Opinion: ‘Pivot fever’ aside, Kiwi farmers are remarkable
© Dmitry Pichugin/Adobe Stock My wife and I have just returned from a delayed honeymoon in what is, in my opinion, one of the finest countries in the world – New Zealand.
Twelve years ago I spent a season working on a fantastic family arable and sheep farm on the Canterbury Plains and explored the country a fair bit. More than a decade later, what changes did I notice in the land of incredible agricultural productivity?
See also: Opinion – Three years of BPS reductions ‘predictably unpredictable’
About the author
First, a disclaimer. When I was fresh out of university, I had many things on my mind other than learning about the intricacies of Kiwi environmental policy.
These are unscientific observations, then, and certainly in no way a criticism.
Over the years, I have found the farming mindset in New Zealand to be both entrepreneurial and extremely exciting.
If I were a farmer in that part of the world, I’d have cracked on too. Good on ’em.
Voted out at the end of last year in favour of a right-of-centre coalition, the previous Labour-Green government had instigated a process of great environmental reform for agriculture to bring New Zealand far more into line with Europe and the UK when it comes to, among many other things, nutrient legislation.
Nitrogen rules have, in effect, limited land to its current use and curtailed any prospect for growth in dairy or stock numbers. Land use, then, has changed very little.
At the time I was working there, much of the arable areas of New Zealand had already converted to dairying in the previous two decades.
Things are changing, but it will be interesting to see in what direction the new coalition takes this legislation.
There are still more than five million dairy cows, which is about the same as the country’s human population.
There was no agricultural subsidy when I was there, and there is no subsidy now, though conservation techniques such as direct-drilling and cover cropping are far more prevalent than in the UK and I suspect farmers are much more receptive to them.
Water is generally plentiful, so the 21-year-old me was employed partly to help irrigate the light, often stony soils using a small fleet of drag-hose irrigator guns.
The first thing you notice driving from the airport is that thousands more centre-pivot irrigators have been installed in the years since, to achieve better efficiency and accuracy.
The largest ones can irrigate more than 200ha in a single giant arc, necessitating the remodelling of the countryside with shelter-belt removal and the moving of field boundaries.
A friend described the change in landscape as “pivot fever”.
While the many conifer hedges that have disappeared were neither native nor particularly historic, I can’t help thinking that performing a similar exercise so quickly in the UK would have annoyed a few on the local Facebook group.
Irrigating conventionally on that sort of scale is such a painful exercise, though, that I’d have invested heavily in pivots too.
Some other aspects haven’t changed. You can still stubble burn in New Zealand, and pesticide withdrawals are about 20 years behind Europe’s.
Energy, coming mostly from hydro plants in the mountains, is both cheap and green.
The Kiwi bug hasn’t yet been extinguished in my mind. It is a stunningly beautiful country and the people are fantastic. I hope one day to return for longer.