Nu Zilind Gothic – Primary Sector Privilege Needs to End
They will never admit it, but the cowboys of New Zealand’s raw resource extractive economy are privileged. Farmers have considerable wealth tied up in property and stock, they have had access to undervalued freshwater to extract from, and to dispose into. Long time fishers often didn’t have to pay for their quotas and they certainly don’t pay for biodiversity costs. The use of raw resources such as land, soil, water, and fish stocks, are true examples of privatised benefits and socialised costs.
If you or I treated animals the way many farmers do, with systematic mistreatment, there’s a chance we’d be condemned. But the sheep sector that allows up to a hundred thousand lambs to die in spring snows each year expect us to feel sorry for their losses – not for the sheep. Dairy farmers want dispensations for polluting swathes of streams and rivers, and ruining freshwater for generations to come. The fishing industry would have us believe that they are caring stewards of the sea, keen on sustainability, and that they never catch dolphins.
They trot out the rhetoric that they are struggling, the back bone of the country, put upon by ‘urban liberals’ who sit round drinking lattes and know nothing about farming.
I grew up on a farm and remember the misery of pigs in tiny pens, castrations and tail clipping done without anesthesia. The sows that had no access to natural bedding, no space to turn around, no way of nurturing their piglets. My experiences of pigs having their throats cuts, bled out and scalded while the next in line watched from a cage on the tractor, put me off ever eating pork as an adult. Generally these practices haven’t changed because every time there’s a review of animal welfare, farmers successfully argue that they’re a special case, and changes to farm infrastructure would be too expensive and take too long.
Many of us have seen the videos of the cows loyally pursuing the tractors taking their babies – and those that are male being taken to the freezing works because they have little economic value. There’s the evidence of the bobby calves being mistreated, -just babies, being thrown around, left in the cold, and bashed to death. No doubt I’ll be condemned for using emotive language, of anthropomorphising the emotional effects on other animals, of generalising mistreatment when bad performers are ‘the exception’. But in the animal industrial complex, non-human life and nature are considered as a commodity and have little alternative value.
We’ve seen the videos and the photos of barns full of chickens, bred to mature in only six weeks to suit the fast-food market in stores and takeaway chains, but so distorted that they can barely stand. They’ll never see the sky except on their way to the rendering plant. They’ll never get a chance to fly, or to scratch in the dust. The way they’re bred and raised means they’re barely chickens at all.
We are less likely to see the travesties of modern fishing practices because there are so few observers, and on the rare occasion when cameras do catalogue indiscriminate fishing practices, you can be sure fishing industries don’t want the public to view it. It’s worth noting though that when cameras were installed as a trial on six fishing boats out of Timaru, five of them hauled up and discarded undersized, non-target fish, and the by-catch included two Hector’s dolphins. Generally, if a fishing boat catches a rare dolphin as long as it’s reported there will be no fine – but who would report it anyway because if you do, rumours have it you’ll be beaten up for jeopardising the industry. If you had any doubt about the privilege of the fishing industry, check out the Animal Welfare Act, mistreatment of animals is generally prohibited, unless it’s as by-catch. You can go to jail for catching trout without a licence but if you pillage the oceans on grand scale you’ll get very rich and a knighthood to go with it.
The privileged status of the primary sector is evident at the moment, with Governmental reviews of freshwater and Maui and Hector’s dolphins. In both cases affected sectors are pleading special interests.
The Seafood Industry have been running full page ads in leading newspapers pre-empting potential removal of their privileges and entitlements to kill. This week they featured Curly Brown, who’s been a fisherman off Taranaki for 38 years. The industry fudges the facts by denying they see or kill Maui dolphins, and claim that people like Curly, who employs five people including him and his wife, are the lifeblood of coastal communities, implying him and his mates are being unfairly targeted to save the endangered species only found here – making the argument that it’s people like Curly who are the endangered ones.
We’ve seen similar rhetoric this week from the dairy industry in response to the Government’s proposals to better manage fresh water for human and environmental health. Dairy farmers old and new have had such free and privileged access to freshwater that it’s driven landscape scale conversions to intensive and extensive dairying, ruining rivers in less than a lifetime.
The Government objectives are entirely reasonable – recognising that clean freshwater is a public and ecosystem right. That anyone should be able to swim, fish, gather mahinga kai and enjoy freshwater, but that urban development, agriculture, horticulture, forestry and other human activities are eroding that. The Action for Fresh Water Plan recognises a lack of robust regulations, monitoring and enforcement governing freshwater management, and aims for material improvements in degraded catchments within five years, and a return to healthy states within a generation. The draft plan aims to stop freshwater getting worse, for better management of storm water and waste water, with no further loss of wetlands (we only have less than 1% left) and streams, for tighter controls to prevent sediment loss from earthworks and urban areas, and for farmers and growers to understand and manage environmental risks and follow good practices. The plan proposes new standards and limits on some farming practices in some regions and catchments including providing financial and other support to assist a transition to sustainable land use.
It is suggested that all farmers and growers should have a farm plan to manage risks to freshwater by 2025 and that this includes restrictions on further dairy intensification unless there is evidence that it won’t increase pollution, through interim measures from June 2020. The aim is to reduce Nitrogen and Nitrate loadings within five years and to apply standards for intensive winter grazing, feedlots and stockholding areas. Given the images of cows chest deep and calving in mud, sediment plumes and other evidence of both animal welfare and environmental harm from intensive stock practices, we should welcome and support these proposals.
Federated Farmers have reacted on behalf of their stakeholders, with ‘shock and fury’, suggesting farmers have been ‘thrown under the tractor’, that the proposals are unnecessarily stringent, would come at great cost, that it would be “very hard to economically continue farming animals and vegetables under a regime like this”. The long-term targets are “effectively unachievable in some parts of the country or will end pastoral farming in these areas”.
National Party agriculture spokesperson Todd Muller played to his rural electorate audience and called the moves a “gut punch to rural New Zealand”, saying “farmers already put their shoulders to the wheel and put in the hard yards for water quality…”. National’s environment spokesperson (surely a contradiction in terms) Scott Simpson, said the proposals would “severely limit New Zealand’s most profitable sector”.
Naturally sectors who benefit from free resources such as freshwater will resist regulations designed to make their practices more environmentally sustainable. Any attempt to internalise and properly reflect hitherto uncosted benefits will be seen to hit their bottom lines.
But for the sake of ecosystems, animals, environmental and public health and our international reputation, the privilege needs to end. Whether or not the Government will be prepared to stand its ground and stare down fishing and farming interests for the greater good, remains to be seen.
It is extremely demoralising to people involved in primary industries who have over years put effort into running their businesses conscientiously in respect of the environment they have chosen to make their lives in, and love not just as much but more than their city brethren who prefer the comfort and convenience of the city life, to realise how they can only earn the hatred and condemnation of the rest of society. The society that derives everything from the land and the sea they that is not provided by tourism.
Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!
It’s for sure that the way pigs and poultry are farmed doesn’t bare close examination. Think about it next time you are eating your KFC. The reason that chicken leg is so succulent and large is not a good thing for the chicken, The lambs however are born into their natural environment and the late snow storm is a hazard that exists for them irrespective of farming. Which brings up the point that none of these animals would have a life at all in this over utilised world except to serve to feed humanity. Few living things would choose not to live even if life has to end, but I fully agree that there is no case for making any life less pleasant than it needs to be.
BTW the price of farm land is a curse to the farming community ; it is light years above what is economically sustainable for any other industry and is entirely the result of government policy of bout camps to encourage unlimited overseas speculation on our land for short term balance of payments statistics to look good.
D J S
I love the sanctimoniousness of this comment.
Farmers aren’t growing all this food for NZers, they are growing it for the international market. If this was just about producing food for the 5million who live here, we would have a lot more concern and compassion, but Farmers are growing for a market of 45million others. So drop the pretence.
My point was that those exports provide everything else we all use and consume. As well as what we eat. The share of revenue those exports return to the farm, just like all primary industries everywhere and always is the bare minimum that the system needs to provide the primary producer to keep the produce coming to market. Occasionally there are accidents that occur in the downstream management that allow a tiny bit more than essential but these over time are massively outweighed by the temporary oversupply generated by those windows.
Try it sometime.
D J S
That would be because they suck up all the available resources. Good on the govt for imposing limits. It means that more of the resources will now be available for something else and if you dont have the imagination to see what else there are plenty that will take the opportunity to diversify that this offers
Farmers are a private business getting handouts from our government, using free water and wrecking our rivers and streams while we fix there fuck ups and pay for there stock with m bovis costing us millions and many of us cant even afford the meat its too dare. And yet our farmers have been getting hand outs since the geckgo and now our government is offering help with water pollution options help is always on hand for farmers who never seem to be satisfied it seems to be all take and not much give this needs to change.
Lab grown meat and milk will within a decade make this conversation irrelevant.
Some on arable land will be able to grow a grain crop to feed the meat/milk factory but it would be more efficient to eat the crop directly. Hill country doesn’t have that option.
The synthetic meat will not grow out of sand or soil or air. Or out of mineral oil either I would.t think.
D J S
Improved rural urban linkages: Building sustainable food systems
The article of Christine Rose describes facts that cannot be disputed. Many arguments raised by the respondents cannot be disputed either.
Building up rural or city folks as actual enemies of each other is not helpful at the end, albeit useful for analytical purpose, especially if an element of class structure would be added to it.
Both groups, rural and urban producers and consumers, are trapped in the same system of reckless exploitation of natural resources and capitalization of every iota of life. One does not go minus the other.
Without a perspective of radical system change the discussion tends to look like mudslinging.
No doubt, what AONZ needs is a comprehensive rural development programme that fosters diversification of agricultural production, local market orientation, rural vocational training, sustainable forestry and fisheries, land use governing protection of natural resources, etc.
Climate Resilience.
System change. Now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJgMzxUTx2U
For the record, I’ve condemned the banking system elsewhere. And I’m certainly not getting fat on KFC because I don’t eat that shit and don’t eat any meat at all. I don’t drink lattes either.
Christine I totally concur with your horror of unnecessary cruelty to animals and your empathy with the distress that farming animals causes them at times. But nature itself is cruel. I don’t believe animals are any less subject to emotional distress than we are just because they can’t speak. Their body language is eloquent.
But it gets us nowhere to castigate and censure the farming community the way you have done here. You could have made all the points you have about the environment without the accusations and hostility emulating Martyns natural instincts. It’s not constructive to make enemies of the people you have to work with.
No hard feelings D J S
Sounds like you are missing out on the good things in life!
Try some happy milk.
https://www.happycowmilk.co.nz/
I’m lactose intolerant, and I’m not a calf. I was weaned years ago 🙂 Though I do commend the happycow milk company
You’ve lumped a bunch of primary industries together all with different issues, all irrelevant to each other , all important but you are coming across with a classic urban vs rural uninformed spray, your (apparent) historic country roots don’t forgive you some basic knowledge.
Some specific points:
Pigs: by law must be stunned before bleeding out when slaughtered commercially. Farmers cutting throats without first shooting dead even on farm would also be reported and fall short of current welfare codes. If your family was cutting pigs throats on farm even back in the day without shooting, that’s a shit show, and your family have issues, not normal.
https://www.agriculture.govt.nz/dmsdocument/1409-commercial-slaughter-animal-welfare-code-of-welfare
Sheep: clearly unbeknown to you some farmers are already moving to local anaesthetic for docking.
Lamb losses to snow? Before agriculture goats/sheep would have been simply eaten alive by wolves or mountain lions. Well farmed animals live a better life on farm than a naturally predated one.
Nature is cruel and doesn’t have welfare standards.
Good farmers, which is most of them, empathise immensely with their stock.They suffer mentally when their animals do and consequently have a higher suicide rate than social justice warriors.
They are animal people, not urban preachers.
Dairy? Not a personal fan of corporate farming, most aren’t corporates , it’s crap to lump everyone in with some over irrigated farms in Canterbury. How to unwind the over intensification of some areas without hitting the guys doing the right thing should be the question. Solution is nuanced and will involve compensation as in Taupo and overseas. More stick, no carrot seems to be what’s on offer.
Good luck with that.
Fed farmers? Have done more harm than good at national level being pig headed despite some genuine good reps at ground level IMO
Commercial fishing? Different thread?
This post of yours further impresses on me that the left aren’t looking for solutions for NZ they are just looking to put the boot in to who they perceive as their political opponents- they certainly will be now.
The politics of kindness.
Farming is like housing.
The land is overvalued. And we want higher farm and land use standards and we want better quality housing.
Farmers with the debts they have will struggle with higher standards and given land for housing is so expensive and we have a housing shortage – every move to improve housing quality results in increasing unaffordability (prices and rents).
The government is doing more in housing (1000 new state houses a year) and now rent to own.shared equity (capped numbers), lower deposits for Kiwi Build homes. But not enough.
As for farmers – I would suggest interest free loans for money invested to raise farming practice standards (the money plus interest accruing repaid on farm sale, so the government books are OK), so that farm operating costs are unaffected.
I didn’t say the pigs weren’t shot first – but that doesn’t diminish the horror and really, when such acts of barbarism as bashing calves to death or killing animals without stunning them first, the chances of any scrutiny let alone reporting are incredibly low – you’d need to be a very courageous whistle blower to report such travesties, and yet that is what reporting and compliance relies un because there are less than 30 MPI inspectors for the whole country. I also know finally now in 2019 that MPI are consulting on mandatory anesthesia for significant surgical procedures such as tail docking (unless for example in the case of piglets less than seven days old), -and we’ll see whether those measures actually get through the system and get implemented on farms with thousands of animals. To say that this treatment of animals is acceptable because they otherwise wouldn’t have a life and because in the wild animals die from cold and snow and wolves is a farcical argument. 70 billion animals are farmed every year and this is a systematic commodification and derogation of animals’ lives and rights. The sectors aren’t separate from each other, it’s a broad institutional problem.
You certainly implied the pigs weren’t shot. If they had been then they were dead when bled and your revulsion is to the blood not the suffering.
It is not legal to bludgeon calves to death either.
I’m not sure that waxing emotive (and slightly misleading) on illegal activity really demonstrates anything – bad people break laws, that doesn’t mean we should stop farming.
NZ has recently upgraded welfare laws and good farmers are well ahead of legal minimum standards.
The tail docking local anaesthesia thing has potential, but I’m not sure it’s at a stage yet where it’s proven 100% effective, or practical but at least they are trying eh.
Good for you going vegan and walking the talk.
Keepcalmcarryon – it was never my intention to imply they weren’t shot, but they certainly weren’t dead when they were bled. I know the horrors aren’t legal, but by the bravery of whistleblowers we know it happens. In fact I’ve heard from people working in the industry directly that there’s more on-farm booby calf killing even than there used to be. There are some good farmers and some improvements signalled for animal welfare standards, but the basic premise of farming in my view – and that of a growing proportion of the community, an abhorrent, unjustified and unncecesary practice. I recommend some of the vast array of literature on this – starting with Peter Singer’s highly rational views, but also Sue Anderson & Will Kymlicka’s ‘Zoopolis’, and ‘Making a Killing; the Political Economy of Animal Rights’, as well as looking at NZ’s Animal Welfare Act and many of our current practices. Look at MPI’s ruling announced today for example, that winter grazing of animals in chest deep mud doesn’t contravene the Animal Welfare Act. Southland farmers might say the cows weren’t in mud for long – but how would they like to spend a night in mud with their young. There’s physiological and psychological evidence of the impacts of even small traces of mud in cows’ water supplies – the AWA just hasn’t kept up.
Farming is unjustifiably inhumane – example given: lots of blood but pig was already shit/stunned-
Yet you loudly advocate for aerial use of a poison (1080)that takes up to 24 hours to kill, affecting countless thousands of animals whose young then die of starvation. The SPCA found it was in humane.
So supposed 1-week ban turned permanent then, dear TDB Censor?! Gutless!