Thursday, March 28, 2024

TOWN TALK: The produce perils of city living

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Homegrown produce is hot property where I live in Auckland – woe to you if your avocado tree is in sight of the street.
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We don’t have a tree of gold nor did I see the thieves on a mobility scooter in the great avo heist earlier this year but a few months ago our four crabapple trees were stripped naked, as were our neighbour’s feijoa trees. 

It was a great upset in our household because we’d already lost our feijoas to an infestation of guava moths. The beggars lay their eggs in baby fruit, the caterpillars hatch and eat the inside so you open up the fruit to find a fat creepy-crawly.

We put a lot of love into nursing our feijoa trees to maturity but guava apple moths know no boundaries. 

We could put traps out to catch them, spray and hope but if our neighbours and their neighbours have the moth and don’t do the same there’s no point.

Which is how the cattle disease Mycoplasma bovis came into my consciousness. 

Being forced to get rid of something you’ve put a lot of work into is devastating. 

M bovis is a bacterial disease that can cause untreatable mastitis, abortion and arthritis in cows but is harmless to humans.

In the city we feel a bit distanced from the impact of this disease, perhaps because there’s no threat to food safety so we can confidently continue buying homegrown meat and milk.

But reading the stories of farmers whose calves suffer from incurable illness brings it home pretty quickly. 

Since the Ministry for Primary Industries announced M bovis had been discovered on a South Island farm in the middle of last year the number of properties confirmed as being infected with the disease has risen to more than 50.

The Government will cull about 126,000 cattle in an attempt to rid the country of M bovis in a phased eradication costing $886 million including compensation to farmers.

Culling cattle becaue of disease must be a horrible process for farmers to go through. 

They wouldn’t want their animals to suffer or the disease to be passed on but all that work into raising the livestock, for what? 

Then there’s a process to clean the farm before it can be restocked.

This all takes time and I imagine compensation goes only so far. It’s not just livestock at stake, it’s future livelihoods. 

It’d be naive to think city dwellers won’t feel the impact of M bovis on our economy and national psyche. 

This is really a confidence game. 

If farmers lose confidence they’ll reduce their spending, including investing in their businesses and the local economy.

Culling livestock is stressful and the impact on farmers and their families shouldn’t be underestimated. 

We know imported threats to New Zealand produce and livestock are nothing new – just think of myrtle rust, velvetleaf, bonamia ostreae in Stewart Island oysters, painted apple moth, kauri dieback, Psa in kiwifruit.

However, an imported disease that affects our dairy industry is one to take notice of – it could be worse. 

M bovis is a test scenario for how the Government and industry manage and prevent further incursions.

As for me, when we eventually replant feijoas it’ll be with more preventive measures against the guava moth. And I’ll be hoping farmers can successfully restock their farms and rebuild their livelihoods.

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