When a cow is just brown
Aletterbox in the country can receive mail and it can also send mail. The technology that allows this additional feature is a little flag. A letterbox with the flag out alerts the rural postie that you have mail to send.
At 19 years of age, I found myself living in the big city and I had a letter to post.
Unaware that urban letterboxes only receive mail, I placed the letter in my letterbox and looked for the flag. But there was no flag. I concluded that the postie must check for mail being sent on a daily basis.
After three days, my letter was still sitting in the letterbox.
My metropolitan flatmates found this most amusing.
Two people with different experiences can see the same thing and interpret it completely differently. But we always think our interpretation is the correct one. A classic example of two different groups with two different experiences, seeing the same thing and making two different interpretations occurred in April 2017.
Cameron Bennett and TVNZ’S Sunday programme aired a feature called the Price of Milk.
Farmer Gavin Flint allowed cameras to follow him around his farm for a few days.
They captured Flinty doing ordinary things like milking cows, feeding calves and spreading fertiliser.
Viewers witnessed Flinty helping a cow deliver a stillborn calf late at night. We saw another cow who had had difficulty calving and couldn’t stand up. He showed viewers how you lift a 400kg cow on to its feet with the front end loader and hip clamps.
I thought Flinty was great and this was just the publicity the dairy industry needed. But, as I am now well aware, if I think one thing, the dairy industry tends to think the opposite.
Farmers were outraged. All across social media farmers were venting. They were calling it a hatchet job and yet another attack on the industry by a manipulative media.
They felt Cameron Bennett had purposely found the worst farmer he could find and filmed him at the worst time of year, in order to make the dairy industry look bad.
Farmers were interpreting what they were seeing on Flinty’s farm through their experience, as farmers. They saw mud, dead calves, thin cows, untidy farm buildings, a ‘‘down cow’’ and a farmer with imperfect answers.
They saw details nobody else noticed, and their experience told them that Flinty was not a good farmer and therefore shouldn’t be showcasing the dairy industry.
To them, the ideal farmer to appear on national television should be a professional wellspoken person with articulate answers, good facilities and fat cows and you absolutely should not be showing dead calves and down cows, because that looks bad.
As the programme ended, farmers braced themselves for the inevitable lashing they would be getting from the usual anti-dairy critics and urban media.
Except, no backlash came. Federated Farmers put out a statement which included the sentence ‘‘by and large the urban media ignored the story’’.
The experience of most urban people is very different from farmers. Where farmers saw a cow with a condition score of 3.0 and considered all that that meant, the public saw a brown cow. They also saw an honest, transparent and authentic farmer who had some witty oneliners. He was obviously honest because he was showing things like a down cow and dead calves.
His answers were not slick but they made sense, they were real, authentic and were believable.
His wife, Cheryl, was real too.
Just before she went to her part-time job at the Four Square, she genuinely expressed how hard it is to feel the negativity from the public.
Now, I am not saying Flinty was converting people into raving dairy industry fans but he wasn’t triggering them as farmers expected.
People get upset when they think someone is hiding something. People feel the dairy industry hides behind a big public relations machine.
They feel their communication is inauthentic.
So they distrust the official good news stories coming from the competent people in the farmer groups.
At the same time, farmers feel that in order to get their good news stories out they should use competent people from farmer groups.
When Dairy NZ heard that TVNZ was filming Flinty, they approached the producers and offered some alternative farmers, Dairy Nz-approved farmers.
While well-intentioned, this would have been a mistake in my opinion and would have actually triggered the urban media because they would have sensed it was too perfect.
I feel sorry for Gavin Flint, the majority of the dairy industry felt he did a bad job and they let him know it loud and clear.
But he did a great job and he possesses the very things that the industry dearly needs – honesty, authenticity and full transparency.