File Photo / Rowena Duncum
Comment: Kiwi farmers are already producing top quality produce and doing it in a sustainable manner, writes Federated Farmers Bay of Plenty Provincial President Darryl Jensen.
The farming sector is again taking a bashing.
In the news we hear we need to be carbon neutral incredibly soon! What is carbon neutral?
To some it is producing a product with little or no impact on the ecosystem.
Is this even feasible?
To me this conjures up the idea of having an electric tractor and electric bike or should I even go back to riding a horse?
Or should I go back to being a traditional hunter-gatherer?
Read more from Federated Farmers here.
However, we are in the 21st century so let's use the tech we have access to overcome or adapt to climate change.
To grow as a nation people cleared the land and developed it to grow food to feed ourselves and the people in our towns and cities.
New Zealand food producers became bloody good at creating agricultural products.
So we started selling to the world. They liked what we produced so we were encouraged to produce more. Here is the problem.
We as a nation can feed 40 million people from a nation of almost 5million people of which fewer than 100,000 are farmers.
That to me is a bloody top effort from previous and current food producers.
So why come after farmers now? We are told we will have to reduce our stock numbers, but why? We as farmers love and nurture and care for our land because if we don't it won't be there tomorrow to produce for the millions we are asked to provide for.
Why would we hurt the very object that allows us all to survive?
Federated Farmer members want good hard facts and robust science to make informed decisions for their farming businesses.
All we get is the nice "fluffy stuff" from the Government that this and that is required to meet the entire country's greenhouse gas targets.
Come on you 'busy bees' in that 'Bee-hive'. You have this grand ideal that we should lead the world in climate change.
We are world leaders in our innovation in agricultural production - come and see what our farmers are doing that isn't all that bad.
We are producing top quality produce the world wants and needs and doing it in a sustainable manner because if we don't we won't be here tomorrow.
