| Television
Copping the blame for our polluted rivers and lakes, farmers seize the chance to tell their side of the story.
Former TVNZ journalist Cameron Bennett puts on his gumboots and crosses the urban-rural divide to present the farmers’ side of the dairying story in Sunday Special: The Price of Milk? (TVNZ 1, Sunday, 7.30pm).
As the PR war rages in the towns and on the internet, Bennett meets Hauraki Plains farmers who are part of the dairying boom that the country has experienced in the past 20 years. The idea, he says, is to “hear where things are at for them from the inside out, rather than the outside in”.
Dairying, in particular, has been blamed for pollution in our rivers and lakes, and dairy farmers, by extension, are seen as the bad guys.
“The perception we got from the farmers was they feel very much under siege,” says Bennett. “Once, they were perceived as the backbone of the economy, of the country.”
Bennett meets two farmers who are taking different approaches. “Flinty” is
running a large farm of 600 cows, and Jasmine is a biological farmer with a smaller herd. Flinty’s approach is intensive, with two milkings a day for his solely grass-fed cows; Jasmine milks once a day and plants paddocks with “herbiage” to give the animals a varied diet.
“Jasmine did not want to give the impression she was telling other people how they should farm their land,” says Bennett. “But I came away with the feeling that these enormous creatures, with their enormous daily effluent output, inevitably are impacting on our land.”
Bennett gets his hands dirty on the farms, helping with calves and having a go at milking. “How am I doing?” he asks Flinty. “It’s hard to put
a finger on just one thing,” he replies. Cameron also witnesses a home kill by the local slaughterman, who is helped by his young daughter.
“The likes of us who buy our milk in plastic bottles and meat in plastic-wrapped trays are far removed from the visceral realities,” he says. “There she was, this beautiful little blonde kid, right in there with a full understanding of animal rearing and animal slaughter.”
A lot of the rural folk he meets blame the damned media for showing only the negative side. “They’re people driven by hard work, by animal welfare, by concerns for the environment. All of these things matter to everyone I met.”