Friday, March 29, 2024

PULPIT: Good dairy story must be told

Avatar photo
With so much noise in the agricultural industry about greenhouse gas mitigation I feel it becomes relevant that our urban brothers and sisters are properly informed.
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Articles about methane emissions land mainly in the farming papers and generally it is like preaching to the converted.

I believe it is the duty of our levy bodies, DairyNZ and Beef + Lamb, to advocate on our behalf in public magazines and papers on a regular basis. These articles can appear in any newspapers and magazines. A well-versed and science-based publication will give the New Zealand farmer more credibility and respect.

Our dairy and meat products have one of the lowest water footprints, methane footprints and antibiotic footprints in the world.

NZ’s rivers and water bodies are among the cleanest in the world.

To create a policy to drive food production away to other countries with worse standards is hypocritical.

It is already happening in our country in the pork industry where we can boast about one of the globe’s best animal welfare standards for pigs yet consumers do not want to pay extra for provenance and so they buy cheaper pork products from China and Canada that don’t have similar NZ regulatory animal welfare standards. 

The British government is contemplating whether to accept chicken from the United States where the poultry welfare standards are much lower. 

Before US chicken is exported it is washed in a chlorine solution. 

British farmers believe their farming practices and profits get eroded by cheap imports. 

Their farming practices were built on public demand followed by law intervention.  

Years ago this same thing occurred in the Netherlands as well and for most local poultry farmers the cost was too great and the premium returns were not visible so they retired or sold up. 

In the meantime, the Dutch public is buying cheap chicken meat from Thailand or Brazil where chickens are raised in different conditions. The chicken cages from the Dutch farmers were sold overseas to expand the lucrative poultry industry unbound by any regulatory constraints and public demands.

The NZ dairy industry should not bend to these unfair practices. 

The NZ public needs to be educated about our high international production standards before the Government decides our dairy and meat industry is uncomfortable with our emissions profile.

A report on the water footprint of animal products, published for UNESCO, concluded the total water footprint of an animal product is generally larger when obtained from a grazing system than when produced from an industrial system because of a larger green (natural rainfall) water footprint component. 

The blue and grey (pumped and recycled water sources) water footprints of animal products are largest for industrial systems, with an exception for chicken products. 

From a freshwater perspective, animal products from grazing systems are therefore to be preferred above products from industrial systems. The graph shows NZ grazing systems are more sustainable from a water foot print perspective.

The NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre found the average emission from 1kg of milksolids is 8.8kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. In the US it is 12.5kg, 40% higher than our grazing system. The carbon footprint of British milksolids is a third higher than in NZ. 

According to Professor Caroline Saunders research in 2007 showed Britain produced 34% more greenhouse gases per kilogram of milksolids and 30% more per hectare of dairy farm. The figures included methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the cows and the British farmers had a higher level of reliance on concentrated feed and forage.

NZ appears to have very low use of antimicrobials in dairy cattle by international standards, a study has shown. The study was reported to the recent Veterinary Association conference by Scott McDougall, Khaled Gohary, Andrew Bates and Chris Compton. 

The calculated average daily use is about 1.7 cow days of antibody use a year from a study of 78 farms. This compares to 5.4 days for the US and 5.3 days in Canada and the Netherlands. 

The NZ agricultural industry has evolved into a sophisticated and very efficient production system that can compete with the best in the world and so much so that everybody, including our city mates, can justifiably be proud of it. 

This should be promoted by our levy bodies. 

Our Government, including Climate Change Minister James Shaw, realised this when it introduced the recent carbon levy of 5% farmers have to pay for their contribution to greenhouse gas emission reduction and not the whopping 100%. 

Who am I?
Hans Nelis is a dairy farmer in the Tirau-Putaruru area in south Waikato. He is involved with community work and sits on two DairyNZ committees.

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading