Local Focus: Dairy farmers look ahead to post-Covid 19 coronavirus economy

While many of us have spent the past six weeks at home, the farmers have still been working.

And as lockdown eases, some farmers are keen to support industries that have been harder hit.

"We have to help our tourism friends out," Reporoa dairy farmer Colin Guyton said.

"We're a lot better off than they are. This could easily have been a foot and mouth outbreak and we'd be easily relying on tourism to save us. Now farming and the likes of forestry have to lift their game and help tourism get through."

Like many New Zealanders, Guyton is looking for positives to come out of the crisis.

"Coronavirus, even though it's been a really bad thing, it's maybe helped us get better support from the urban side of New Zealand. We feel like we've been picked on a bit over the last 10 years. And now ... we want to help this country get back.

"Then we'll have some serious kudos going forward as far as farmers keep doing what we're doing."

Agriculture has been spared the worst of the Covid-19 lockdown, though it hasn't been without its challenges, he said.

"The on-farm stuff of feeding cattle, putting grass seed in and things have been the same," Rotorua dairy farmer Lachlan McKenzie said. "Every day the cows want to be fed, the same as we want to be fed.

"The difficulty is if anything goes wrong, if we need any supplies to come on the place, if we need parts for tractors or chainsaws, it's a lot harder to get a place to pick those things up."

Guyton agrees that most farmers are hands-on, which has been made difficult by some of the regulations.

"We tend to do a lot of things you would maybe get a tradesman for," he said. "However, we're unable to get the sort of plumbing type supplies unless you get a tradesman to do it for you.

McKenzie agreed saying some of the wholesalers were starting to run out of supplies.

"I picked up some plastic pipes last week. The wholesaler only had nine left and I picked up six of them. So unless they can start manufacturing them again, those pipes are not available from that supplier."

Making up 6 per cent of the nation's GDP, agriculture employs approximately 120,000 people across New Zealand. Managing staff has been difficult for all businesses under lockdown, even those living on remote farms.

Lockdown has made life difficult in myriad unexpected ways, Reporoa farmer Kelvin Thomas said.

"I've got [a] staff member, he understood he wasn't going to get to see his daughter, who comes to stay with him on the farm basically whenever he's got time off. He wasn't going to get to see her.

"We haven't had a getaway from the farm or anything, that's probably been one of the biggest things as it's carrying on. You're working, you've got nothing else to do so you tend to just keep on working, it has been a hell of a drag.

"You go home, you work on the farm, you see things to do on the farm, there's been no getaway. That's probably catching up on us now."

Farmers are now facing uncertain times, not knowing when and how deeply the recession will hit.

"The dairy industry has got an advantage, where most of the dairy product can be prepared at home the same as it can be prepared in the restaurants, so there's still a demand there," McKenzie said.

"But as the recession hits, as it's going to hit around the world, then we have to watch what happens. It's probably more the supply chain of shipments getting to the marketplace, then the decrease in demand as well."

Thomas had felt the pinch.

"This season I budgeted on [selling] 300 [calves] at $250 a head.

"How it's panned out, I've gotten rid of probably 300 animals and only averaged $150 a head."

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