They’ll certainly want to see the gains that have been made since Dairy InSight and Dexcel joined together continue, and they’ll be concerned, as always, that research findings are going to come back to them in a way that they can apply to their farm management systems to reap greater efficiency gains.
In recent years DairyNZ has taken on a much wider role, communicating the state of dairying in this country to a larger audience, and giving the general public a steer on what dairying’s take on different issues might be. This is valuable, particularly in the economic area, as an independent voice where any assertions made can be readily backed up by plenty of facts and figures.
In years gone by dairy farmers, along with their sheep-and-beef counterparts, got very upset when Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry figures were released, giving average farm incomes for the year gone by and predictions for those to come. What really rankled with them was their belief that television viewers, radio listeners, and newspaper readers taking in this information believed these incomes were all farmers’ to keep, rather than them having to pay a range of onfarm costs out of these totals, reducing them very substantially.
Even at the reduced levels, a large proportion of the income had already been committed to capital repairs, often delayed from previous seasons where weather events meant money due to be put to this end went into extra feed.
Thanks to excellent up-to-date facts from DairyNZ there’s now a much better appreciation of what these figures mean for the dairy industry. More importantly, a far better fix can be obtained on just how important dairying is to the country as a whole.
An interviewer from ABC Radio in Australia, getting some comment from me recently about the election campaign here and the importance of agriculture on the campaign trail, expressed surprise those figures were mentioned at all as they certainly aren’t in his homeland.
Thanks to the statistics which DairyNZ updates so regularly, there’s a plethora of information that can be readily accessed to check out claims to see whether they’re outrageously political or right on the mark.
Another of DairyNZ’s big innovations, which has taken some time to come into common use, has been the farm classification system according to the amount of bought-in feed consumed by individual herds. While not every farmer might know their number, as a retirement website exhorts us all to do, they have a fair idea of where they sit on the spectrum of different feed systems. And those in need of vital statistics such as bankers, accountants, consultants and yes, agricultural journalists, have a ready reckoner at hand to get a good feel for what’s driving each individual business and what sets them apart from their neighbour down the road.
Through using the DairyBase system, also driven by DairyNZ, farmers can work out rapid benchmarking comparisons with their counterparts in the same area, with the same herd size, or with those running the same farming system but farming elsewhere in the country.
Onfarm communication is completely at the heart of what DairyNZ’s all about so it’s great to see regional initiatives such as the Southland Demonstration Farm, established and going strong, thanks to local farmer support.
Of course farmers, like voters, always want more.
In the case of DairyNZ the most immediate of those wants is probably timely information about research trial results, whether delivered by websites, the printed word, or email updates. Farmers then have the luxury of perusing it at their own pace and measuring the fit with their farming operation in their own way.
And as they peruse DairyNZ director candidate profiles over the next few weeks those are exactly the sort of assurances they’ll be looking for.
