The emotional impact on farmers with animals affected by Mycoplasma bovis may have the unintended side effect of changing the public's perception of farming.
Rural Raconteur Jim Hopkins spoke to The Country's Jamie Mackay saying urban New Zealand will be viewing farmers with much more empathy and sympathy as aresult of M. bovis.
Hopkins' speech was so impassioned and succinct we thought we'd let him do the talking to end today's show.
"This occurred to me a week or two back when I was listening to you [Mackay] talking to a cocky in South Canterbury who wept on air ... I've seen farmers on television in the same awfully stressed situation and you feel their pain. But the thing that did occur to me was, this is the first time for two years, that I have seen the other side of farming.
For two years or more, a gullible brainwashed urban media that sort of picks up all the green garbage and feeds it into its audience ... has presented farmers as heartless calf-killers and creek polluters ... suddenly we see people who are genuinely grief-stricken at the loss of animals, not as economic units but as members of the family, as part of their lives, as individuals.
It occurred to me when I saw that and heard it, I thought - suddenly, an urban audience is seeing farming and farmers in a new and vulnerable and emotional and caring and compassionate light and that's got to be, long term, a good thing.
It's a shift in perspective and perception in my view and it's one that ... everyone involved in the sector knows ... that farmers ... care, but that isolated, insulated urban audience that thinks milk comes in bottles or containers -they haven't seen that and now they have and I think that's a fantastic thing."
Catch Jim Hopkins' full speech in the audio below:
