At face value, a letter signed by 100 farmers and printed as an ad in Farmers Weekly may not do much more than raise eyebrows.
But we at Southland Federated Farmers fully support the letter and hope it is raising the blood pressure in a few boardrooms.
Many of the farmers who signed the letter might be unknown to you. The majority of them aren’t adversarial or controversial.
They’re people who generally let their farming do the talking, and quietly participate in industry good groups without a big fuss.
Several are prominent in catchment groups and other industry support groups. A number are Beef & Lamb Farmer Council members or Feds Provincial Meat & Wool Chairs.
The fact that they’ve put their name to a letter and put their hands in their pockets to make it public is a really big deal, especially when it fires a very serious shot at the levy body they fund to represent them.
This is not a group of people who are hellbent on undermining Beef & Lamb. They care deeply for the future of the sector and their usual constructive ways of working aren’t cutting it.
So now what? Those who wrote the letter are pretty clear. They want those in the boardrooms of our industry groups, and around the HWEN table, to go back to the drawing board.
Any "solution" to New Zealand’s emissions reduction targets that will ruin roughly 25% of New Zealand’s sheep, beef and deer farming businesses cannot be the answer.
Taxing methane emissions, when New Zealand agriculture’s methane outputs are already basically neutral in terms of warming, cannot be the answer.
And doing those things in the full knowledge that overall global emissions will increase as a result (as other less emissions-efficient countries fill the gap left by our reduced production) absolutely cannot be the answer.
We stand with the signatories of that open letter and ask for those representing the sector on this issue to put their farming hat firmly back on their head and think about New Zealand farmers first and foremost in their decision-making.
If those representatives can’t put their egos aside and go back to the drawing board, it is likely that a seismic shift around those boardroom tables won’t be far away.
- Bernadette Hunt is vice-president of Southland Federated Farmers.
