, Europeans down to 30 something percent, so the first colonizers – Maori -destroyed more.
More species went extinct after Maori colonization than after European.
So there’s that.
Enough with the bullshit revisionism Stephen, you might want this country torn apart on false pretenses for your own selfish benefit, I don’t.
We should be like France and not record stats on race, treat all citizens as equal, stop this fictional exceptionalism myth.
KeepcalmcarryonCancel, more pakeha revisionist BS! So trawling thru historic records by the very first pakeha who wrote exceptionally about their experiences quoted “the land is full of thick native forest a far as the eye can see” The burning of native forest which scientist noted was also a natural event that happened in AO/NZ 3000 years before any human lived on these Islands.
Your confusing with Maori burning forest or large extinction which is a myth of species comparing the damage that european farming practices have had on these lands. The lost of native flora & fauna that european exceptionalism has impacted this country immensely which is reflected today.
http://www.enzb.auckland.ac.nz/
We should be like France…
________________
Nah, fuck that !!!
Big difference between a herd of 1000 dairy cows shitting in a river after a feed of high input nutrients ( N P and pke) on a 2 ha paddock than a herd of a 1000 beef cows grazing a 1000 ha block, occasionally shitting in a river after grazing a basic rye grass clover mix that might get a dollop of lime or phosphate every so often
We are gonna end up voting for National just for the left to re-discover the need for housing, healthcare and education. Currently they don’t give two shits about it.
Wait for it, all the right wing apologists will be on soon to make their excuses as to why we should let the planet burn.
This is why all the big capitalists are donating big to the NACTS. just to keep them old fires burning hallelujah!!
The anemic, Lab good Nat bad, posts, that are a staple at ‘The Standard’ draw minimal engagement thought from their readership.
The liveliest comments and debate occur in The Standard’s ‘Open Mike’ sic.
Like this one:
https://thestandard.org.nz/open-mike-05-07-2023/#comment-1957988
We grow cows, trees, ignorant white people and violent brown people…
Black with a Vengeance, So white people (pakeha) aren’t violent? Give me examples of this exceptionalism benevolence??
Pakeha here in Aotearoa/NZ are more ignorant than violent just as Pasifikan people are more violent than ignorant.
That’s not to say Pakeha are not violent or Pasifikans aren’t ignorant.
It’s to say our education system has been traditionally set up to breed ignorance in Pakeha about why Pasifikans are prone to violence.
Cows and cash crop trees are products of colonization as much as our justice, education and governance sectors are. Those sectors/industries would be best served by undergoing a process of decolonization.
Yeah nah ?
Take your vengenance and stuff it up your jersey, (not Jersey cow though).
@BAV
Holy cow. After years of stirring the pot over at Kiwiblog with all that Pasifika Supremism you’ve turned up here!
Looks like you’ve already got a bite from Ultimate Lefty, “Stephen”.
that right ultimate righty
We have always been here…
Milk & Cream at the local vap shop is super expensive. So Fonteara must have some high end product s, not just cheap milk powder.
All our politics is silly in light of us really ignoring climate change. Cos it’s not an immediate crisis! Democracy just does the immediate apparently.
Bradley does both, Trotter seems sniffy about the real challenge — laughable. What an amusing descent to hell, right now. But it is a very human descent to hell.
Meanwhile here in Gisborne I’m considering Masterton or Chch — don’t like my hometown much.
Milk powder is an economic lifeline that we all benefit from:
Mr Shane Jones says New Zealand has a $30 billion a year trade relationship with China, including a large Maori component.
“I’m sure the United States want us to be closer publicly, overtly, to them. However, they have consistently refused to provide New Zealand with a free trade agreement. China is our economic lifeline in terms of international trade, certainly primary produce trade, so only a fool would take that for granted,” he says.