For farmers, as they come under increasing regulatory pressure, being on the menu in the world of consumer engagement means risking the loss of capital value and ability to earn an on-farm income as greater controls are pushed on them by retailers and local and central government, Taupo farmer Mike Barton says.
Farmers risk losing access to their markets if they refuse to engage with those groups, the Onetai Station director said at the farm’s final field day after five years as a Beef + Lamb environmental focus farm.
The world’s major retailers control food value systems and drive the price farmers get so they must have valid, open conversations with consumers along with auditable evidence to back claims to give consumers confidence to buy their products.
“If we don’t have that then control will lie with the retailers and they will drive this issue into an access issue and they will only talk to us and buy our product if we look after waterways, if we manage greenhouse gas and if we manage biodiversity.
“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in my view to change this. If we don’t get it right we will lose this opportunity to grab value from this action and we only have an opportunity of two or three years before that window closes.”
That message was later challenged when one farmer suggested following the example of the recent mass farmer protests seen in European countries.
“You see it all over in Europe where they are driving tractors down the road and telling the Government to get … why don’t we do that?”
That is a recipe for failure, Barton said.
His experience dealing with the nitrogen cap in Taupo 15 years ago is the process will just carry on without them.
While it is tempting, in doing so farmers risk losing the capital value and flexibility of their farm and ability to earn an income.
“Don’t, whatever you do, tell them that. You have to engage, You might not like it but the hours you spend engaging will give you the greatest return on your investment than any form of farming itself. If you spend 100 hours a year on this sort of process the return you will get in the long term in terms of protecting your capital asset is the best return you’ll get from any activity you can perform on the farm.
“I’m not just saying that to be Pollyanna, I believe it.
“All farmers have to get involved. If we take the approach of slamming the gate we’ll wake up one day and think ‘what happened?’.”
The 15 years spent farming in Taupo under a nitrogen cap helped shape the environmental lessons learned at Onetai Station over the past five years.
“The lessons we have learned here at Onetai are that, yes, you can reduce your environmental footprint and there’s some simple things you can do like increasing your lambing percentage, which means you increase your income from the same environmental input.”
A higher lambing percentage reduced the farm’s environmental impact per kilogram of product. If farmers are smart they can intensify to an acceptable limit, he says.
“Environmental legislation and consumer-driven environmental pressures are coming and we are going to have to take account of them.
“They do reduce your flexibility and they do reduce your profitability.”
At Onetai he learned over the course of the last five years to improve his environmental performance but it came at a cost. Much of that cost will not be met from increasing production.
“The only way we can meet that cost is to grow the value of the product we produce, be it wool, meat, honey or whatever.”
The 1450-hectare, hill-country sheep and beef farm is near Awakino in Waikato’s west coast catchment, which comes under the Waikato Regional Council’s plan change 3.
While notification is still some years away Barton urged farmers to front foot it and challenge their processors on what they are doing to communicate with consumers.
“My father used to say that most people know the price of everything but the value of very little. People don’t understand the value of the produce leaving our farm and that’s our fault, we have never really talked about the value of it. We have shied away from it. We have tried to pretend we don’t damage the environment and that’s been our strategy. That will fail us if we don’t turn this around.”
Barton believes farmers can grow value.
To help create more consistency in its income derived from manuka honey, station owner Rafa Grozovsky helped develop a new honey and milk powder spreadable product called Onetai Milk and Manuka Honey.
It is similar to the dulce de leche milk caramel product sold in Latin America.
“He’s developed some technology that’s probably a world first that’s been able to bring together those two ingredients.”
A factory is being built in Taupo to process the product for exporting.
“It does involve courage, it does involve investment but you can do it.”
Animal welfare is also increasingly becoming important, Grozovsky added.
“All the retailers are requiring traceability down to the farm.”
Farms need to be audited to prove they meet the standard required to supply meat to processors.
“It’s important that you get involved in this process otherwise someone else will come and will tell you what to do without knowing if its possible to do it or not,” he says.
The station’s greenhouse gas emissions were reduced from 2000kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per hectare to1860kg/ha/year over the five-year programme.
Methane emissions from the drystock sector are strongly influenced by the amount of feed consumed. Further reducing emissions requires either changing the farm system by converting more land to forestry or having the stock not eat the pasture, AgResearch scientist Grant Rennie says.
For Onetai to be carbon neutral it would have to plant 94ha of pine forest in its first rotation for 30 years. The farm has 8-10ha in 50-year-old pines, which will not be sequestering more carbon.
The steep nature of the 500ha not used for grazing means there are few options available on where they can plant these trees without giving up productive farmland.
Another option is having 410ha of native bush, which will sequester those emissions. The station has 220ha of bush and 212ha of manuka and kanuka scrub but much of it is pre-1990 forest and would require a law change if it was counted.
The station runs sheep and beef on its 891 effective hectares with the balance in manuka and kanuka scrub and bush. Financially, the farm has made steady gains in profit with the main driver being improvements in the reproductive performance of the ewes and cows as well as income from manuka honey.
More recently several kilometers of new fences and stockyard infrastructure have been built to boost the farm’s production and fund future environmental work at Onetai.
A new water system for the south and western parts of the farm has been installed and in a few years time he hope to have most of the farm in a reticulated water system.
The removal of 2500 feral goats earlier on in the focus farm programme also gave the farm more options around increasing sheep numbers while retaining its environmental footprint.
