All seems rosy, then, on the finance front but farmers still face a lot of unknowns.
Input costs are going up and there are new charges coming for just about everything. DairyNZ has set the Mycoplasma bovis fee at 2.9 cents/kilogram of milksolids. It might not seem much but all these things eat away at a farmer’s income.
Similarly, the average cost of inclusion in the Emissions Trading Scheme is estimated to be about $1500 a year for each farm. But remember, that’s with a 90% exemption. By the way, Farmers Weekly, delivered free to every farmer every week, is running a series on farmers who are cutting emissions and maintaining profits.
Just how much compliance with various new regulatory charges will cost farmers is also a big unknown and is likely to vary from farm to farm. It’s not just the cost of the levies that have to be taken into account but also the cost of doing things on-farm like installing new infrastructure that has to be paid for.
And on top of that farmers have the worry of wading through the political and perception issues surrounding what they are doing.
For instance, we have a pretty low intensity pastoral dairy industry in the main. Some people advocate indoor housing for cows as a way of reducing environmental impacts and improving animal welfare but others object to such moves, labelling them factory farming.
What’s a farmer to do. Well, you make your decisions and take your chances. Everything you do will be applauded by someone while someone else accuses you of being an environmental vandal. You can’t win.
And the argument about genetic modification and editing is still going. It’s unlikely to be resolved in the near future but at least the Government says it wants the issue on the agenda and is keen to get a debate going.
Again, there are those who believe this technology is an economic saviour that will also clean up the environment by cutting water and chemical use while others say it will be financial suicide for exporters and create Frankenfood.
So, who’s right?
That’s likely to be too simplistic a question to ask about an issue with so many social, economic and environmental complexities. I doubt even a genius can come up with a solution that makes everyone happy.
One issue emerging from the debate about how we feed a growing world population while saving the planet is to address food waste.
Now farmers might think it has little to do with them. What happens once food reaches retailers and gets into people’s homes is neither here nor there. Many dairy products have longer shelf lives than more perishable goods, think back to the butter mountain and the European Union’s intervention stocks of milk powder, but it’s still an issue.
And it’s one with big implications.
Estimates generally put waste at about 40% in developed countries. Supermarkets, sensitive to finicky customer demands, tend to chuck out lots of stuff as it reaches its so-called expiry date though food experts say it’s still edible long after that.
There’s regularly talk in New Zealand farming circles of increasing production – getting more from less is a phrase oft heard.
But if people start chucking less stuff out then that could suppress demand. If supermarkets sell more and waste less then they don’t need to buy as much.
Now 40% is a lot of food but cutting waste won’t happen overnight. It will be a gradual process, as much about changing attitudes as anything else, such as convincing people a piece of fruit with a skin blemish is okay to eat.
It’s an issue that hasn’t had a lot of attention though it has been mentioned now and then.
It’s been quantified and like other issues facing the planet will get popular attention so those who govern us are likely to eventually catch on and do something about it so waste reduction could become an economic factor at the production end of the equation as well as something happening at the eating end.
