Article – Businesswire

March 17 (BusinessWire) – Like deluge from a dirty drain, a whole pile of news landed on the dairy sector at the end of this week.

SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: It’s Only Natural

March 17 (BusinessWire) – Like deluge from a dirty drain, a whole pile of news landed on the dairy sector at the end of this week.

No sooner had the Clean Streams Accord annual review reported that, thanks to dairy farming, streams were actually getting dirtier in many areas, than Fonterra was leading an effort to clean it up, and Federated Farmers was whinging about it.

So far, so normal as far as who stood where. However, none of that alters the fact that the Clean Streams Accord outcome for 2009 is very disappointing, and a blow to the focus Fonterra places on sustainable practice in New Zealand, albeit that they keep cows in sheds in China.

Agriculture Minister John Carter’s unequivocal ticking-off to the dairy sector, and the “every year audit” policy announced by Fonterra in a well-managed piece of damage control, show this is a serious challenge to New Zealand’s ability to claim valuable margins for products made by “natural” farming methods.

Many media have bought that argument too. The tabloid instinct would be to call shed-based dairying a kind of “factory” farming, but with almost no PR pressure, the nebulous but perhaps more palatable concept of “cubicle” farming has become embedded as a media descriptor. Most journalists are patriots too, and everyone knows that giving New Zealand food a bad name offshore is just voting yourself poor. Imagine the field day they’d have in Europe or the damage it could do in China, where Fonterra’s San Lu tainted milk scandal taught our only multi-national how to deal with issues involving catastrophic risk.

The cubicle farming promoters themselves talk of keeping the cows in “stables”, which sounds almost genteel, while producing twice as much milk as traditional pastoral dairy farming. They also claim far greater control over the whole effluent outflow from the herd than a farm based on nitrification and other pollution occurring anywhere in a field as cows crap and pee all over the countryside.

Indeed, one of the reasons the Clean Streams Accord report was bad was that it measured effluent getting into waterways from under-road tunnels and the concrete pads where cows stand during milking.

From that point of view, these McKenzie Basin blokes may have a point.

Their bigger real problem is that they want to do all this using water diverted from the Southern Alps which then flows into Canterbury, the most over-stretched water resource in the country, which the government has now decided is also the most badly managed.

Any day now, a commissioner will be appointed to replace the regional council, Environment Canterbury, and probably move to set up a new special agency to manage the Canterbury water resource ahead of the mid-year reportback from Smith’s consensus-building Land and Water Forum.

There is some speculation that former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley is in the frame for the commissioner’s job. Her Ashburton roots make her an appropriate choice, were it not for the fact that she is also chair of Genesis Energy – about to inherit the Lake Tekapo hydro scheme under electricity reforms, and with an active interest in local dairy ventures.

Just down the road is her former Cabinet colleague Ruth Richardson, who is a director of Synlait, an ambitious example of Kiwi cleverness seeking to make money from milk in ways that the monolith Fonterra will always find hard to replicate. A little further down that road is former National Party leader, Don Brash, with an interest in another Canterbury irrigation scheme. And chairing ECan as it prepares its own execution is former National MP Alec Neill.

It looks as though the government is taking a principled approach at a policy level, while seeking enablement from a coterie of old mates, some of whom arguably have conflicts of interest.

At the very least, water lobby participants will be breathing a sigh of relief that the McKenzie Basin proposals are out of the picture for now. If they haven’t already, these plans threatened to tar all water users with the environmental wastrel brush.

Now, a calmer national discourse on water management can occur.

At the heart of the McKenzie Basin issue is a concept that is becoming rooted in the New Zealand national story, and feeds the “100% Pure” tourist branding. One agricultural ideas man calls it “Pasture Harmonies”. It’s the underpinning idea that drives a company like NZ Farming Systems Uruguay, although that firm’s recent problems may make it a less-than-persuasive example.

This nationally recognised idea allowed Environment Minister Nick Smith to describe the proposal for McKenzie Country cubicle farming as “a completely foreign farming style to New Zealand”.

And on that basis, he argued, the promoters rather than the taxpayer should pick up the tab for getting permission to do it, especially when the $2.6 million they are being asked to spend on their idea would be expensed against a business forecasting $30 million annual turnover.

Fair enough.

In a week when the tide turned and proposing careful mining in conservation lands started looking like vandalism, the dairy issues were an unimpeachable opportunity for the government to show the right stuff when it comes to the national brand.

(BusinessWire)

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