We need to back our success stories
COMMENT: The uproar over a TV show highlights a bigger problem, writes
Geoff and Justine Ross, the Lake Hawea couple who featured in a controversial Country Calendar episode, are right. People pay for the story. They were successful with vodka, and now with their enterprise at Lake Hawea Station, they've shown how to get the story out there.
Branding is everything, a picture paints a thousand words, and Country Calendar did a great job in creating discussion around the business.
The business is fashion, just like Icebreaker and Allbirds. People pay for fashion as part of personal branding and status. With the zerocarbon stamp, virtue signalling is also involved.
The question remains whether the same success can be achieved with food.
This is not a new goal; New Zealand has been trying to create its food story for more than one-hundred years (think Canterbury Lamb).
Sadly the main detractors seem to be New Zealanders tearing down the aspiration (which was for tourism) of 100% Pure NZ, as well as making constant negative statements about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the primary production sector.
This is disappointing as it erodes the potential to create added value for the benefit of New Zealanders as a whole.
What naysayers ignore is what the alternatives might be.
New Zealand farmers, creating protein for fewer emissions than other countries can achieve, do so from pasture that is not edible by humans, and is grown where crops can't be.
The animals create essential amino acids in protein in a form that humans can digest and use. They also provide dietary energy and minerals, such as iron and calcium, as well as many vitamins. There is research on it.
On much of the land devoted to pasture, growing anything else will create environmental impact through erosion, loss of soil carbon, and increased need for inputs such as fertiliser and irrigation.
Even on the Canterbury Plains, which often feature in the news because of concerns about agriculture, dairy production creates lower nitrogen losses, lower soil carbon loss and much more protein for humans than cropping.
Calculations were done by nutrition scientist Dr Graeme Coles and co-authors and published in 2016.
Dr Coles makes it clear that dairy farming can feed more people with a lower impact than any other food system. And more cheaply.
Six cheese sandwiches meet daily essential amino acid, energy and fibre needs at about half the cost of the cheapest alternative — and the calculation was done for New Zealand supermarkets using the price of kilograms of cheese, butter and bread (noting that “mild” gives as many essential amino acids per bite as “tasty”).
Despite this, New Zealanders in general and farmers, in particular, are being bombarded with more and more ideas about what else we should do – plant-based, regenerative, organic — all of which are getting away from New Zealand's comparative, and now competitive, sustainability advantage.
At the same time the government is pouring dollars into research to investigate these alternatives, even though at least some of the science has already been done and indeed, provided the foundation for advances.
The question must be asked if the investment in alternative production systems is at the expense of finetuning what we have already achieved and then enabling uptake of advances?
Given the reliance that New Zealanders have on the export economy for new money (the other source is government borrowing), the 81.8 per cent that the primary sector contributes should be valued.