Mention New Zealand anywhere overseas and sheep jokes come thick and fast. But have you heard the one about the woolly beast that transformed a couple of antipodean islands into a first-world economy? If not, you are not alone. There is an increasing disconnect between urban and rural communities, Agribusiness editor Neal Wallace reports as farms around the country throw open their gates to their city neighbours.
Mount Aspiring Station may be geographically isolated, but when it comes to passing traffic, it might as well be in the centre of a major city.
Each year an estimated 80,000 people pass by John and Sue Aspinall's gate in the Matukituki Valley, 42km northwest of Wanaka, making the remote locale something of a hot spot in the intersection between the rural hinterland and the roving urban-based traveller.
The interactions that follow do not always go well, hinting at a disconnect between town and country.
In 2007 Mr Aspinall recalled in a column for the Otago Daily Times a series of incidents over a month that highlighted to him how a generation of young people were growing up without the regular contact with, and therefore knowledge of and respect for, rural New Zealand that previous generations enjoyed.
He recalled arriving home for a morning coffee to be greeted by a complaint from an overseas visitor whose 11-year-old grand-daughter had touched an electric fence.
Later that same day, Mr Aspinall was met by an apologetic teacher with news a group of schoolchildren had been chasing and catching ewes, ripping ear-tags off five of them.
That evening on another part of the farm, he found three gates either improperly latched or not latched at all, and three days later found a gate left open and cows in a newly-sown grass paddock. While he was putting them out, one of his dogs rolled in fresh human faeces left on the riverbank beside a popular staging area for trampers headed to the East Matukituki.
On the other hand, he said, there were many positive experiences: visiting school pupils thanking the family; a visitor who righted a gate that had been lifted off its hinges by cows, then told Mr Aspinall's shepherd; and regular gifts of fish left by appreciative fishermen.
He said most people who visited the valley were well behaved and interested in what he did. Others unintentionally caused problems through a lack of knowledge or understanding - basic stuff, such as not knowing how to close a gate securely - while a small minority were out to cause trouble or aggressively push their "rights".
Such issues were thrown into sharp relief during the recent debate over access to rural land.
Mr Aspinall served on the Land Access Panel, the Government-appointed group tasked with improving access to rural areas, and says he heard many times that "trampers don't disturb lambing ewes".
That is not true, he says, and shows some were either ignorant or intent on pushing a personal agenda.
It can all leave farmers with the feeling their role in society and the economy is under appreciated. After all, the country's economic prosperity continues to rely on the ability of a small number of people to generate overseas income from exporting meat, dairy, wool, and horticultural products.
At the same time, the wider public quite rightly wants to ensure farmers are using resources responsibly and sustainably.
Federated Farmers president Don Nicholson says most farmers want the same thing, but common ground disappears in the detail: for example, over how environmental standards are defined and implemented.
Farmers feel they are portrayed negatively, as environmental vandals who rape and pillage the land and who are profiteering from the recent rise in the price of food.
Terms such as sustainability are lobbed back and forward between suburb and paddock, with farmers taking the view it means viable businesses and communities as well as sound environmental stewardship.
They use phrases such as "common sense" and "affinity with the land" to describe their management.
Townies are left complaining that farming is destroying the environment while cockies grumble that urban ignorance is restricting their ability to farm. The battlegrounds include dairy effluent, water use, and access.
A just-released Lincoln University survey on public perception of New Zealand's environment found management of farm effluent and runoff were believed to be the least well managed environmental problem and water pollution and water related issues the most important environmental issues.
Many a city slicker will now automatically add the epithet "dirty" to any mention of the word "dairying", a testimony to a campaign by Fish and Game New Zealand about the impact of the industry on waterways.
Fish and Game New Zealand director Bryce Johnson says agriculture needs to take responsibility for its adverse effects on the environment, especially dairying.
As evidence this is not happening, he cites reports from Ministry for the Environment, Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment and regional councils that water quality is being degraded.
Farmers are not seen to be addressing their impact on the environment, while treating natural resources as their own.
"There is still an arrogance in agriculture in terms of attitude towards natural resources, that it is theirs to use."
Regional councils are also seen to be too soft on prosecuting farmers who breach consent conditions, he says.
However, just this week Environment Southland announced it was considering enforcement action against three farmers and contractors for undertaking earthworks without resource consent.
The Otago Regional Council is also coming down hard on dairy farmers who violate consent conditions, prosecuting 24 in the 2007-08 season and another 21 in 2008-09.
As with city folk, few farmers have sympathy for those who transgress, but Mr Johnson says the onus is on those farmers to demand higher performance.
Such is the level of feeling that some communities, for example, Omakau and Curio Bay in Southland, are trying to stop dairy farms from being established in their areas.
The sight of large centre-pivot and irrigation guns spewing water over parched paddocks ensures farm water use has a high public profile at a time when there is a global debate on water use.
Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson accepts the public wants clean water and wants it to be used correctly, but says urban perception and understanding of farmers is tainted by interest groups, which he says make a lot of noise but in reality represent few people.
Farming today is more transparent and public than urban waste services, he says, pointing to the number of days Dunedin's beaches have been closed due to waste in the water.
The other issue that has split town and country is access.
The previous Labour-led Government upset landowners with a proposal for almost unfettered access to rural areas. It was eventually rejected and a compromise reached where access was to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
Fish and game's Bryce Johnson says the legislation reminded rural New Zealanders that they did not have "absolute property rights".
His organisation is also seeking a declaratory judgement on the rights of pastoral lessees, saying the leasehold agreement only gives lessees rights to pasturage and not trespass rights.
Mr Johnson believes lessees have "talked up the extent of their property rights" and says all he is trying to do is get the law clarified.
Federated Mountain Clubs president Rob Mitchell says there are reasonable and unreasonable people on both sides of the access debate, and it is important for people to sit down and talk.
The Land Access Panel was established because some farmers were unreasonable about granting access over their land to conservation areas, he says.
He says it is important farmers make their farm management needs known, such as by using signs to alert people to when ewes are lambing.
Few farmers do this, he says.
While many organised groups have codes of practice on how they behave in the outdoors, Mr Mitchell says people increasingly visit rural areas as individuals and have little idea how to behave.
While his federation has some differences of opinion with farmers, they generally work well together.
Farmers have long memories and recall with horror former prime minister David Lange and his finance minister of the 1980s, Roger Douglas, telling anyone who would listen that farming was a "sunset industry".
Farmers say the message still seems to resonate, with anecdotal evidence some career advisers actively discourage students from careers in the rural sector.
Massey University director of agriculture Jacqueline Rowarth says changes to the way science is funded and an era of cheap and plentiful food have helped this urban-rural disconnect.
Education has also changed, with a broadening range of subject and career opportunities meaning fewer pupils are studying in areas important to farming.
At the same time, changes to the way children are raised means parents are not challenging or pushing them into particular careers as earlier generations did, Prof Rowarth says.
The result is a decline in the number of people studying agriculture, environmental and related studies nationally at tertiary level, from 460 in 1997 to 355 in 2006, because, as in the case of science, it is seen as too insecure, or for agriculture, it is too hard.
Prof Rowarth says farmers are increasingly viewed as "rapists and polluters of the environment," a generalised and incorrect view in her opinion, that ignores the benefits consumers enjoy today.
Food is available all year round because of the skills of farmers and scientists.
Farmers around the world are feeding nearly seven billion people, who generally have a higher standard of living than they did 60 years ago.
Prof Rowarth says 50 years ago a basket of food cost consumers 25% of their weekly spend. Today a comparable basket of food costs 17%, a sign farmers are more efficient.
"It's a phenomenon what agriculture and farmers are doing. We should be lauding them."
A Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry report says that in the 10 years to 2008, agricultural productivity increased 1.8% a year compared to 0.9% for the rest of the economy.
Discussion between farming, food and the environment does not have to be an either/or debate, Prof Rowarth says.
"We need food; we desire and want a good environment as well, but there are implications for that and we need very good people to sort out how we get both.
"Slating farmers is not the way to go about it or we will not have them anymore."
Equally, urban lifestyle came at a hidden cost, especially encroachment into rural areas.
Lincoln University senior lecturer in landscape architecture Shelley Egoz says urban encroachment is putting at risk New Zealand's global signature - the rural landscape, which tourist surveys repeatedly identify as New Zealand's brand.
Writing in the university magazine, Outlook, Dr Egoz says Christchurch's projected population growth for the next 40 years will soak up an extra 5000ha of farmland.
"It is one of the identifying markers of New Zealand's culture and way of life, but sadly we seem to be divesting ourselves of it for an ever expanding suburban-scape."
Tomorrow farmers will open the gates to 27 farms throughout the country to show their urban cousins what goes on, as a way to bridge the growing town/country divide.
But that may count for little until there is a greater understanding and respect for each other's roles in the economy.
• Farm talk
Want to impress a farmer at tomorrow's Federated Farmers Farm Day? Here are some useful terms.
Tupping: When rams are put out with flocks of ewes for mating.
Waratah: A long, steel stake shaped like a three-pointed star used in fencing.
Hogget: A one-year-old sheep.
Heifer: A one-year-old cow.
Steer: A castrated male cattle beast.
Wether: A castrated male sheep.
Dag: The clumpy black stuff around the tail of a sheep. You don't want to touch it.
Dagging: The removal of that black stuff you didn't want to touch.
Bobby calf: A new born calf to a dairy cow.
• Boots on
Telford Rural Polytechnic, between Balclutha and Owaka, is opening its gates to the public tomorrow from 10am to 3pm as part of Federated Farmers Farm Day.