Dairying needs a storyteller
Dairy farming needs to tell its story better reckons Marc Gascoigne.
For years it has been the wrong people telling New Zealand about dairy farming. Bad news sells newspapers. And in the age of the smart phone and social media, one nasty post can go viral and do a lot of damage to our reputation.
The vast majority of farming families I know are good, honest, salt of the earth, hard-working, nononsense, generous, genuine people.
The farmers I know just get on with it, put their heads down and do the very best for their families, their animals, their workmates, and their communities.
If you’re not a farmer, you’d be forgiven if the image you have of farmers is of polluting rivers, causing climate change, being cruel to their stock, whining about the weather, too much rain, not enough rain, having their hand out every time there is a drought, and working their staff like slaves for under the minimum wage.
And then you’d be forgiven if you think a huge company like Fonterra is ripping off farmers, ripping off consumers, and lining their pockets while everyone suffers.
Each time Fonterra announces their annual profit, I’m amazed at the number of people I know who will comment to me how terrible it is that Fonterra is making such a massive profit, and not paying the profits out to farmers. When I tell them that it is great that Fonterra is making a profit, and actually, yes, they do pay it out to us as a dividend, they can’t believe it! An independent survey that Fonterra did last year showed that 84 per cent of New Zealanders do not even know that Fonterra is a cooperative and is 100 per cent owned by farmers. That’s amazing.
That’s why initiatives like the Fonterra #431am campaign are so important. It’s great to have a legend like Richie Mccaw prepared to stand up and be proud of farmers and Fonterra. We as farmers need to have pride in what we have achieved as well. Fonterra is New Zealand’s biggest company by far and it has been built up by generations of family farmers and a lot of hard work. Let’s be proud of that. Over the last few years a huge amount of work and money has been spent on farm environmental initiatives, upgrading effluent systems, fencing off waterways, improving animal welfare, and improving workplace safety and workloads.
Let’s be proud of that too. If you believed some media reports, and Green Party press releases, you would think none of this has happened. Well it has, and people need to know.
I’ve had one or two farmers say to me that they don’t care what people think. I’ve had farmers ask me, why the hell is Fonterra spending all that money on Richie and primetime TV when payout is so low? Well, take organics as an example. The demand for organic food around the developed world is growing rapidly. Why? It’s not because organic farmers have done an amazing job marketing their product. It is because consumers have lost trust in conventional farming, they believe all the BS and have a perception that conventional farming is bad for them, bad for the environment, bad for the animals, bad full stop.
Well it’s not and we need to tell them that. We need to tell our story, of the premium quality products that are sustainably produced from pasture based freerange cows and expertly exported to 140 countries around the planet, from the best little country in the world, New Zealand.
I’m a Fonterra dairy farmer and I’m proud of it. You should be too.
Marc Gascoigne is a Cambridge dairy farmer. He welcomes feedback at marcmaria1@gmail.com