Agricultural Avatar Says Alternatives to Milk are Delusions.

Dairy farmer Jim Hedley is an aggressive activist for New Zealand’s overwhelming export earner which is milk products. He explains why the nation’s economic underpinning requires a rebel voice in order to protect it from undermining by influential urban society.

Cows have a bad name and so do their owners?

Is it so evil to be responsible for the bulk of the nation’s export earnings? All I hear is what is going wrong with the country, about people who do not have enough money to acquire the things that they say they need. These things have to be paid for and to a very large extent these have to be paid for by overseas earnings.

Dairy farmers are said to be quite literally in clover now with record pay-outs?

The rewards for dairy farmers and thus for the country as a whole are high at the moment. For every kilo of milk solid worth $10 however there remains the production expenses in raising, feeding, and milking the animals which is also at its highest level ever. Electricity is one such spiralling cost.

There is this outpouring about how cows endanger the atmosphere among their many other anti-social acts?

There is an intensifying volume of negative activity relating to dairy farming. It is concentrated in the urban sector and nurtured by the beautiful people. Also by their always attentive members of parliament who have allowed so much dairy pasture to disappear. And do so exactly at the time that the needy are said to require the wealth that the dairy sector generates in order to alleviate their misery.

A constant refrain is to the effect that dairy farming needs so much regulation in order to limit pollution to waterways?

Those of a greener hue have successfully created an impression that until they came along nobody did anything at all about this. Conveniently forgotten is the historic presence of drainage boards, catchment boards, acclimatisation societies among other regulatory and monitoring bodies. The dairy sector has become victim of an urban hysteria. As it becomes more and more evident that dairy is the major earner of our exports I have no doubt that this resentment fervour will intensify.

You are saying that urban opposition to dairy farming has its roots in jealousy?

There is some truth here. It may be the reason for so many collective institutional schemes to make it tough for the industry. There is the campaign quite ludicrous in its way to stop cows belching and so preventing the ruminative process that results in milk. Then there is the campaign to take dairy pasture out of production by planting trees. We have seen the effect of this in the clear felling clogging the very waterways that our dairy critics so ostentatiously pledge themselves to protect. Then there is the failure of the timber-planting offset auctions to generate any value at all.

Forestry has become the official glamour activity. Is this at the expense of dairy do you think?

Urban influencers have become hypnotised such is the extent of this delusion. A number of people who should know better extoll the value of forestry to me as the ultimate attainment in primary production. I say if this is the case what happened to New Zealand Forest Products? The biggest corporate entity of the last century simply collapsed. What happened to our paper mills, the saw mills…? Whether we like it or not New Zealand possesses one and only the one competitive advantage. It is that grass grows all the year around. Such is the government infatuation with forestry that deliberately ignored is the efficiency of grass as a carpet of carbon dioxide -absorbing mass and one that does not need an artificial, subsidised, nebulous and fraying futures market to sustain it.

Why is the value of grass and the animals that graze on it so widely dismissed?

It is that the intelligentsia find it so hard to acknowledge that dairy farming is ultimately responsible for much and even most of the wealth they enjoy. How can these dolts wallowing around in the mud with their belching animals have the power to generate our wealth? Remember the era not all that long ago when we were supposed to stop doing mucky things such as dairy farming and instead focus on buying and selling office properties and trading in shares and foreign exchange markets. The result of this particular state-sponsored illusion was that we lost our entire banking and insurance sector here and overseas.

You dwell upon the state-sponsored nature of these illusory sectors, the ones that contemporary fashion dictates will replace the dairy sector?

Let us not sustain this illusion by imagining that this state of affairs is in the past. It is ever present. In terms of local government it takes the form of prime pastoral land being subdivided into residential blocks. There is now the official government-sponsored “fast-tracking” of dairy pasture near electricity substations to become swathed in solar-generating panels and their batteries.

Why do you believe there is this deep-seated reluctance to acknowledge the critical role dairy farming has in the nation’s economic life?

It is because so many influential voices are the ones that the opinion-forming sector takes their cues from. James Cameron for example declared his intention of removing animals from the food chain and going directly to plant nutrition. In New Zealand he manifested the sincerity of his intention by acquiring substantial dairy farms and converting them to this purpose. This move was accompanied by the establishment of neighbouring vertical integration in the form of vegan retail capability which I notice is not there anymore.

You appear to have made yourself personally rather unfashionable in the course of your dairy industry advocacy?

I have not made myself popular I have to admit. This was emphasised by lurid reports of my being “thrown out” of a district council meeting. I was asked to leave in more mundane words. I was persisting in what I believe is the solution to this whole problem which is that farmers become again part of the governmental scene locally and nation-wide. In the incident you mention I was seeking to lobby for rural wards on district councils. Since boroughs and counties were amalgamated we have the situation in which the town candidates dominate because of the more populous town vote.

Why does the dairy sector fail to confront that fact that the governing coalition is led by the National Party which was founded specifically to look after farmers?

The National Party and its coalition cohorts are focussed on a small group of inner city electorates in which politicians pander and defer to known urban upscale issues which have more to do with grandstanding globalism than they do with the less exciting matter of how this country pays its way in the world. It is not that long ago that New Zealand was in the very top rank of prosperity. The reason we are so indebted is because we are so unproductive. This is because only a diminishing proportion of the population makes things that can be actually sold and especially overseas which is what the dairy industry does.