Newstalk ZB Tim Beveridge talks to dairy farmer Mike at 4:30am on Saturday 7th September.
Mike:
It was a bit of a shame to listen to Alana, the stress in her voice, and this is what is happening to us farmers, particularly dairy farmers, I am a… I should say I’m meant to be a retired dairy farmer, but at the moment I’m working solidly for my son helping out on the farm driving tractors. And I came awake to see what I could do about the calving check, and I came awake and I heard your talk back, that you want to talk over the water… so yeah, I can answer any questions you’ve got, I’ve been involved in the industry for oh… for fifty odd years.
Tim:
Okay, ah…phew… what questions, what to ask? Well, what… do you feel that ah… the government… oh, okay, where does NZ farming, dairy farming, stand in comparison to other um farming practices internationally?
Mike:
We are way above everyone else. We are way above. You can take a glass of milk from NZ, drink it at an Irish bar and it’ll have less impact, carbon wise than…
Tim:
Yeah, actually I read that press release from the marketing guy. Said, what, a glass of milk… a litre of milk produced in Ireland has more greenhouse gases or… that… than… than a… sorry, more carbon footprint than a litre of milk produced in NZ and shipped to Ireland. (Laughs)
Mike:
Yep.
Tim:
Which is…pretty…
Mike:
And they’re one of the… they’re one of the more advanced ones. So, NZ is… is regarded well all overseas but you’ve got to… what the matter is, I think (indistinct) it’s an election campaign starting, they did it successfully last year…
Tim:
Is that because of the rivers? Everyone goes, oh yes, the rivers – I want to swim in the river.
Mike:
Yes. The only good thing that we’ve seen, and I’m involved in Federated Farmers, the only good thing we’ve seen is that a heck of a lot of media commentators are getting advised about the bullying which is taking place and are starting to strike back. In fact, hang on, hang on, hang on – you’re not telling the truth.
Tim:
So, who’s bullying who?
Mike:
The government.
Tim:
Yeah.
Mike:
The people. They’re out to say that dairy farming is bad. Now if you want clean stream… they want the ability to swim in rivers, right?
Tim:
Yeah.
Mike:
Swimming in rivers has not nothing to do with dairy farmers, it’s got nothing to do with nitrates. Swimming in rivers has got to do with e-coli, and where’s the E. coli coming from? The inconvenient truth is the E. coli is coming out of your…
Tim:
Bottom.
Mike:
…sewerage schemes.
Tim:
Yes, well actually I didn’t know if the previous caller realised the… the ah… inadvertent pun when she said she wanted to encourage someone to pass a motion on something… I was like well…
Mike:
Laughs.
Tim:
That’s the very problem isn’t it?
Mike:
We’ve got five k’s of river frontage. We’ve got five k’s of river frontage and one of the factors which came out was that we started checking all our water levels, and our water, when it came against the farm at the top was high in nitrates and when it left the farm – which is completely against all of the computer modelling – the computer modelling says we should be adding nitrates to the water – but the actual fact, the water levels was going down.
And we’re downstream about five k’s from the tiny wee townships (indistinct) and so, the nitrates (indistinct) we can swim in our rivers, there’s no E. coli.
Umm… most of the monitoring, all the monitoring in the regional council is down in areas where they know there’s a problem. So, they may say 60% of our sites are affected – that means 60% of the sites of the very few sites which they actually check. So that’s the inconvenient truth.
The majority of the rivers… the majority of the rivers are checked by regional councils. Um… nitrates, well… you are on a hiding to nothing with nitrates at the moment um… particularly in ones like Canterbury, Southland is that if you… the only way to stop nitrates getting into the… getting into the water is to either get rid of um… in Canterbury, in the fragile soils which leach badly, is to either get rid of all farming completely, put cows in big herd homes or allow genetic engineering or genetic editing to solve the problems…
Tim:
However, the government won’t do that lest the greens throw their hands in the air and go aaah.
Mike:
No, the government won’t allow cows to go into big barns, because oh, that’s terrible, they won’t allow genetic engineering – oh, that’s terrible, um… oh, we’ll get rid of dairy farming.
And what are you going to replace dairy farms with, on that land? Most of the people would tell you the disaster that forestry is doing, and all the mess it’s made, but the saddest thing that I can say is that you’ve got so many people now… we’ve got friends, or dairy farmer acquaintances who when they go into their local city, never announce their profession – the amount of hatred which exists out there.
Tim:
Really?
Mike:
We know there’s cases of children in schools being bullied because of their parents…
Tim:
This is dreadful!
Mike:
Well that’s what’s happening.
Tim:
It’s appalling!
Mike:
It’s… it’s a… there was a… there was a remarkable cut down of the amount of verbal and social media bullying on dairy farmers on…
Tim:
That’s disgraceful. That makes me angry considering this government bangs on about mental health and everything in a sector where actually dairy farmers have a great deal of ah… they’re prominently presented in mental health statistics…
Mike:
We used to…
Tim:
…in a negative way.
Mike:
You must have heard the stress in that… Alana’s statements when she was talking about (indistinct) there was a hell of a lot of stress in there and…
Tim:
I know, I know. She was trying to be sort of humorous, sarcastic
Mike:
Sarcastic because of the stress.
Tim:
…but it was just… it was just awful.
Mike:
(Indistinct) at the moment… quite frankly if I was 20 years younger and I was full time I would have said to my wife, let’s get the hell out of this. It’s not worth fighting… fighting any longer. And why should you have to fight? Because we know, we can prove – we’ve got the scientific proof that we’re not leaching any nitrates, into the river. Scientific proof that we’re not leaching…