Having just returned from a trip to the UK, where I visited several farms, I was rightly challenged by a retired Kiwi farmer when I pronounced: “Environmentally speaking, NZ agriculture is at least 20 years behind the UK.”
He asked me for examples, so I said that stubble burning was banned there in 1985 and would he like me to carry on from there?
Now, right up to the present moment, I have just got a recommendation from my agronomist to apply the herbicide actives paraquat and atrazine to my lucerne. These chemicals have long since been banned in the UK and many countries in Europe, and rightly so. The former is a deadly poison and the latter a serious aquatic polluter.
She also tentatively suggested applying chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate, to my wheat for porina moth.
“What would be the damage to my earthworm population and other beneficial bugs and beasties in the soil?” I asked.
“Terrible,” she said.
This active is banned in the UK, Canada and even certain states in the United States.
But here in NZ we can do these things.
Our exports to the rest of the world, which have kept our economy afloat during this pandemic, are to a considerable extent reliant on our clean green image.
But do we really deserve that reputation?
To me the answer is probably not.
Where there is change there is opportunity, as they say, and where it’s at today is a need for agriculture to change, to find a kinder, friendlier way in terms of animal and social welfare and environmental improvement (as opposed to just stopping environmental degradation), all while remaining profitable.
Sadly, we read in these very pages that we are all too resistant to change.
While many of us now talk the talk, those who are actually walking the walk are too few.
Currently they are the pioneers and I salute them.
Worldwide, diversity loss and climate change as direct results of our activities are an existential danger, worse in the long run than having Russia as a neighbour, even.
I read that Karen Williams of the Feds is retiring because of “many factors – the avalanche of regulatory change is just one of them”. Well, how weak.
I listen to the Feds’ relentless moaning that it’s all too hard, and Groundswell braying like a demented donkey, with spokesman Jamie McFadden questioning why we should pay an emissions tax at all.
The simple reason is this: we all, that’s everyone in the world, need to start paying an emissions tax where emissions are created or the inevitable result will be the planet fighting back against its human aggressor.
The planet will win, there will be chaos on its surface and we will all be blaming and fighting each other.
A farming friend lent me his car during my UK trip. A 2007 Range Rover Sport HSE.
I drove it in London and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the congestion charge and Ultra Low Emissions charge amounted to £45, or about $85, a day. Makes the ute tax seem quite benign, really.
The tax has not caused Range Rover drivers to go holding London to ransom. Instead the city has been improved, with less fumes produced.
And my farming pal picked up a magnificent full-on luxury vehicle for an absolute bargain price; he uses it as a farm hack.
Those who think life will stop because of the ute tax must remember there is always another way around.
So this plethora of rules and regs coming our way: they are not too hard, nor are they unaffordable, nor are they unworkable.
You just need to travel elsewhere to see how they have been adopted.
The English countryside is so much better now than it was 20 years ago. It has life, joy, diversity, profitability, birdsong and blossom.
The picture shows a friend of mine, volunteer worker and eco warrior Rachel Byrnes, overjoyed to discover a sunflower growing in a not-for-profit wildflower mixture on my farm at Rakaia. On the stark Canterbury Plains such a thing is as rare as hens’ teeth. In Europe such a thing is now commonplace.
But it is supported by European governments.
Mike Joy, our outspoken freshwater ecologist, says our government could copy the European way and support or even improve such initiatives on our farms here.
It’s certainly an option.
And affordability? This strip was 1.3 hectares and cost $700 to do. Negligible.
I like “Clarkson’s Farm” (streaming on Amazon Prime) because he says how it really is.
So I’m going to be brave and say how it is on my farm.
My net farm profit, which includes all costs before drawings, was the best ever from harvest February 2021, at $87,458. Not bad for 153 hectares.
This year, assuming that I will get paid for the last two loads of wheat that have just left the farm at a storming $610 per tonne, that figure will be $167,892. That is despite 13 hectares of clover being a bit of a disaster. And all of this is from dry land managed inexpensively.
Quite frankly I have never known dealing with regulations as they are – and indeed improving on them while being immensely profitable – to be just so bloody easy.
And I only go farming for two days a week. The remaining time I either give to conservation projects or I pedal madly around on a bicycle.
I look forward to tackling these new regs as they arrive because they are 20 years overdue and I know I can deal with them and could even find opportunities within them.
So in the words of Damien O’Connor, “the rest of NZ is waiting for us to play our part. Our customers abroad are demanding high quality food and fibre produced with low emissions and high sustainability. Let’s get on with the job.”
Who am I? Andrew Luddington is a crop and sheep farmer in Rakaia, Canterbury.
