NZ Dairy Industry Flashpoint Approaching

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I have been arguing for some time that the NZ Dairy industry is a sunset industry the millisecond a synthetic calcium casing is found.

We have been led to believe that we are some fancy Dairy producer when the reality is we are a basic bitch exporter of basic bitch milk powder that is used as ingredient filler for the heavily manufactured food industry, 75% of our export is milk powder and the millisecond those big manufacturing industries can remove the cost of growing the cow to make the milk, our economy will risk an enormous implosion.

The NZ Dairy Industry Flashpoint is approaching…

Scientists find new way to make cow’s milk substitute, could have radical effect on New Zealand’s dairy industry

Scientists have found a new way to make a substitute for cow’s milk that could have a radical effect on the dairy industry.

It’s called precision fermentation – creating cow protein in the lab – and could replace dairy ingredients, which make up a significant proportion of New Zealand’s export market.

“Precision fermentation of dairy proteins which creates a very easy pathway for creating proteins without using dairy cows,” University of Otago Professor Hugh Campbell explained.

“If this area takes off, it improves New Zealand’s economic prospects because a whole lot of things happen that are high value, but it does shrink our livestock footprint on the land.”

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Food technologist Anna Benny has worked in food science for decades and has found herself living on a dairy farm in South Otago, so she has a unique perspective on the future of the dairy industry.

“My concerns are we are right in the firing line if this technology can take off,” she said.

Benny said New Zealand was vulnerable because three-quarters of our dairy exports could be replaced.

“The types of products that precision fermentation will produce are ingredients and powders. The types of products that we specialise in.”

…the Daily Powder Industry has managed to get environmental rules sidelined and water pollution limits eroded as they take on huge debt from the Banks to afford dairy intensification when that industry is a sunset industry.

Why on earth would the heavy manufactured food industry who peddle salt, sugar and fat laden food give a shit that the filler ingredient is organic when they want only profit maximisation?

We have built all economic support into a product that had a technological limit.

Cows will soon be Taxis in an uber world.

There is zero recognition of this risk because kiwis have been conned into believing that NZ Milk and Butter is the clever product we are exporting when the milk powder reality is far more demeaning.

The Cows will come home to roost.

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 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.

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.

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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!

The Left must force a bargain with Farmers and Growers 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.

For growers we need to protect our most productive growing land for food by giving those producers tax breaks to ensure they can continue to feed NZers first.

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.

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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33 COMMENTS

  1. Farming must be an holistic enterprise because so much about farming is nuanced and almost infinitely variable on a three dimensional plane. Think Vulcan chess on paddocks.
    Dairying is a crude and aggressive means of making money from any land area and is as factorified as one could get anything that could be considered agricultural.
    It’s also very good coin for the dominant urban elite so on that basis, fuck us and fuck the natural environment because fuck it, gimme all the money.
    The reason for the rise in dairying is because urban parasites have exploited traditional farming practices until many farmers were suiciding to avoid the indignity of being police-escorted off their fourth or fifth generation farms because they couldn’t pay the bills to the banks and sundry money lenders after they were squeezed to literal death, and that all happened because there was no resistance from the victims of urban greed.
    Ask ACT’s don brash about that. During his narcissistic, bare chested reign of greed and in-mirror sociopathic masturbations interest rates went to 22%.
    And on a cautionary note; those good ol days are just around the corner again.
    Farmers. This is what you do. DO NOT ground-swell again. You looked like dicks. Instead, do literally nothing but wait. Let them come to you with proposals and if you don’t like what’s being proposed… then go back to bed. It’s that simple. Dairying is money laundering. That, is all it is.
    On a more serious note. We farmers should be growing pot by the tonne and the dairy factories should be repurposed into manufacturing MDMA. ( God. I can hear you old cockies guffawing. ” Haw-haw-haw….” Well, laugh it up chuckles but remember, right now you’re fucked and that’s because you have no control over your own destiny. You’re being exploited. You’re enslaved. Those four foreign owned banks? The ones who are second most profitable in the world, second most to Canada. They got you good haven’t they. )

    • You keep telling us how good farmers are yet the evidence keeps showing that most of the current systems are unproductive, just today it was announced that Silver Fern and PPCS had lost about $120 million over the last year while we are also told that farmers are barely breaking even or making a loss. If it costs more to produce your sellable products than you earn from the sales then it seems pointless to keep going. As you say the problem with selling commodity products is that we are price takers and not price makers. While I support the idea of growing and selling high value products (I obviously disagree regarding mind altering drugs though) there needs to be a recognition that the current system is broken and a recognition of the need to change. While I have not seen any reliable evidence to prove it I suspect that if you allowed the health cost from the consumption of animal products to be offset against its income we would find that animal products will never be profitable to the economy. It is well proven that the correct plant based diet allows us to live longer and healthier lives so that is something we should focus on. I accept that some people could feel justified in looking at the current mess around the world and think what is the point in having a long healthy life and decide that mind altering drugs are a quick and happy way to escape (The Press had an article today about some immigrant farm workers made a substantial amount by catering to that demand) so you could try to get our laws changed to facilitate that however I think that our international trading partners would frown on that so it would be better to sell healthy plant products that we get a premium for while developing knowledge based industries that can pay higher wages.

      • Bonnie Everybody here seems to assume that these politicians care about New Zealand, and about our children’s future. They don’t. They care only about themselves and their own immediate needs, because that’s the way they are.

        A police minister who mumbles about law and order while failing to support a decent pay structure for the girls and boys in blue ? C’mon now. Tobacco groupie who won’t support renters bullied and exploited in insecure tenancies with kiddies subject to upheaval and searches for new schools? Third world ailments rampart among the children of the poor? Decent people care about the well-being of the community and the planet.

  2. Lol. No one is going voluntarily to eat these disgusting fucking franken-foods (all packed with GMOs and chemicals) unless you force them to do so. But keep believing!

  3. Martyn – So much Government support in the form of tax relief, rates relief, water consents, and the watering down of environmental standards in order to make Fonterra work…and for what?

    • For what? Only the ability to import the petrol for the cars, the stuff at The Warehouse and just about every other physical product you can buy in a shop.

      • It doesn’t have to be milk powder that huge chunks of the planet don’t want of grow their own. We have a large agricultural base. It doesn’t have to be dairy.

  4. I am no scientist but there a lot of proteins that are “brewed” on an industrial scale. Monoclonal antibodies used in oncology treatments being an example. There must be differences but I hardly think it will be a quantum leap before it’s viable.

  5. If people think they are poor now just wait till our dairy industry is destroyed.
    The irony is that our major market, China, is also supposed to be our enemy.
    Meanwhile, our friends whom Winston Peters wants us to join in military alliance USA, Britain, the EU, Canada Japan, India all place quota and tariffs on our dairy products.
    This behavior by our friends is not new. During the height of the cold war we had to trade with Russia. Iran has also been a prominent partner.
    Fonterra does not want to be a supplier of bulk powder but if our allies and our major market refuse to allow us to supply value added product what can we do.

    • We should revisit our trading links with Russia & Iran as these countries have all the goodies needed to stop becoming a banana republic. BRICS is replacing the petrodollar unless their a nuclear strike than say goodbye tp humanity!

  6. Factory produced meat has not been widely recognized as a substitute for the real think and I think substitute milk will be the same.

  7. Except with a far higher pollution footprint, as the raw ingredients to the fermentation process require greater inputs of fertiliser, land, water, and agrichemicals than the dairy industry does.

    • That is wrong, you compare feeding a cow to get milk (along with #1 & #2 outputs) which we dry and get the protein we want from to having bacterium making that specific protein in ideal conditions and the water/energy used is probably 10 to 20% of the cow based system. Personal I have not eaten dairy products for decades so I don’t see the point in people wanting to consume them but as long as people are ruled by their taste buds people will supply what they want and the lowest cost supplier will get the majority of the market.

  8. both holland and denmark are big dairy/pork producers but their watercourses are not open sewers…
    we are third world

  9. On the one had I’ve been expecting this for some time. On the other hand artificial meat is failing. And you ,ishould be pleased about the latest news from Stats NZ;
    At 30 June 2023, the number of:
    beef cattle was 3.7 million, down 4 percent from 2022
    sheep was 24.4 million, down 3 percent from 2022
    dairy cattle was 5.9 million, down 1 percent from 2022
    deer was 742,000, down 7 percent from 2022.

    Ou agricultural industry is steadily shrinking. Pity we have nothing to replace it. But the Far Left will think of something, right?

    • I’m buoyed by the ability of our farming communities to diversify they have done it before and if necessary will do it again.

  10. Even if factory meat & milk become a successful thing, there will be high end consumers demanding the real stuff. Like champagne from champagne not sparkling wine from Oz. Also ironically there will be a big contingent of greenies who only want to put ‘natural food’ into their bodies.

  11. I think the Dairy Industry is safe, Frankenmilk products cooked up in a Laboratory, just like the Frankenbeef & Frankenchicken will never replace the REAL THING, these Lab foods which are full of additives, GMO’s & other nasty things will not be able to replace real food? All it’s going to do is bump up the price for these foods astronomically & turn the real food into a niche product that only the rich will be able to afford while the poor will be given this GMO created Food to supplement the toxic Bugs they are trying to foist on us as a Food source, that’s the Globalist agenda!

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