Dr Clive Dalton
It’s good to see in 2013 that sheep and beef
farmers have been complimented for raising productivity, while at the same time
limiting pressure on the environment.
It’s a pity that they didn’t get rich at
the same time! As capital rich and
cash poor, many have been lifestyle farmers for years, as being first in the
production chain, they’ve been ripped off by ticket-clippers all along the way. It’s a wonder more didn’t give up and go
to town long ago.
Their young folk left years ago to be
lawyers and accountants, leaving aging parents to dag, drench and crutch their
falling sheep numbers. No wonder farmers’
carbon footprint has dropped along with their incomes.
Living on the western side of Hamilton, I
now rush out when a Fletcher flies over heading for the coastal hills. For the last 10-15 years a Fletcher
engine has been a rare sound, and as a result of no fertiliser, the Raglan
hills have raced back to browntop, fern, gorse, broom, kanuka and manuka –
where honey now is touted as the new gold from the hills. What a fond hope?
With this sad state of affairs over the
last two decades or more, I keep wracking my brains and despair over how
researchers just walked away from hill country farmers as soon as times got
tough.
Where was the urgent emergency task force
of researchers and farm advisers set up to find answers and keep the hill
farmers viable? After all, two
thirds of New Zealand is still hill country, and forestry didn’t save the day
and still won’t!
The reason for the disaster was the CRIs,
which as a commercial outfit had to make a profit for shareholders - the taxpayers. AgResearch directors must have
convinced themselves that better bets were dairying and ‘blue sky’ things like
cloning and GM. So the lower hill
country became ‘dairy support’ and even some of it became ‘milking platforms’. Drive out to Raglan now and count the
sheep flocks – you won’t need both hands!
The CRI excuse for ditching sheep and wool
research was because farmers refused to pay the wool levy, as they were getting
nothing in return. That was fair comment as little research was being done to
help them. Why would they
pay? If more effort had gone into meaningful
and practical beef and sheep research, or got what was known applied, things
could have been different.
AgResearch just walked away from hill
country research so avoided the problem. There were donkey’s years of finished
research in the old MAF research files, at Whatawhata, Invermay and Tara Hills.
It was easier to restructure, and get rid of it and the scientists. We were expected to believe this was
progress.
A very smart economist, Grand Scobie joined
us at Ruakura and calculated that for the dollars put into research, there was
an 80% return on investment to the nation. But, there was a 10-12 year lag in these benefits getting though
to action on farms. So the recent good news hasn’t come from recent CRI research
– it has come from work decades ago, when MAF scientists were dedicated to the needs
of hill country farmers.
I often muse on what C.P. McMeekan would
have done with hill country farmers’ incomes bleeding, and being told there was
no money for research to help them - so just ignore them and the problem would
go away.
He would have been down to Wellington like
a raging bull, grabbing the DG by the scruff on the way up to the Minister’s
office, his very clear message laced with expletives to demand new cash from
the treasury for research before he got on the overnighter back to Frankton.
Clearly nobody in the current set up has the
passion for hill country farmers to do that. Concern about jobs, bonuses and KPI’s seem to take priority
these days. CRIs have to make a
profit which history shows is done most easily by getting rid of staff, while getting
into joint ventures with commercial companies with their embargos on
Intellectual Property. So nothing
ever emerges through the barbed wire entanglement guarded by big-salary Directors
of Corporate Communications who are the kiss of death in any research
organisation.
When we go to Raglan at weekends for a
coffee and pass my old Whatawhata hill country research station where there
were over a dozen of us working flat out to improve sheep and beef production,
my heart sinks for hill country farmers.
If there was ever a image to prove that
nobody cares any more about hill country farmers, it’s the faded sign at the
gate – waiting till the lease runs out so it and hill country research can all
be forgotten.
And I couldn’t see in the recent big announcement
of the $100million going into the ag research’s joint venture hubs, that hill
country got a mention. It looks as
if the manuka and bees will have the final say. Nobody else seems to care. What a national tragedy.
Photo to go with article
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