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Maybe all romances have their ups and downs. Outside the hut, frosted grass sparkled like a diamond cloth in the last of the moonlight. Magical but burningly cold on bare feet, so I had to race back to the overnight fug of wood smoke, damp clothes and men-smell.

Steve had been grumpy after an argument about what now seems a stupid issue - the need for haircuts - and we had gone to our separate bunks. Then he’d knocked the alarm clock to the floor where he couldn’t stretch to stop its unwelcome clanging, now up and stumbling in the dark. He’d lost last night’s toss, so he had to go catch and saddle the horses and let the dogs off. I heard barking and saw their unique tail-sniffing acquaintance rituals through the smeary window. I later got on with stirring porridge and watching chops fry brown.

Sure, it was a life with only basic comforts and, perhaps strangely, the life I loved. Mustering on these hill country stations for the past three years had kept this love affair going with a simple landscape of hills and streams. Faraway mountains crouched behind rocks and changing grey-gold tussock, thorny matagouri, manuka and weeds.

But work in the hills can be lonely. Although I had lived in my own self-protected world, I could see the advantages of working as a team with comforting male company at night and my horse and dogs each day. So meeting Steve was a bonus in this high country romance. We were now a contract mustering duo, moving around the country with regular clients.

The first time we met, I knocked over his beer at the dog trials bar and rushed to replace it and avoid any aggro. He’d grudgingly thanked me and started a connection between us. His two-metre heavy frame put my short, wiry body in the shade. We became known in local pubs as the One and a Half Men of Omarama. Steve never did get the literary or even television connection. Although we’d both gone shepherding to first build our dog teams, he left school at 15. In contrast, after two years, I was a university dropout, intolerant of theory from impractical lecturers.

Ours wasn’t the easiest relationship. Steve was self-sufficient, even reluctant to let me use his frypan as I didn’t clean it to his satisfaction. His clothes were always tidy, even after a hard day bashing through scrub on the hill, and he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t sew on missing buttons. He liked the latest gear and had a beard. You’d call me unshaven.

When I’d clambered into boots, oilskin coat, and woolly hat to protect the warm inner glow from a satisfied stomach, a blush-pink glow in the eastern dawn lit the dark blue shadows.

“Red sky in the morning is a shepherd’s warning,” Steve tossed over his shoulder at me. I grunted scathingly, but he continued, “That’s what my father used to say.”

The weather looked pretty settled to me as we levered into our saddles and headed out up the valley. Then, up a side gully into a pocket of clammy mist. It deadened some sounds but highlighted creaking leather and the familiar snick and clink of hooves on stones. The manuka hung with moisture, and bushes swished against our coats. Mysterious new country, yet I couldn’t see it. Later, we broke out of the white blanket into clear early sunlight on a leading ridge. Before us, spread an arduous climb to the back boundary ahead.

We separated, and I was comfortable in my own space, warmed by horse heat, heading for my beat with dogs trailing behind.

“Speak up, Joe. Ho! Ho! Speak up.” His throaty bark echoed around the hills. It mightn’t have been Split Enz, but it was the only musical background to this romance. The sheep started to move in front of me. The sun climbed higher and off came the coat. Dogs barked, and sheep drifted on. Occasionally, I had to send out a heading dog to stop a group dancing sideways or to shift a stubborn clump of dirty white stragglers in a gully. Generally, everything went with the gentle flow of a stable relationship.

But the mountains reminded us who was really in charge. Within minutes, everything Steve and I had built began to unravel.

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Water should be a clear, colourless, tasteless, odourless liquid.

Is it?

Maybe not, if people spend $140m to buy 135m bottled litres of our own water each year, plus import another 5m litres.

WHY?

If you listen to some environmentalists, our water has only some of those qualities, so that’s bad. Shallow waters make most noise, but why bad, and who’s to blame?

Farming, farmers and particularly dairy farmers, if you believe some academics and activists like Greenpeace.

§ They are the focus of media talk, words and pictures of the worst water pollution.

§ Perhaps that’s more newsworthy than the truth.

§ Compare that with media’s negligible coverage of the annual swimming beach ban in Auckland City and the engineering solutions and long-term work to resolve a significant ongoing sewage spill from Wellington City into the Cook Strait.

Is salty water less important?

The quoted ‘Swimmable’ test relates to both sea and highlighted rivers and lakes.

LET’S FOCUS ON FRESHWATER

Major freshwater contaminants are E. coli and sediment. Add in nitrogen, phosphorus and heavy metals.

§ Why are farmed animals to be fenced from waterways but not wild animals having similar effects?

§ Why are farmers and their farmed animals blamed for E. coli water levels but not birds and fish?

§ Why are simple farm animals worse than humans with their many water uses?

§ Why is a city not seen as a human feedlot with food in and waste out?

§ Why are dangerous heavy metals in city water ignored?

Double standards exist.

A different look can produce a different view.

Look through one window of a research-based comparison of farms and their livestock with people and their cities.

FARMS

Each farm water catchment has different soils, landforms, climates and a mosaic of uses, each with varying effects on the water.

Farm economic activities can pollute waterways with fertiliser and pesticides, livestock - more especially cattle, and harvesting/replanting exotic forests.

Catchments in trees should be better, although nutrient loading from exotic trees is similar to pastoral catchments; from native trees is about half that. Forested catchments have lower water turbidity and negligible E. coli levels.

CITIES

Urban catchments are remarkably similar, with similar water discharges.

Urban pollution comes from human water use and waste, transport, industry, and similar activities, as well as minor animal influences. Each person contributes about 250 litres of treated waste daily, 40 times more than a dairy cow.

Ministry for the Environment data shows that nutrient loading in urban catchments is about 5% more than in pastoral catchments. Turbidity from silt, algae, and sewage is 13% higher, and E. coli is 80% higher. Urban nitrate nitrogen, reactive phosphate and E. coli water levels are up to twice that of water from pastoral catchments.

ONE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FARM AND CITY

Farmers, particularly dairy farmers, face harsh penalties for effluent problems trumpeted in the media. Urban penalties are much less severe, if at all.

Is that from the policeman and judge also being the polluter?

_________________________________________________________________________________

This is not about blaming urban or rural sectors of society.

All people, living and doing, will have some adverse effects on the environment.

We have to accept that.

People are part of the environment.

This is about balance and understanding.

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STILL WATERS RUN DEEP

A basic fact is our pasture-based food production is as environmentally friendly as it gets.

There are exceptions, and the media highlights them, but that is not reality.

A fundamental fact, often either ignored or not appreciated, is that NZ depends on export income to try to pay for everyone’s import costs.

§ Over the last 15 years or so, everyone has benefitted from these so-called ‘polluting cows’.

§ Dairy exports have more than DOUBLED from $13 billion to $28.6 billion.

§ Over 80% of our merchandise exports come from our farmed land.

§ Fifteen years ago, our merchandise exports failed by only 4% to close the gap with merchandise import costs. Since then, increased costs, regulations and criticism of farm water contamination have not helped to fill that gap.

§ Even now, following an extraordinarily profitable agricultural export year and strict government money management, the gap remains the same.

As we continue to live beyond our means, imagine if there were no $28.6 billion of dairy export income.

Understanding that dairy cows are still in the future mix provides a view through that window of any future clamour, cynical condemnation, and controls.

Farmers need careful communication for cooperation to meet credible challenges.

That’s why you crossed the Rural Urban Bridge.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it float.

Most people remember their first snowfall with excitement. Mine started with a stranded tractor, and wondering whether I’d ever make rugby practice. Sometimes the best farming lessons arrive wrapped in bad weather.

If things went on like this, I’d miss footy practice. Rugby was important! As were the long traditions of eighty-minute challenges on muddy, rough-chewed sports paddocks. The village team had welcomed my new blood, even though, as a hooker and a six-inch height difference, I was locking with a former Canterbury rep for the next match. Now my shoulders and thoughts bowed with several responsibilities.

After a year as a junior shepherd on a King Country station, I could ride a horse, drive a tractor, lamb a ewe, crutch a sheep, mark a calf, and fix a fence. Farm work meant being out in all weather – hot and cold, wet, sometimes in the dark. On weekends, when animals demanded. Then, I got a new job on a North Canterbury hill farm, starting in late summer, for more responsibility, opportunities and experiences. I had arrived, bringing my saddle, boots, and a starter dog team: an old yard dog, a bounding huntaway, and a year-old heading dog still learning. Like me.

North Canterbury was certainly different. The faded summer-yellow countryside, blow-dried by the frequent norwester, was a real shock. Noticeable climatic differences with the King Country, but farming principles are much the same. It never rained when we wanted it, and didn’t stop when we needed sun. The annual farm work routine was similar. Sheep still smelled like sheep, but I missed the smell of heat-scorched manuka, pronounced differently here.

But rugby melded the social layers, fostered by family, wealth and education since earlier settlement and history. We drank together at the after-match but still in different pubs during the week.

Winter snow was an absolute novelty. I’d only ever seen it in pictures before. There’d already been a few flurries from late autumn storms, but the boss could smell a bad southerly coming as colder weather started to squeeze the land. He knew about footy practice but first wanted the heifers brought down from the back block to a handier paddock where they could be fed if need be. So I climbed onto the grey Fergie tractor, togged up in a hat, a bulky coat, and gloves, and called the dogs onto the tray.

We drove along the sloppy track through stream crossings, slipping around cuttings and setting gates for the return trip. I had to walk the last mile up to the back boundary, but fortunately, the cattle had mobbed in a sheltered gully out of the wind and down-swinging temperature. The sky started to drain of light, and suddenly, snow came. A white curtain of hardened flakes driving sideways soon cut visibility. I’d heard about wind-chill, and now I certainly felt it.

The cattle were moving with the wind and not towards the gate. Dogs darted and barked, nipping at the heels of the bellowing cattle. In an hour, the ground was covered in snow. Icy sabre wind bored into trousered legs.

Using dogs, shouts and curses to herd the cattle along while watching for breaking animals, steering the tractor and squinting through the ragged white screen – eventually, it all became too much. The tractor slipped sideways into the water table, and the front wheel slumped into a hole. Reversing would make it worse. How could I get the tractor out of this? We needed it back at the homestead. What would the boss think and say? Footy practice that night for Saturday’s title match, and being late would bring rough comments from the coach and my teammates. Now it would be a long walk, but perhaps that would at least warm me up.

I had four problems. The tractor was stuck. The cattle were scattered. The snow kept falling.

And it was only halfway through the day.

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A convenient banner for environmental activists to wave, so many people now think it’s our food production slogan, especially for exports. It’s not.

It means different things to different people and should not be confused or combined. As the late Helen Hughes, our first Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, said 30 years ago, clean and green New Zealand was a fiction created by accident.

SO WHAT DOES CLEAN AND GREEN MEAN?

The dictionary defines green as being gullible, immature, unsophisticated or newly minted.

v That’s not farmers.

v They’re responsible and directly and indirectly involved with land, plants, environment, people and thousands of individual animals.

v They must be well-educated, progressive, skilled, knowledgeable, versatile, and flexible to run multi-million-dollar businesses.

Being a farmer means getting dirty most days.

v Soil that’s either mud in winter or dust in summer.

v Animals digest plants with a dirty end product.

v Step in it or have it wiped on you or your clothes.

v Dusty products like lime and fertiliser, sticky like some chemicals, and smeary like oil and grease.

Working outside when it’s hot and sweaty, so all these can stick to your skin and clothes.

v Harvesting grain and seeds and making and storing hay means dust.

v Fixing leaking water pipes means mud.

v Despatching animals for ill health or meat means blood.

It isn’t easy to stay clean if you are a farmer.

SHOULD OUR FOOD BE CLEAN AND GREEN?

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Consumer science shows consumers choose and act differently. Using psychological, social, cultural, educational and personal, situation-based decisions.

These hide clues in price, taste, convenience, quality (however defined), appearance, trust, safety, origin, production methods, age, generation, household technology….

Marketers know that product format, packaging, delivery, access, legal and financial systems and currencies are also involved.

Conclusion: Food choice is complex,~ with different areas of concern.

NEW ZEALAND IS A FOOD EXPORT TRADING NATION

But there is not one global food market.

v Meat and dairy food choices reflect freshness, quality and taste, animal welfare, nutrition, outdoor production and price, in that order.

v European consumers prioritise safety, taste, quality, price and nutrition.

v In the northern hemisphere, environmental sustainability, food miles, climate damage and emissions all ranked lower.

v American consumers prioritise taste, price, healthiness and convenience.

So the Fish and Game claim that polluted waterways hurt our food export prices was a clear example of blackening farming for its own agenda without justification or reality. Other environmental activists are as guilty.

That’s not to say clean and green aren’t important to their agendas. However, exporters should set their own marketing standards, not local New Zealanders writing the export script like Aucklanders, with only 8% of our exports.

We have an enviable reputation for healthy, nutritious, safe, reliable, sustainably-produced food meeting the standards of our markets.

v The New Zealand appellation is what we need without compromised labels if we get behind a New Zealand brand with passion and loyalty.

v Think Swiss watches or Italian shoes.

v Selective agendas should be kept local, where they apply.

AT THE FARM PRODUCTION LEVEL

Farmers can claim they produce food sustainably. To use the legal jargon: that means managing the use, development and protection of natural and physical resources to enable people and communities to provide for their social, economic and cultural well-being, health and safety.

Sustaining natural physical and potential resources for the future by avoiding, remedying or mitigating adverse environmental effects and safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil and ecosystems.

Evaluated in the framework of each unique farm and each farmer.

AROUND THE NEW ZEALAND DINNER TABLE

People have different living standards, lifestyles, and activities, shaped by personal preferences and opportunities. Societies and communities have unique cultures developed over time, some more important than others. They evolve by living and working in an environment, forming social bonds. They can relate to places, activities, language, entertainment, behaviours, speech and dress.

ACROSS THE RURAL URBAN BRIDGE

Urban and rural communities are different societies. To understand rural cultures, you need to live in them for a while, not observe them from passing car windows, the TV news, or casual connections.

Farmers live and work in the natural environment and see it through different eyes than non-farmers. It’s green when not in drought; it’s pasture, trees and shrubs; it’s native and introduced plants and animals.

The urban environment is different, and town people want to escape to their images of nature, even if based on imagination, nostalgia or wishful thinking.

That’s not wrong, but it can be too focused to be practical.

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“Got you at last, you bugger,” he shouted. “I knew you’d be back!” Gordon sidled around the barn, swinging his torchlight to a dark shape halfway through the fence.

“Get up, you bastard! Come with me,” he barked, lifting a shotgun.

“Don’t shoot – don’t shoot. Just let me get up.” A slightly built figure unscrambled from the wires. Crouching, now splotched with mud and clearly worried. But defiant eyes blazed from a hooded young oval face.

“Who’s with you? Where’s the rest of you?”

“I’m alone. Let me go, and I’ll leave now.”

“Oh no, you won’t. You’re coming with me,” and Gordon grabbed the figure by the sleeve.

“That’s assault. And threatening me with a gun. I’ll have you for that. And for those little calves in there.”

Gordon ignored the challenge, jabbing with the gun towards the shed, where he turned on a floodlight.

“A girl,” he exclaimed, now seeing her blonde hair and pinched face.

“Call me Debs. Everyone else does,” she responded cheekily. His anger volcano erupted.

“You interfering bitch – you’re up for it now, Deborah. You must’ve come through the locked front gate, so that’s breaking and entering. And you’ve been here before, haven’t you – painting words on my walls. That’s vandalism. And I’ll bet it was you who cut the fence that let the calves out last week, too. You make me sick. I’m calling the cops.” He flicked open his cell phone.

“DON’T! Don’t! Please don’t call the cops. Can’t we talk about this?” She was scared now, no longer cocky. Her impudent half-grin had faded with worry.

“You can talk while we wait for them. Tell me why you’re monstering me, invading my farm, my home, my life.” He stood commandingly on a hay bale, and she shuffled over to lean on a wall.

“Stand up! You’re not at one of your dope parties now. Well?”

“Your calves are suffering in that shed. They should be out in the fields, galloping around,” she began.

“Oh yeah. In the dark, huh! Anyway, how’d you know they’re suffering? How can you know about them better’n me? Who’s with them every day?”

“Calves deserve just the same equality and rights as humans. Why don’t you think of their pain? Pain’s pain to whoever.” She was starting to get agitated, forgetting her situation.

“You don’t give up, do you? Open your mind, you silly little girl. Define pain. Define degrees of pain a calf can feel. Animals eat each other. Do you think that might be painful for some of them?”

“You’re silly, not me. Calves don’t eat each other. There’s lots of people who think like me. We’re living the highest human values – goodness, generosity. We know that any animal pain and death are real to them.”

Then flashing red and blue lights pulled up at the gate.

A policeman was striding up the drive.

“Hey Gordon,” he called. “Did you know some calves were out on the drive?”

“Now you know why I called you. And I need some help to sort out this young girl.” He paused. “But hang on a minute.”

He was getting frustrated with her blank-wall argument.

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One sentence from the policeman changed everything.

Gordon had spent time accusing Deborah.

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A poultry industry spokesman said last year, “... it’s our foot-and-mouth disease moment” after the virulent bird flu outbreak that you’d almost forgotten.

What could a FOOT AND MOUTH disease outbreak mean for New Zealand?

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HERE’S AN EXAMPLE FROM SCOTLAND

This is comment on the last major 2001 UK outbreak by international author Alan Taylor, editor of the UK Sunday Herald and the Scottish Review of Books.

“Travelling deep into the Scottish borders, east from Edinburgh, traffic thinned out until it became non-existent. There were empty roads for mile after mile. Entrances to farms and estates taped off as if they were crime scenes, and where access was essential, there were mats sodden with disinfectant.

Weirdly, given the circumstances, fields were dense with sheep and cows, which, of course, would be killed if found to be diseased. To all intents and purposes, the countryside had been closed off. No one was outdoors, and no ramblers. Animals were being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands and burnt in pyres.

This outbreak was first discovered at the end of February, with the first Scottish case at the beginning of March. Over the next couple of months, more than 1.2 million animals were slaughtered in Scotland alone.

As in the rest of the country, the disease was confronted by a rigorous stamping-out policy which involved the wholesale slaughter of all animals on infected premises and all those regarded as ‘dangerous contacts’. The State Veterinary Service decided to impose a pre-emptive cull of all sheep within a 3 km radius of an infected farm; later extended to cows.

A farmer was waiting to see the disease creep ever closer, praying against hope that his livestock would be spared.

· In the event, he lost more than 600 cattle and 700 sheep.

· F&M was diagnosed one day, a valuation to compensate him for his loss of animals was arranged for 8 the next morning,

· An hour later, the slaughter began until 11 that night.

One could only imagine what it must have felt like to nurture recently born lambs and milk cows one day and then witness them being killed en masse the next day.

· The animals were cremated and buried near his house, and the pit was still smouldering two weeks later.

· You could see the smoke, he said, smell the burning flesh.

· He likened it to an anti-social barbecue.

The impact on the countryside was incalculable and traumatic. A 2002 report by Scotland’s national tourist agency estimated that it had cost the tourist industry £200-250m. That did not consider the lasting psychological or other economic damage.

Once people stop going to a place, persuading them to return is difficult and expensive.

For the duration of the outbreak, the countryside was effectively quarantined. Like the place had been evacuated or ethnically cleansed.”

IN NEW ZEALAND

Our outbreak policy could be compulsory slaughter and prohibited travel.

At the first sign, our exports stop until our customers clear NZ, taking several months. Even if the first case was contained.

A couple of MPI website references for this Horror Show.

• Economic impacts of farm disease incursion in New Zealand, May 2024 NZIER

• NZ Vet Journal 50(2) 46-55 2002. Foot and mouth disease: an assessment of issues facing New Zealand.

So, loss of export income, farmer income and capital, and government costs for MPI actions and compensation. A big pit to burn and bury a Canterbury herd of three thousand cows.

A sad tourist industry, and you thought it was quiet during COVID-19?

WHAT IS F&M?

It’s nasty. Infection’s through physical contact with saliva, animal breath, blood, semen, meat, milk, skin, soil, hay, and straw.

The virus can last 2 days to 5 weeks, depending on temperature—longer in winter. And it can blow up to 10 km in the right conditions.

It affects cloven-hoofed animals like sheep and cattle. And deer, goats and pigs like those in the bush - out of control.

PROTECTION

· We have NAIT animal tracking system for sheep, cattle, and deer, which will be essential if it’s entirely up to date and includes lifestyle farmers’ stock.

· We have X-ray, hand and baggage inspections at international airports, as well as customs declarations.

· We don’t have adequate penalties for people bringing risky items to threaten us.

Compare the up to $4,500 fine plus automatic six-month licence disqualification for dangerous driving without injury.

A $2,000 instant fine to measure the F&M risk would soon spin around social media to all potential travellers, travel agents and websites.

It’s not only farmers who need this protection. It’s our whole country.

Australia is more stringent than us. WHY?

Got the message now?

PS You can do your part to stop any risks. You’ll know how.

It was bus-station gloomy when they arrived.

“Over here, girls – how are you both – I haven’t seen you for years – gosh, you’ve grown and grown up too,” eyeing 12-year-old Cindy’s full make-up.

“Sorry. We didn’t recognise you in those farm clothes, Uncle Jamie,” said younger sister Claire.

“Come on then, let’s put your bags on the ute, and we’ll get you home. Auntie Jan is looking forward to seeing girls in the house.”

“But that dog’s going to walk all over our new suitcases.”

“No, no, Bella‘ll just lie down beside them. She goes everywhere with me. She’s having a bit of a break from her new pups. You’ll be able to play with them. Anyway – all aboard,” as he shoved cartons aside on the front seat.

Soon, they were rattling along on a windy gravel road up a long valley.

“Uncle – I feel sick,” said Cindy softly.

“Look… if you stopped working that cell phone and looked at the view, you’d be okay. Isn’t it pretty after all the rain we’ve had? All those new green willows and grass.”

It was becoming clear to him that his nieces weren’t happy about being sent from Auckland to stay on the farm for a week so their mother could holiday with her new boyfriend. As she’d said, that’s what big brothers are for. He’d never really taken to his brother-in-law and wanted this new relationship to work.

“We’d love to have them,” he’d said on the phone. ”We’ve just about finished lambing. They’ll enjoy the garden. Despite the rain, Jan and I are so proud of it this year. Remember the rhodos? They’re much better than when you were a girl. Remember our tree hut?”

His outlook from the sitting-room window was magical. The late afternoon sun wavered behind trees and a kaleidoscope of technicolour. Wordsworth may have seen whole fields of waving golden daffodils. Here, white, double and frilly multi-coloured specimens clumped around the lawn. They’d followed the white-on-green snowdrops and were now starting to be replaced by bluebells dotted amongst the riot of tulips – a palette of colour beneath the taller trees

A pair of noisy tuis swooped across the lawn and into the trees, but it was banked rhododendrons and azaleas fringing the drive to the left that caught his eye. An almost tropical splash against dark wind-break pines - white, multiple shades of red, lemon-yellow and purple petals all jumbled but harmonious to his eye.

In contrast, the hazel hedge on the other side, with stately bare oaks behind it, had just started to dress in fresh light green tips to welcome spring again.

Directly in front, his view was of fields where recent showers had washed mud-stained pasture now springing new leaf. Little shoals of lambs raced each other along the fence, over mounds and through hollows, tails flying, with heel kicks that any dancer would envy. It hadn’t stopped raining for a week, and didn’t he know it from puddles between hummocks, boggy gateways and stock camps, and cattle hoof-ploughed ground. Never mind the water-cracked fingertips and drips down his neck from a leaking coat.

Jan met the girls running in under the dripping guttering to the back door, shivering in their city clothes.

Would the girls be happy on their farm holiday? What would they enjoy?

What new experiences?

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ROADSIDE RUBBISH

I live in a rural village astride a crossroads of two highways with lots of passing traffic. The other day, I walked a couple of kilometres past farmlands to a friend’s orchard to get the weekly fruit supply.

Rubbish recycling starts about half a kilometre from the village’s 50 kph boundary.

Glass beer bottles will eventually break down to their original sand and limestone components, although not in our lifetime.

But aluminium beer, RTD, sports drinks and soda cans? It’s a long way to Bluff’s Rio Tinto/Sumitomo smelter.

Then, there’s the food wrappings, food, plastic containers, clothes, old tyres, and paper junk.

Potential microplastics.

HAVE YOU HEARD OF MICROPLASTICS?

They’re bad

§ linked to lung and colon cancer, inflamed gut and lung injury, heart attack and stroke

§ a human-generated limit to global population by affecting sperm quality and ovarian follicle development

§ and that’s the early research science.

Do we want to wait for the illnesses, hospitalisation and deaths?

WHERE DO THEY COME FROM?

FROM PLASTICS

SO WHERE WILL PLASTIC COME FROM?

Those microplastics are smaller than a baby’s fingernail

§ Coming from single-use plastics, containers, wrappings, tyres, synthetic clothes, carpets and blankets

§ You can easily see them at the beach - little, brightly coloured scraps amongst the sand and stones, washed there from urban drains, rivers and the sea

§ You can’t see them easily on the farm, garden, or road.

Or already in your body.

It’s not only roadside junk. That source hides from passing traffic in grass verges and roadside drains. Eventually, the long grass dies down or is flattened. That’s when the harmful elements escape into the environment and adjoining farmers’ fields.

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A FARM PROBLEM

Farm animals, especially cattle, eat plastic that can kill them.

An even bigger problem is the potential biosecurity risk with scattered food and packaging from overseas visitors who copy passing vandals. New Zealand cannot afford the risk of an introduced disease - it has enough already.

The truth is, farmers already get more farm and family goods delivered in packages.

§ They use plastic containers of chemicals on plants and animals.

§ They conserve grass in plastic-wrapped balage bundles for storage.

§ So all that packaging has to end up somewhere.

It will produce microplastics.

The fossil fuel industries will respond to reducing emissions from transport, energy generation, and the reduced use of their oil-based fuels. A logical option for them will be to produce more plastic-based business solutions.

More microplastics.

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ACROSS THE RURAL URBAN BRIDGE

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ARE THERE SOLUTIONS TO MICROPLASTICS?

It’s not easy to give up using plastic and avoid these microresidues. One way to stop or reduce the roadside junk would be to get a message to the yobbos who treat our countryside as their personal rubbish bin. But challenging when some can’t even read or write.

Another would be more stringent biosecurity packaging controls at the border for incoming risks.

Any solution has pluses and minuses.

WOOL to replace plastic.

Farmers know wool is better than synthetics for clothing and furnishings. The warmth, fire resistance, and wearability factors are well known, if not widely adopted.

But not everyone in the world, including New Zealand, lives in cooler temperatures. And wool has barely covered the cost of shearing the sheep for animal welfare reasons.

The government’s Education Authority has illogically preferred cheaper synthetic carpets over the warmth, durability and fire-retardant benefits of wool in all classrooms.

Apparently, saving some money now to increase the risks and costs to the children who sit and walk on it for six hours a day, five days a week, makes sense in an economic model but not in a farmer’s mind.

PACKAGING

Internet shopping is increasing exponentially, at least according to NZPost, which blames it for its reduced business profitability. So more packaging.

Paper bags, wrapping, and cardboard have rapidly replaced some single-use plastics and packaging. That reduces landfill needs and costs, uses smaller rubbish trucks with lower emissions and should reduce local body rates.

But has not solved this plastic packaging problem.

TOURISTS

The tourism industry argues that its many businesses need overseas visitors, and the country needs their overseas income to balance any plastic or disease risk. So, the government also actively and financially encourages it while trying to reduce the risk of imported biosecurity. Confusion???

Our own airline brings additional risks and, indirectly, more microplastics.

Do your friends really know about this? The solution must lie in all our hands.

________________________________________________________________

PS We don’t talk about introduced Foot and Mouth disease.

The next farming newsletter will. Enough to stop you in your tracks.

ACROSS THE RURAL URBAN BRIDGE

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rural people and Farmers

ACROSS THE RURAL URBAN BRIDGE

Here is the second short story about real people.

They will continue, adding to more articles about real Farming

THE TEACHER WHO CHANGED COUNTRY EDUCATION

A glamorous teacher arrived at a remote country school, but she only lasted two terms. By the time she left, the whole district was talking. Young boys didn’t understand the gossip then. But later, realised that Miss Louise Latimer had provided a different kind of country education.

Apprehension, anticipation, and excitement were big words for Robert and his 11-year-old mates. But that’s how they felt at the start of the first day of the year at their three-roomed school, fifty miles from Te Kuiti.

Pulchritude was another big word that wasn’t in their spelling books. It certainly didn’t suit last year’s relieving teacher, Miss Meech. Still, it was the only word that matched their new teacher, Miss Louise Latimer. She was gorgeous. She had long blonde hair, a trim figure in her early twenties, light olive skin and deep dark eyes hinting at some mysterious background. A friendly voice and her smile could only be described as dazzling as a possum-hunting spotlight. Her new class was immediately captured, and now looking forward to the year to come.

The boys were too young to understand the stir her arrival caused amongst the local young shepherds, who often found a reason to come to the village. Nor did it take long for Phillip Garmondy, son of the most prominent farmer in the district, to show up at school. Fathers collecting children from school were not unwilling to stop longer from digging postholes or dagging sheep for the opportunity to rush up and thank her for caring for their offspring.

She also brought dress style to the village where track pants, Swandris and gumboots were the norm - even for the women. She seemed to have a myriad of new clothes, though probably just careful planning and mixing and matching. But her hair always seemed shining, her shoes clean, and her lipstick bright.

Well, that’s what the young boys would have said if they had noticed. By the second week of the term, she was just their teacher to spend each weekday with, a good one who seemed to understand them and who smelled nice when she bent over their desk to correct their work. However, they were also aware of comments from the grown-ups at home. They varied.

His mother saw her as a disruption in the settled social structure of the district, where patterns were laid down by history, locality, familiarity and predictability. This clearly wasn’t a country girl, couldn’t even climb a fence properly in her high heels, wasn’t interested in the netball team and didn’t accept an invitation to the Country Women’s Institute meeting. Old Mrs O’Donnell, where she boarded, said that at home she was either doing schoolwork, watching TV and doing her nails, or shut away in her room. However, also often out, taking the old dog for a long walk down to the river.

Robert heard the two shepherds who came in for their evening meal each night, often speculating on why such a glamorous girl would even want to come to such an out-of-the-way place like this, wondering about a broken romance, hoping she might be vulnerable and looking for a new boyfriend. They were longing for the opportunity of the first winter dance at the village hall.

At the time, Robert didn’t realise that the arrival of Miss Latimer was about to unsettle more than just the school.

Phillip Garmondy had been home for a couple of years after Massey University to take over the family farm. With him had come a bride, a Canadian girl who had been a fellow student on exchange from Guelph University. But the King Country wasn’t like Toronto and Palmerston North, and she was increasingly unhappy with her life, her future as a farmer’s wife and with Phillip. She made him take her home early from the first winter dance after he had spent more time dancing with Miss Latimer than with her. Tongues wagged at the village store, and words burned the telephone party lines.

During the third term, Robert noticed Miss Latimer seemed a bit not quite with it in the mornings. She got a bit snappy with Tyson, who was always causing trouble anyway. But she also made Helen cry when she growled at her for not finishing her story on time. Helen was a bit of a crybaby, but also the teacher’s pet. Then she smacked Trevor with a ruler for not saying please when he’d snatched Mihi’s without asking, and then ran from the room in tears. The kids didn’t know what to do, and eventually, Mr Potts came and took them for the rest of the period until playtime.

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ROADSIDE RUBBISH

I live in a rural village astride a crossroads of two highways with lots of passing traffic. The other day, I walked a couple of kilometres past farmlands to a friend’s orchard to get the weekly fruit supply.

I found that rubbish recycling starts about half a kilometre from the village’s 50 kph boundary.

There may be some logic in assuming that glass beer bottles will eventually break down to their original sand and limestone components, although not in our lifetime.

But aluminium beer, RTD, sports drinks and soda cans? It’s a long way to Bluff’s Rio Tinto/Sumitomo smelter.

Then, there’s the food wrappings, food, plastic containers, clothes, old tyres, and paper junk.

Potential microplastics.

HAVE YOU HEARD OF MICROPLASTICS?

They’re bad

§ linked to lung and colon cancer, inflamed gut and lung injury, heart attack and stroke

§ a human-generated limit to global population by affecting sperm quality and ovarian follicle development

§ and that’s the early research science.

Do we want to wait for the illnesses, hospitalisation and deaths?

WHERE DO THEY COME FROM?

FROM PLASTICS

SO WHERE WILL PLASTIC COME FROM?

Those microplastics are smaller than a baby’s fingernail

§ Coming from single-use plastics, containers, wrappings, tyres, synthetic clothes, carpets and blankets

§ You can easily see them at the beach - little, brightly coloured scraps amongst the sand and stones, washed there from urban drains, rivers and the sea

§ You can’t see them easily on the farm, garden, or road.

Or already in your body.

It’s not only roadside junk. That source hides from passing traffic in grass verges and roadside drains. Eventually, the long grass dies down or is flattened. That’s when the harmful elements escape into the environment and adjoining farmers’ fields.

A FARM PROBLEM

Farm animals, especially cattle, eat plastic that can kill them.

An even bigger problem is the potential biosecurity risk with scattered food and packaging from overseas visitors who copy passing vandals. New Zealand cannot afford the risk of an introduced disease - it has enough already.

The truth is, farmers already get more farm and family goods delivered in packages.

§ They use plastic containers of chemicals on plants and animals.

§ They conserve grass in plastic-wrapped balage bundles for storage.

§ So all that packaging has to end up somewhere.

It will produce microplastics.

The fossil fuel industries will respond to reducing emissions from transport, energy generation, and the reduced use of their oil-based fuels. A logical option for them will be to produce more plastic-based business solutions.

More microplastics.

_________________________________________________________________

Readers wanted to know more about farmers who produce their food.

Did you see that there will be short stories about them?

ACROSS THE RURAL URBAN BRIDGE

Did you read the free one last week?

Have you signed up for more in the future?

________________________________________________________________

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ARE THERE SOLUTIONS TO MICROPLASTICS?

It won’t be easy to give up using plastic and avoid these microresidues. One way to stop or reduce the roadside junk would be to get a message to the yobbos who treat our countryside as their personal rubbish bin. That would be challenging when some can’t even read or write.

Another would be strict bio-security packaged controls at the border for incoming risks.

Any solution has pluses and minuses.

WOOL to replace plastic.

Farmers argue that wool is better than synthetics for clothing and furnishings. The warmth, fire resistance, and wearability factors are well known, if not widely adopted.

But not everyone in the world, including New Zealand, lives in cooler temperatures. Even if wool is cheap to use, it barely covers the cost of shearing the sheep for animal welfare reasons.

The New Zealand government’s Education Authority has illogically preferred cheaper synthetic carpets over the warmth, wearability and anti-flammable benefits of wool for all classrooms.

Apparently, saving some money now to increase the risks and costs to the children who sit and walk on it for six hours a day, five days a week, makes sense in an economic model but not in a farmer’s mind.

PACKAGING

Now, internet shopping, which is increasing exponentially, at least according to NZPost, which blames it for its reduced business profitability, means more packaging.

Paper bags, wrapping, and cardboard have rapidly replaced some single-use plastics and packaging. That reduces landfill needs and costs, uses smaller rubbish trucks with lower emissions and should reduce local body rates.

But has not solved this plastic packaging problem.

TOURISTS

The tourism industry argues that its many businesses need overseas visitors, and the country needs their overseas income to balance any plastic or disease risk. So, the government also actively and financially encourages it while trying to reduce the risk of imported biosecurity.

Our own airline brings additional risks and, indirectly, more microplastics.

Do your friends really know about this? The solution must lie in all our hands.

________________________________________________________________

PS We don’t talk about introduced Foot and Mouth disease.

The next newsletter will. Enough to stop you in your tracks.

You will have to subscribe to read these stories about them. Each regular story will cost less than a cup of coffee.

BUT like anything ele, you will want to know about what you might be buying.

SO HERE IS THE FIRST ONE FOR FREE

A RURAL LULLABY

‘Right, you lot. Bedtime!’

‘Aw, Mum – not yet,’ from the eight-year-old twins. They always did everything together.

‘Can’t we stay up later, Mum? It’s the holidays,’ called Tim with ten-year-old child logic.

‘Me too,’ from six-year-old Lucy. ‘Read us a story…yes…yes…a story,’ they all chorused.

This single mother run out of patience, exhausted at the end of school holidays, with exasperation starting to boil. Four days of rain had drowned outside holiday activities, six-year-olds couldn’t play Monopoly, and the twins now scorned SLAP and SNAP card games. Tim craved his PlayStation despite his mother’s concern about overexposure. Now, her recently widowed father had come to stay, and she hadn’t even had time to wash her hair.

‘No time for stories. I’ve got all this wet washing and loads of ironing to do. Off to bed with you all. Now!’

‘Can I help, love?’ offered her father. ‘Ohh Dad…please.’

Father-daughter bonds planted in the womb had grown over the years of teenage tantrums, varsity hijinks, marriage in another country, and now divorce. The Clyde family had always stood together.

‘Yes, tell us a story, Grandpa.’ ‘Yes, a story – please,’ pleaded the twins together.

‘Alright, but where will I start?’

‘Tell us about when you were a little boy, but not too little,’ suggested Tim, hoping for some tips on growing up. ‘Did you like school? I don’t. It’s boring.’

‘Yes, boring,’ said the twins.

‘Do you want a story or not?’ asked their grandfather. ‘If so, come and sit by me on the couch. You, Tim, on the floor. But you’ve all got to promise. Straight off to bed after I’ve finished.’

‘Cross my fingers, look straight in the eye, break the promise and have to die,’ they all chanted.

‘Well, sit up here. All comfortable? Lucy, you can sit on my lap.’ His bearlike arms wrapped her, and the twins crammed together like a packet of biscuits. Always together.

‘Grandpa – you smell funny.’

‘Lucy,’ called her mother. ‘That’s very rude. Say sorry to your Grandpa. He loves his pipe.’

‘Sorry, Grandpa,’ her mouth drooping.

‘Our teacher told us smoking’s bad for you,’ said the twins.

‘CHILDREN! Your grandfather’s trying to tell you a story. Listen! Or off to bed.’ Mothers have magical long-distance ears.

‘Alright, are you listening? Now, in Standard Six, we had gangs. Everyone was in a gang. All the boys, anyway. Not girls. They were too bossy.’

‘What’s Standard Six?’ asked the twins.

‘That’s like year eight,’ called out their mother from the ironing board.

‘Did you have patches like the Mongrel Mob?’ asked Tim. ‘

No, but we had gang names. Our class had three gangs, with kids from all around the district. When I first started school, we had to get up early for the bus at seven o’clock every morning and didn’t get home until after five. It was actually the mail van that went around to all the farms in our district. We were jammed in, but at least it was warm when the puddles had ice on them. And the windows kept frosting over.’

‘But what about the gangs?’

‘Yes – the gangs. Tell us about the gangs.’ Lucy didn’t understand about gangs, but still joined in.

‘Please, Grandpa,’ she pleaded.

‘Well …yes…three gangs… I’m trying to remember… it was a long time ago.’

‘You said that already, Grandpa,’ the twins chorused, but he looked hard at them. He coughed, hoicked and swallowed.

‘I’ve forgotten what I forgot to say. But I think I still remember most names. The M and M gang - all their names started with M. There was Mick, Max, Mac – his real name was Allan MacIntosh, then Mark, Miles and Monty.’

‘We had a puppy called Monty once,’ interrupted Tim, ‘but he got run over.’

‘Well, I don’t think you should have any dogs in the city. Farms’re the only place for dogs. I had five dogs on the farm when I retired. We couldn’t have farmed without them. I had Flo and Butch and Rock… can’t remember the others right now. I still miss them. You could cuddle up to them on a freezing day on the hill. I remember one day…’ but Tim interrupted.

‘Tell us about the gangs Grandpa.’

‘Well,’ he battled on, smiling to himself, remembering, ‘One gang had funny nicknames. They called themselves the Nicks. There were nine of them. I think I can remember. Spud Murphy and Dusty Miller. Then, Snow White and Darkie Brown. I remember him because he was much fatter than anyone else. And Shorty Robinson, who was tiny. But they also had Tiny Timlake, and he was actually tall.’

‘Why was he called Tiny if he was tall?’ puzzled the twins together.

‘I don’t know. Anyway, that wasn’t my gang. Then the others were Lefty Latimer and Sandy Beach.’

‘But you said nine,’ accused Lucy. She clearly wasn’t going to sleep.

‘You must have been counting on your fingers – were you?’

‘I can count up to a hundred, and I’m only six.’ She snuggled down again. It wasn’t easy keeping a place as the youngest of four, mainly when the twins always worked together on everything.

‘I can’t remember the last one…it was Blue something.’

‘Tim! Stop picking your nose,’ came from the kitchen. ‘What was your gang, Dad?’

‘There were six of us, and we had nicknames too, but we were much cleverer because our names matched us. Well, we thought so anyway, and our gang was the Animals. There was Fish Salmon, Jonah Williams – he looked like a whale. Do you learn about Jonah and the whale at Sunday school?’ They nodded. ‘Then Rudolph Hoffman…’

‘I know, I know – Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer,’ crowed Lucy. ‘Did he have a red nose?’ Still wide awake.

‘Lucy…Lucy…let your Grandpa tell his story, or I’ll carry you off to bed.’

‘We had Wuff O’Leary – he could make all sorts of barking and howling noises like a dog. And Bull Gates, a big Maori boy, a bit older than us but a great fellow.’

‘What was your name, Grandpa?’

‘I was called Neddy. Well, that was sort of from my name – Edward. Neddy was a popular name for a horse, too, and I came from a farm and had a horse of my own.’

‘Why did you have a horse, Grandpa?’

‘Later on, I was allowed to ride to school when we moved closer to town. No, Tim, not a bike. I had my own pony whose name was Gerald, and my young sister used to double up with me. No saddle but a big sheepskin to sit on, rope for a bridle. There was a horse paddock at school, and some other kids rode too. No one else in my class, though.

‘All farmers had horses in those days. We needed them to do the work. My father, who was your great-grandfather, had a team. There were six of them. Big Clydesdales.’

‘Ah! I get it,’ cried Tim. ‘Named after our family. Clyde.’ He cast a superior glance up at the twins. ‘Why didn’t you have a tractor?’

‘Well, it was before tractors. And horses were great. They could go anywhere and didn’t get stuck. They stopped when you said, and things didn’t go wrong much if you looked after them properly. Fed them. And they all had names too. They were like friends. You could talk to them. They sort of talked back. You could understand them; well, my dad could anyway. Although I tried, I could never understand tractors later on.

‘All the animals had names on our farm, and us kids named the calves with girls’ names. They started with the same letter, but a different one each year, so you could tell their age from the letter in the alphabet. We were up to G by the time I got a turn. I remember one year we ran out of names starting with L, so we ended up with a cow called Lawrence.’ The twins giggled, half asleep. ‘And a bull called Horace. A nasty Jersey bull. Us kids weren’t allowed to go into his paddock by the house.’

Lucy interrupted him by flopping fast asleep onto one arm. Obviously, she’d lost interest in the story, or the warm ironing smell from the kitchen was too comforting.

‘Come on now, you others. That’s the end of the story. Off to bed. You promised. Remember?’

‘I’m going to be in a gang,’ said Tim.

‘Us too,’ called the twins.

‘You’re too young,’ was Tim’s scathing response.

‘Come on – teeth, then bed,’ their mother called from the kitchen. ‘Quick now, chop chop, you’ve had your story.’ The children were all uncurled. ‘Thanks, Dad. You’re wonderful, a saviour. You’ve always looked after me. I never knew about your gang, though. Did you ever wonder what happened to all the others?’

‘Probably like me, making up tall tales for their grandchildren to spare their mother.’

Share GARRICK BATTEN

They produce the food and drink we all need to stay alive.

In New Zealand, they also produce most of the export income to pay for all our imports. Aircraft, vehicles, fuel, clothes, computers, cheese from Denmark, biscuits from Thailand, or frozen vegetables from Vietnam.

Things you need in your daily lives.

Have you asked farmers in the last few weeks if they are happy?

Why not?

MAYBE BECAUSE YOU’VE NEVER HAD A CHANCE

Maybe you don’t know very much about farmers. Maybe you should know more about them.

In the last few months there’s been feedback across the Rural Urban Bridge

about knowing farmers as people.

Soon you will have an opportunity to learn more.

There will be regular Paid Posts that you can subscribe for . Short stories about real farmers. They are fiction of course but about real people in real situations.

Keep an eye out for the first one. SOON

Meantime, as a busy person, especially a housewife, maybe you haven’t had time to wonder about someone important who’s feeding you and your family?

I’ll help you. Read on.

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COVID MEANT STAYING AT HOME

Remember how the pandemic meant you could work from home and use the internet

Ø Recent national surveys show that now, 5-6% of salary and wage earners work from home permanently

Ø about 45% on a couple of days a week

Ø and 74% have done so at some time.

The highest paying WFH role was in project management, including working in pyjamas with a computer.

Farmers do have the advantage of working from home.

That survey didn’t include farmers who are at home, project managing all the time,

§ maybe in a swandri, not pyjamas

§ sometimes with a dodgy internet connection

§ certainly not in that salary bracket.

But then they were at home.

They know they don’t fit surveys run by academics, but they have no daily commute

§ waiting in traffic queues, at bus stops or train stations, and people, people and people

§ They can have animals to share the people scene, lunch at home, and enjoy family responsibilities

§ usually in a pleasant working environment until perhaps rain, snow, floods or disasters.

No worries about the aircon.

ENVY FARMERS

Farmers can understand why others want to work from home as they step outside to look over fresh, dew-drenched green paddocks and leafy trees, pull on boots, and rev up the quad bike.

No daily shave or face foundation/eye shadow/lipstick, appropriate clothes to suit the day, and then face and dodge cones in constant noise, leaving more emissions.

Farmers can go straight to work in clean, fresh air, surrounded by nature. A sky ceiling with sun and clouds on high rotate.

§ working in the natural world with plants and animals for therapeutic enjoyment and pleasure.

§ It helps with physical and mental stress.

§ Others must seek gardens, bush, beaches and manicured parks for relief from their weekly grind.

Farmers only have to step outside and open the back gate.

So that’s a happiness measure. And farmers are even better off than those other rural workers who can’t work from home with those opportunities and benefits.

Like truck drivers, agricultural contractors, vets, fishers and foresters. They all have commuting time and money costs to get to work.

SOME BOSSES AREN’T HAPPY

The government wants its public servants back from WFH.

Why?

Apparently, because it is not certain they’re really working, and to save questionable Wellington hospitality and retail business models. Even at the cost of more transport emissions.

The government doesn’t have to get farmers back to work because they are always there.

Farming may not be a five-day, 37.2-hour working week, but animals and plants make sure the work’s done, and workers concentrate daily on the result.

If the job’s not done properly, there’ll be obvious consequences, and the boss trusts workers.

Turns out that farmers are forced to work at their businesses, working from home.

A BALANCED LIFE

Urban people seek work-life balance, so if farmers work and live in their own place, they must be balanced.

How lucky is that – if the hay and shearing are done before Christmas!

FARMERS GET OTHER BENEFITS

When they step outside the farm gate, they have all the advantages of their countryside knowledge as they travel somewhere.

Not for them, just a dark green wall of native bush. They see a stately rimu amongst the totara - that matai must be several hundred years old - possum damage on the native fuchsia, and another slip exposing clay under the bush.

Those are not black and white cows, but Friesian-cross two-year-old steers in good condition for the feed they’re in, considering the grass is short and browning off.

If they break out, that dodgy roadside fence might be an issue with wandering stock.

Farmers wonder if another farmer would make baleage or hay from a long grass paddock. They eye the patches of encroaching broom critically. However, they know there are biological control insects out there trying to control it.

Farmers see the passing countryside with open eyes, and its many messages add to their knowledge and enjoyment.

At home or away, they can be happy.

Do people who eat food that farmers produce know that?

Ask them

.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to appreciate that other issues can make farmers happier.

__________________________________________________________________

PS Next time, you can read about one reason farmers are not happy and what you can do about it to help.

Here’s one answer for you.

Pretty - aren’t they? Those solid golden gorse hillsides and scattered clumps amongst the grass from May to November.

Controlling Gorse costs Money to grow Grass to make Food.

Blame the early Europeans.

An 1835 Bay of Islands gorse hedge predates the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Waitangi, which may be why there are ongoing prickly indigenous relations.

Early settlers called it furze and whin in Scotland. In New Zealand, where it flowered much longer, they could rejoice with their Middle English saying, “When gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of season”. Everyone can now enjoy the buttery, coconut-and-vanilla-flower perfume.

By the 1850s, gorse windbreak hedges were well established, especially in Canterbury with its norwesters or southerlies. By 2005, nationally, there were 300,000 km, now reduced to heritage status due to changed land use.

But gorse is a contradictory conundrum.

To farmers, it’s the worst introduced scrub weed in New Zealand on 5% of farmed land. It smothers pasture, and hard-coated seeds can last in the ground for 50 years. A Southland hedge was estimated to produce 6m seeds per hectare every year. In 1861, the Nelson Provincial Council prohibited gorse hedges, but after WWII, you could still buy gorse seed for a shilling a pound to sow for sheep feed. In the 1970s, you could still see remains of drilled rows on Moutere Hills farms.

Driving through Canterbury, you’ll see golden gorse margins on the braided rivers and binding gravels to change channels. It can be a positive for controlling soil erosion on hills, but the negatives outweigh that.

Planting new forests of native or exotic trees on burnt-over, formerly gorse-covered land can lead to regrowth competing with new tree seedlings. Pines will outgrow gorse, but it’s still a prickly, dense problem for pruning and thinning work. Regrowth can smother slower-growing native species.

That gorse understory is a fire risk on hills around Wellington, Christchurch and elsewhere. Gorse is known as good firewood.

Gorse bushes and clumps in paddocks are great hiding places for mustelids and feral cats attacking our native birds, and cats carry the toxoplasmosis disease, causing abortion, threatening our sheep. Toxo can reduce lambing percentage by 25-30%, which can cost bottom-line profit, so more work and vaccination costs are needed to prevent it.

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GORSE CONTROL

There’ve been ongoing attempts to control gorse. Grubbing, slashing, and burning were ineffective, so when farmers learned how best to use 2,4,5-T after WWII, some progress was made. It was widely used as a defoliant in the Vietnam War, exposing its risks and negatives, so it fell out of use for scrub weed control. Using current chemicals is expensive.

Biological controls started in 1928 when a seed weevil was only partly effective because our autumn-flower-born seeds were not attacked. Restarted in 1989, there are now eight different insects tackling seeds, shoots, and stems. Soon to be joined by fungus. All are effective in various ways but are slow to spread, and gorse is vigorously defensive. And all those seeds await to germinate.

During the goat boom in the 1980s, when 1:6 farmers had goats on their farms and research workers were not constrained by political management or a lack of funds, they together developed effective techniques for using goats to both control gorse spread and eliminate it from pastures. Repeating that needs more farmed goats.

But there must be some positives - right?

It has food value to supplement pasture; on hill country, it can produce twice as much per hectare from spring to autumn -- if stock would eat it. The Scottish granite-trough whin mill to crush stems and prickles is not an option, but sheep will nibble new shoots on low bushes.

Goats are better adapted to shrubby, high-tannin feeds than sheep or cattle. Our goat block tried to maintain about 25% of the paddock cover in gorse bushes as feed, especially during dry summers, and also for winter shelter, when goats attacked the bark, semi-destroying the bushes and keeping the gorse cover in balance.

Gorse not only made windbreaks but stockproof fences, like barberry is used in the Waikato and boxthorn in South Taranaki. As a legume, it fixes nitrogen from the air, one of the six major plant foods they need to grow.

Flowers are the main benefit. Our most common and numerous farm livestock are essential honey bees. Gorse flowers help beekeepers with pollen to feed spring larvae when other sources are limited and nectar for honey income. Our agriculture would be doomed without that and them.

The flowers are edible - as a garnish on a cafe lunch dish, or steeped in spring water and brandy as part of the Bach Flowers homoeopathic remedies with claims to restore equilibrium to emotions and encourage hope and faith. That might help a sweating farmer swinging a slasher or braving dense prickles searching for a lost lamb.

Maybe some gorse should be kept after all. But that would cost you.

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It’s not only men who appreciate women. Young housewives struggling with the cost of living and trying to make the best food choices can appreciate rural women, too.

That’s because women are constantly involved with food in one way or another, and rural women know more about how to produce it for what you want and need.

Now I can help you across the RURAL URBAN BRIDGE to them.

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It’s not easy for a man to write about women these days.

That may flow from the MeToo movement, feminism - whatever that signifies, or their fundamental role in producing men. Or a hidden Oedipus complex?

It may be from the inferiority of numbers.

· While the world ratio of men to women is 504:496, New Zealand has 497:503.

· If you want to play with numbers, that varies with age, but as an older man, in a ratio of 447:553, I’m a bit fearful.

· And with my long-ago Armenian heritage, where 55% of the population is women, I have another reason.

Should I rely on the NZ food and fibre industry’s workforce 65:35 male-to-female ratio, and on the fact that only 4.43% of the total workforce are women working in agriculture?

NO --- all that smudges rural women’s importance at all sorts of levels.

EUROPEAN SETTLERS.

Have you read about women in early colonists’ literature? There were shepherdesses and milkmaids, but women’s farm life was mainly cooking, mending, cooking, sewing, washing, baking, gardening, and producing and often burying children as part of the pioneering farm family.

Men could go out on the farm and work with nature. A mud-floored hut and a smoky fire were the only nature for early colonial farm women.

Gradual changes

Into the 20th century, with better housing and family conditions, there was time to socialise in the Country Women’s Institute and the independent women’s part of what became Federated Farmers.

Apart from monthly meetings to show and compete with flower arrangements, knitting and baking, those women had industry concerns and activities. In Nelson, their Melrose House provided a residential home for backcountry women on town visits and relief and recovery from members’ challenging situations.

Did you know what happened on farms during WWII over 60 years ago?

· Many, especially young men, were defending the Empire and were no longer on farms.

· Nearly 2,000 uniformed Women’s Land Service landgirls replaced them on farms and orchards.

· As well as wives and daughters trying to keep the farms going.

· Men’s farm work was pretty simple and even routine with limited resources.

Wives, daughters, and land girls quickly adapted, doing their best to keep food coming to feed New Zealanders, especially rural people in Britain.

After the war, when I started shepherding, farm women were back in the kitchen, wash-house and garden. Apart from dominating herd testing with their overnight visits to a couple of dozen dairy farms each month, measuring cows’ milk and butterfat, travelling by struggling vehicles or even horse and cart.

WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW?

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Into the new century, women are taking a greater part in agriculture as AI technicians, vets, sharemilkers, shearers, shepherds and managers. They also have greater influence on farm financial, management, and even technical decisions, in partnership with husbands/partners.

With better education and an increasing wife influx into the country of former teachers, nurses and other ex-professionals, the Rural Women’s Manifesto 2014-17 was required reading by everyone, including rural men (and did not come in a brown wrapper).

It identified 12 political actions with sensible solutions covering social services, broadband, electricity, and education. Ten years later, the list has focused on leading, empowering and supporting women as the glue for rural families and communities. Building the farm industry.

Five key areas were physical and mental health and well-being across rural communities needing improved access to equal care with urban societies and better resources.

· Current digital services are unreliable and slow, and affordable internet connectivity and mobile service are lacking.

· Key industry matters include making economic and environmental land use decisions with rural communities, improving biosecurity, improving water supplies, and adapting to climate change impacts.

· Education policies, resources, amenities and access still need to recognise rural needs and the voices.

We all need safety and security on roads, in homes and workplaces, and support for the government to adopt international recommendations that empower women.

There’s no doubt that women’s contribution to the agricultural industry continues to grow, contribute, and strengthen with significance in widening spheres.

And they can still make lovely chocolate cakes.

Join Rural Women. You don’t need to be from the country.

You’ll learn from them, and they’ll learn from you about what you need and why.

So, why not? There’s a branch in a town near you.

Check out the website.

https://www.ruralwomennz.nz

________________________________________________________________________

PS. Rural women are contributing to industry structures. The next Newsletter expands on that aspect.

Gorse is like COVID-19. Endemic, always there, not going away. A bit like Long Covid.

Does long gorse increase food costs?

Ongoing with significant headaches.

Farmers have to control it. That costs money and time and can add to your food costs.

I’ll tell you why with a couple of minutes of reading.

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HISTORY

An 1835 Bay of Islands gorse hedge pre-dated the 1836 Declaration of Independence and the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Maybe that’s the reason for ongoing prickly indigenous relations?

In the 1850s, gorse windbreak hedges were well established, especially in Canterbury with its norwesters or southerlies.

In 1861, the Nelson Provincial Council prohibited gorse hedges, but after WWII, you could still buy gorse seed for a shilling a pound to sow for sheep feed. Even in the 1970s, you could still see remains of drilled rows on Moutere Hills farms.

And by 2005, there were 300,000 km of gorse hedges on farms.

They’re now reduced to heritage status as land use changed.

BUT IT ESCAPED

To farmers, it’s the worst introduced scrub weed in New Zealand, on 5% of farmed land, smothering pasture.

Hard-coated seeds can last 50 years in the ground. A Southland hedge was estimated to produce 6m seeds per hectare every year.

Gorse bushes and clumps in paddocks are great hiding places for mustelids and feral cats.

· They attack our native birds.

· Cats carry the toxoplasmosis disease, causing abortion in sheep.

· Toxo can reduce the lambing percentage by 25-30% = lost bottom-line profit.

More work and vaccination costs.

CONTROLLING GORSE

There’ve been ongoing attempts to control it.

· Grubbing, slashing and burning weren’t effective.

· Progress, when farmers learned how to use 2,4,5-T after WWII.

· That stopped after the Vietnam War with its defoliant risks and negatives.

Gorse won.

Goats eat gorse. During the 1980s boom, when 1:6 farmers had goats on their farms, they developed effective goat techniques to control gorse spread and eliminate it from pastures.

That system currently needs more farmed goats.

Another reason for more biological controls.

· A 1928 seed weevil was only partly effective because it didn’t attack our autumn-flower-born seeds.

· The programme restarted in 1989, with eight different insects tackling seeds, shoots, and stems. Soon to be joined by fungus.

· All are effective in various ways but slow to spread, and gorse is vigorously defensive.

And has all those seeds waiting to germinate.

Gorse is an ongoing, permanent, potential cost to produce food.

IT MUST HAVE SOME GOOD POINTS

Have you been wondering what they are? Gorse is a contradictory conundrum.

Share GARRICK BATTEN

Driving through Canterbury, you’ll see golden gorse margins on the braided rivers and binding gravels to change channels. That can be positive for controlling hillside soil erosion.

Regrowth competes with new tree seedlings in newly planted forests of native or exotic trees on burnt-over former gorse-covered land. Pines will outgrow gorse, but it’s still a prickly, dense problem for pruning and thinning work.

That gorse understory is a fire risk, like on gorse-covered hills around Wellington, Christchurch and elsewhere. Gorse is known as good firewood.

BUT IT IS SO PRETTY IN FLOWER

From May to November, how about those solid golden gorse hillsides and scattered clumps glowing amongst the grass?

Early settlers also knew gorse as furze and whin in Scotland. Here, where it flowered much longer, settlers could rejoice with their Middle English saying, “When gorse is out of bloom, kissing’s out of season”.

Everyone can now enjoy the buttery, coconut-and-vanilla-flower perfume.

IS THAT ALL?

Gorse makes windbreaks and stock-proof fences like Waikato barberry and boxthorn in South Taranaki.

v As a legume, it fixes free air-nitrogen, one of the six major foods that plants need to grow.

v Gorse can supplement pasture with twice as much growth per hectare from spring to autumn - if stock would eat it.

· The Scottish granite-trough whin mill to crush stems and prickles is not an option, but sheep will nibble new shoots on low bushes.

· Goats are better adapted to shrubby, high-tannin feeds.

· Our goat block tried to maintain about 25% of paddock cover in gorse bushes as feed, especially for dry summers.

It was also a winter shelter where goats attacked the bark, semi-destroying bushes, and keeping the gorse cover in balance.

Flowers are the main benefit.

Ø Our most common and numerous farm livestock are essential honey bees.

Ø Gorse flowers help beekeepers with pollen to feed spring larvae when other sources are limited and nectar for honey income.

Ø Our agriculture would be doomed without bees.

Eat more honey

The flowers are edible as a garnish on a cafe lunch dish. Or steeped in spring water and brandy as part of the Bach Flowers homoeopathic remedies, with claims to restore equilibrium to emotions and encourage hope and faith.

That might help a sweating farmer swinging a slasher or braving dense prickles searching for a lost lamb.

____________________________________________________________________

PS. By the way, are farmers happy?

Because governments take farmers and their food production businesses for granted.

You’ll learn more about how they do that and farming businesses across the Rural Urban Bridge.

You’ll learn how to buy the best food if you’re struggling with costs.

I’ll help you.

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Could you produce all your own food and drink? Be realistic – you couldn’t.

And who would replace export dollars to pay for all your imported needs and wants?

Using round figures

· The Goods sector brings in more than two-thirds, and 92% comes from farms.

· Tech sector adds11.4%

· Tourism a little less.

The other 10% comes from various manufactured and processed products.

So, you’d think that agriculture would be the top priority. It’s not.

· The Minister of Agriculture ranks 10th in the national cabinet and probably 12th in the New Zealand Coalition government.

· He also has the critical Trade portfolio to handle.

· He has a Minister for Rural Communities and a couple of other Associated Ministers outside Cabinet to help.

Other Ministries dominate the Ministry of Primary Industries.

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You’ll have heard of SMEs – small and medium businesses.

You’ll know them because they make and package your food and drink so you can buy it.

And pay for fuel, clothes, electrical equipment, fix the lawnmower and massage weary muscles. Paint the house, repair the car and TV, source and sell your medicines.

And so on and so on. 97% of businesses are classed as SMEs.They are everywhere.

They all have their own Minister.

He has a Council to advise him, supported by a collective of businesses and muscle of the monster Ministry of Business, Immigration and Environment, with 6200 bureaucrats providing a conduit for SMEs to other relevant departments. .

Why aren’t farms SMEs and have their own special government-funded Council? They don’t, so they have to rely on their industry groupings.

Maybe the sheer number of SMEs politically outweighs farmers, despite their critical roles.

ASK: Should farmers who feed you be part of this government SME family?

A common SME feature is family ownership and one-person management with constant mental, if not physical, commitment. Working long hours, weekends and with limited holidays.

Both live for their businesses, and farmers actually live in them.

Farms have much more capital invested, such as dairy farms averaging nearly $5m, sheep and cattle farms about $6m in land and buildings, and stock and machinery.

The average capital value of an SME is about $700,000.

Small businesses often have many small sales, and farmers have few big sales.

SME customers are usually many, local, varied, frequently casual and maybe fickle and transitory.

Farm-direct customers are few, usually fixed, firm, familiar, and faithful.

Or overseas. Farmers’ markets differ, and it’s challenging to raise prices, particularly in export markets, to cover higher costs.

Working capital varies. SMEs have a regular wage bill, stock purchases vary but can be small, regular, and spread, and there’ll be either rent or mortgage payments to meet.

Farms’ costs and income are lumpy, although dairy farmers get a monthly cheque - well, it used to be called a cheque. Major lump costs are fertiliser, contractors, repairs and maintenance, and stock purchases.

Both types of businesses have rates, insurance, energy and perhaps rent, but farm costs are higher.

SMEs often deal directly with people in varying numbers. Farmers mainly deal with animals - cows, sheep, hens, pigs, and plants - grass, strawberries, hops, and apple trees.

Both usually have fixed places of business, subject to different weather conditions, especially on farms, where nature can be kind or cruel.

Some SMEs are ambitious to move into exporting, and the Trade and Enterprise and Foreign Affairs ministries can assist at the sharp end. SMEs ignore farmers’ lifetime export experiences.

The question is: why are farms excluded from the MBIE SME family?

· MBIE provides avenues to other government departments

· That includes advising on all businesses, sectors, regional development, and leading economic and environmental strategies.

· It supports sustainable management of natural resources and invests in research, science and innovation for that.

Like farming. So it should be the lead farming business agency.

But maybe not.

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Farmers had six years of overregulation from MBIE, where ignorant policymakers imposed additional costs, reduced production time, and increased ongoing frustration because they couldn’t accept that each farm and farmer were unique.

Maybe that’s the fundamental distinction with SMEs.

MEANWHILE, farms will keep providing food and export income like they’ve always done.

Once upon a time, they were subsidised, as tourism and films are now. No longer.

Just taken for granted.

Maybe not forever, as large areas disappear under pine trees.

But farmers may give up if governments keep taking them for granted.

PS. You can read about one way it’s not even dealing with a major farming problem on its own land. Next time.

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It’s not only men who appreciate women. Young housewives struggling with the cost of living and making the best food choices can also appreciate rural women.

That’s because women are constantly involved with food in one way or another, and rural women know more about how to produce it for what you want and need.

Now I can help you across the RURAL URBAN BRIDGE to meet them.

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It’s not easy for a man to write about women these days. That may flow from the Me2 movement, feminism - whatever that signifies, or their fundamental role in producing men. Or a hidden Oedipus complex?

It may be from the inferiority of numbers.

· While the world ratio of men to women is 504:496, New Zealand has 497:503.

· If you want to play with numbers, that varies with age, but as an older man, with a ratio of 447:553, I’m a bit fearful.

· And with my long-ago Armenian heritage, where 55% of the population are women, I have another reason for caution.

Should I rely on the NZ food and fibre industry’s workforce 65:35 male-to-female ratio, and on the fact that only 4.43% of the total workforce are women working in agriculture?

But all that smudges rural women’s importance at all sorts of levels.

EUROPEAN SETTLERS.

Have you read about women in early colonists’ literature? There were shepherdesses and milkmaids, but women’s farm life was mainly cooking, mending, cooking, sewing, washing, ironing, baking, washing, gardening, and producing and often burying children as part of the pioneering farm family.

Men could go out on the farm and work with nature. A mud-floored hut and a smoky fire were the only nature for early colonial farm women.

GRADUAL CHANGES

Into the 20th century, with better housing and family conditions, there was time to socialise in the Country Women’s Institute and the independent women’s part of what became Federated Farmers.

Apart from monthly meetings to show and compete with flower arrangements, knitting and baking, those women had industry concerns and activities. In Nelson, their Melrose House provided a residential home for backcountry women on town visits and relief and recovery from members’ challenging situations.

ANOTHER CHANGE

Did you know what happened on farms during WWII over 60 years ago?

· Many, especially young men, were defending the Empire and were no longer on farms.

· The nearly 2,000 uniformed Women’s Land Service landgirls replaced them on farms and orchards.

· Men’s farm work was pretty simple and even routine with limited resources.

Wives, daughters and Land girls quickly adapted, doing their best to keep the food coming to feed New Zealanders and especially rural people in Britain.

After the war, when I started shepherding, farm women were back in the kitchen, wash-house and garden. Apart from dominating herd testing with their overnight visits to a couple of dozen dairy farms each month, measuring cows’ milk and butterfat, travelling by struggling vehicles or even horse and cart.

WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW?

Into the new century, women were taking a greater part in agriculture as AI technicians, vets, sharemilkers, shearers, and shepherds. They also have greater influence on farm financial, management, and even technical decisions, in partnership with husbands/partners.

With better education and an increasing wife-influx into the country of former teachers, nurses and other ex-professionals, the Rural Women’s Manifesto 2014-17 was required reading by everyone, including rural men and did not come in a brown wrapper.

It identified 12 political actions with sensible solutions covering social services, broadband, electricity, and education. Ten years later, the list focused on leading, empowering and supporting women as the glue for rural families and communities. Building the farm industry.

Five key areas were physical and mental health and well-being across rural communities needing improved access to equal care with urban societies and better resources.

· Current digital services are unreliable and slow, and affordable internet connectivity and mobile service are lacking.

· Key industry matters include making economic and environmental land use decisions with rural communities, improving biosecurity, improving water supplies, and adapting to climate change impacts.

· Education policies, resources, amenities and access still need to recognise rural needs and the voices.

We all need safety and security on roads, in homes and workplaces, and support for the government to adopt international recommendations that empower women.

There’s no doubt that women’s contribution to the agricultural industry continues to grow, contribute, and strengthen with significance in widening spheres.

And they can still make lovely chocolate cakes.

Join Rural Women. You’ll learn from them. And they’ll learn from you about what you need and why.

So, why not? There’s a branch in a town near you.

Check out the website.

https://www.ruralwomennz.nz

________________________________________________________________________

PS. Rural women are contributing to industry structures. The next Newsletter expands on that aspect.

Leave a comment

I’m on a journey (modern jargon) to help people struggling with the cost of living and buying food so they can understand food comes from farms, not supermarkets.

So I want to help you across the RURAL URBAN BRIDGE.

Without a toll on your money or mind, so you can eat better.

You’ve been asking questions. Here’s some answers that will help your decisions.

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MODELS

All models can be wrong.

But don’t we love them! If it’s not model trains, it’s swimsuit models and, lately, Lego planes and buildings. There’s a big love affair going on between models and scientists, policy wonks and planners. They feed their computers with them.

A MEAT MODEL OR A METHANE MODEL

Some modelling results influence our farming and your nutrition, such as the prolonged campaign to eat less red meat.

· It’s been piggybacked onto climate change policy at every opportunity because red meat comes from livestock, especially cattle.

· Animal methane output’s about one-third of the world’s methane supply, but it’s more warming than CO2 emissions, even if it disappears much more quickly.

· But reducing methane is a quick, short-term fix, so farmers and their cattle are the obvious political and media targets to save New Zealand.

So - “Eat less meat.”

That’s distracted our nutrition research, which is using models more and more in academic studies. So now, nutrition modelling includes methane and climate change.

The now famous EAT-Lancet World Health diet used modelled climate change after mining models in existing scientific studies. Yet the authors advised that eating less red meat had only a weak correlation with cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Most of those base studies were based on an average of 52-year-old Americans, with older ones suffering from those diseases anyway.

· The result showed that of those dying of those diseases, about 1.4% ate a lot of red meat and also drank and smoked more.

· What caused them to die?

· Other studies in Europe and Japan did not support the recommendations of this paper.

Garbage in and garbage out plague these models.

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OUR NEW ZEALAND MODEL

Another clear misuse of modelling was the New Zealand review of the results of recent mathematical optimisation studies on achieving healthy and sustainable diets. (Yes, they use academic jargon to make it difficult for you to understand.)

In other words, a model of models.

It used data from China, India, Tunisia, France, Italy, Finland, the USA and the UK to conclude that sustainably nutritious diets were plant-based with less red meat. And they had fewer biscuits, cakes, desserts, savoury snacks, white bread, alcohol, and sodas — easy, flavourful rubbish with a bigger negative effect.

You’ve been wondering if diets in those countries relate to us, given the foods we have and how we produce them.

Popular media promoted this review’s recommendations, but didn’t consider how we get enough of the nutrients we need. Red meat supplies 100% absorbable amino acids, whereas plants supply only 40-80% that are absorbable. Plants may not include all necessary micronutrients.

MEAT REPLACEMENTS

Fish was offered as an alternative because of its health-giving Omega-3 fatty acid content. Some fish can have red meat’s iron, zinc, Vitamin A, and other healthy aspects, especially riboflavin.

Did it consider the effect of increased fish harvest under the quota system that preserves the resource? Or have you bought fish lately? Can you chew fish?

Where do the essential proteins come from in recommended plant diets?

· Soya beans with their interfering phytoestrogens? Beans, peas, and lentils grown where?

· Locality, contour, climate, soils and available water limit such production areas. And ignore the consequences of continuous cropping on soil structure, weeds and fertility.

· Ignore capital and operating costs for cultivation, harvesting, processing and packaging.

Forget associated emissions.

That NZ review plugged in results of 12 overseas studies claiming to be cost-neutral or cost-saving.

Ø A model looks good if you leave out the negative bits.

Ø A NZ vegan diet could be three times more expensive than one with meat.

Ø We have limited land to grow food crops, mainly in the South Island, when most people weigh down the north of the North Island. More transport emissions.

What about nuts?

· Again, you can’t grow nuts just anywhere in NZ.

· You’ll have heard of the swimming pools of water to grow almonds in California.

· Can you imagine the machinery and labour to harvest and prepare all the nuts for humans to eat their 50 grams daily?

You’d go nutty - even from adding peanut butter to your porridge.

Eating meat doesn’t mean you have to eat the fat that gives it cooking flavour.

The message can be to eat lean meat.

NOT to eat NO meat.

Especially when that’s based on an agenda other than for the right nutrition.

It’s easy to ignore that red meat is from sheep and cattle. They harvest their feed that we can’t eat at no daily cost and eat plants grown with the sun’s free energy.

They’re just uncooked meals eating grass.

Maybe eating meat is another way to eat plant-based foods

.

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PS. Women, who do most of the food buying and cooking, will feature in the next newsletter.

There are a lot of sheep in New Zealand. But there are more bees than sheep.

Did you know that? And here’s the RUB – they’re vulnerable.

And they’re more critical for lots of reasons. I’ll tell you why, so you can value them and their honey. And destroy some bee myths.

Come across the Rural Urban Bridge.

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HELP FARMERS AND IMPROVE MEAT QUALITY TOO

Our most essential farm animals are bees.

They’re pollinating clover that’s driving grazed pasture quality, and making free nitrogen from the air. Pollinating our fruit orchards with 10-12 hives per hectare during flowering, depending on the crop.

That needs lots of bees. There are 520,000 registered hives, each with 20-80,000 worker bees. About 3,000 per hectare are on farms. Almost unseen and unheard, but working most days for you in many ways.

They reduce the cost of meat, milk and fruit.

BUT THERE ARE RISKS IN THIS BEE BUSINESS

A bee’s life is a constant struggle, as each bee lives only 37 days to produce one teaspoon of honey from about 28,000 flowers.

§ They battle diseases just like sheep and cattle, and losses can be significant.

§ Insecticides can counter the threat of Varroa mites which wiped out native bee populations, but at a cost.

§ European Foul Brood and Colony collapse are constant threats.

§ Unfortunately, the 10 MAF apiary inspectors in the 1980s, who covered 200,000 hives for official disease monitoring, have been replaced by 4 MPI staff for 500,000 hives. That highlights the increasing challenges faced by beekeepers.

FARMING BEES

Bees are much more difficult to farm than sheep and cattle.

You can’t farm bees like other stock, especially on hill country.

There are limits.

§ High temperatures, drought, or cold, wet conditions hinder flowering and nectar flow.

§ The best nectar harvest temperature is 20- 25 °C, but bees won’t go out to start foraging until about 13°C. A cold snap will stop harvest even during nectar flow that’s already taken two to three days to attract them.

§ They won’t fly in more than 25 kph wind and actively forage mostly within three km of their home hive, but up to six km.

Bee stocking rate’s critical, just like other livestock. They need a variety of constantly flowering plants, or moving their hives to provide that. But they can get distressed by moving.

Too many hives in one place are bad for their health and welfare because they can starve and be more susceptible to disease.

A particular problem has been boundary stocking, where ‘foreign’ hives are placed near existing sites, meaning they compete for feed and risk introducing diseases. There are other issues. Hives are vulnerable to wild pigs, and there can be lots in some hilly districts.

A bigger risk can be from theft, which also brings related crime and interpersonal conflicts.

Remedies such as electronic hive monitoring or moving to more remote locations with only helicopter access are expensive. Moving, harvesting, and later feeding bees when there are no flowers needs legal and practical farm access.

Running a beekeeping business is not simple. Or cheap.

HONEY

You probably know more about honey. It’s the beekeepers’ bonus from pollination.

Each year, a hive needs honey and pollen to feed the bees. Still, it can also yield about 30-40 kg for sale each year, depending on the season. A recent five-year average is about 21 kg per hive after 27 kg in 2020, 22 kg in 2022 and 12 kg in 2023 because of wet weather.

The industry’s traditional seven-year cycle is not an itch but a sting.

Honey prices also influence beekeepers’ businesses, like the significant impact of manuka honey over the last 10 years. It’s not easy to produce a single floral-source honey from short-flowering manuka, and bees have to feed on other flowers too.

You’ll have heard about manuka health benefits if honey contains the magical UMF factor. Maybe you have some in the medicine cabinet. The problem is - some of it doesn’t have that magic and sells without it. The market and consumers are confused.

Clover honey has sold in the $7-11 per kg range in recent years. Manuka prices’ve been all over the place, partly influenced by unsold stockpiles.

INDUSTRY CHANGES

The industry has mirrored honey sales and yields over the years. From 30,000 hives in 1980, 450,000 in 2013, 880,000 in 2018, and 1 million in 2019. Then 870, 720, 600 and now 520,000. That is a wake-up call. We now eat 450 g of honey each year, down from 750 g in 2011.

Without profitable honey sales and pollination services, beekeepers have no business.

There’ll be too few bees for pastoral farming survival.

All farmers need bees.

Are you going to buy more honey to support these essential workers? Are you going to tell other people to do that? It’s better than importing sugar to make jam.

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PS 1 Bees’ll cut your food costs. And improve meat quality.

PS 2 Next newsletter will respond to some questions about nutrition.