Both can be distorted for purpose but perception or to use the Americana version of the word, optics, can have a greater influence than shouting “look at the facts”.
There is no doubt that agriculture New Zealand relies on our optics for a great proportion of our sales.
The image of a green, clean, beautiful wilderness, 100% pure if you like, sells our milk, our manuka, our wine, our kiwifruit and everything.
So what will the optics be like when a massive milk factory farm in the Mackenzie country begins to crank its colossal gears?
Well, the answer is bloody awful.
Let’s look at the facts first.
When a cropping farmer on good, deep soil adds irrigation he might need to apply half as much water again over what his farm receives in rain. Say at 900mm annual rainfall he will need to artificially apply 450mm.
A dairy farmer on the same ground, I would hazard a guess, will need a little more, say 600mm.
Now, in the hard, stony, shallow, sun-baked, wind-blown, high-country desert that is the Mackenzie, these figures will leap to a multiplier of many times.
And this fact becomes a very bad look indeed.
The public will see massive machines trundling around spraying newly created, virulent, unnatural green desert in stupidly unsuitable weather conditions spraying the highways, their cars and even themselves with water.
A finite supply of the most precious commodity on the planet gone to waste.
The optics are terrible.
Furthermore, we have seen that a really good wind can turn all those kilometres of centre pivot into what will look like the aftermath of a Terminator battle.
A rather expensive and stupid look.
And in the exposed Mackenzie country it can be very windy indeed.
Emerson once wrote on these pages “who cares about a few slightly impure waterways”.
Well I do and I am not the only one.
It would follow then that Emerson would not care what happens to a few rare black stilts that happen to be in the area.
Well I do, and I am not the only one.
The human juggernaut expands and expands, polluting earth, sea and air on an unprecedented scale in the history of the world.
We are creating a mass extinction event that is undeniably occurring under our very own feet.
It is said that Fonterra is not supporting this massive development in the Mackenzie.
Emerson tells us Fonterra is not qualified to make the call.
Sorry, but that is the biggest factual stuff-up I have ever read from you 52 times a week for some 10 years now.
Fonterra is not supporting this development because it knows the optics are appalling.
The old adage, if you kick mother nature out of your door she will just waltz right back in with a pitch fork is very true.
This development is so far removed from nature that nature is most likely to turn around and destroy it.
Emerson tells us we have brought in hieracium and rabbits that have cost the pre-human Mackenzie country dearly and that is true.
But let’s call hieracium the sword, the rabbits a machine gun.
What will that make this massive milk factory? A nuclear bomb?
Emerson then goes on to rather childishly suggest that if Greenpeace wants to stop developments such as this occurring in such sensitive areas then it should buy the land.
A good idea. Greenpeace have got it right. We farmers need them like Trump needs opposition.
I intend to make them a donation to help them achieve that goal because the optics of this farm going ahead are so bad it will bring deleterious effects upon all of us.
