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A mate of the Hound reckons he's not surprised by the recent announcement the Government is 'partnering' with Lincoln-based company Leaft Foods on a $20 million R&D programme in the alternative protein sector.
He suggests that Leaft Foods founder John Penno, who made all his money setting up Canterbury dairy company Synlait and pimping it off the overseas interests, may finally be getting rewarded for helping sell the Government's deeply contentious and unpopular freshwater regulations to farmers up and down the country a year or so back.
Your canine crusader's derisive colleague believes this is all the more galling considering Penno's company probably did more to increase Canterbury's dairy cow numbers and degradation of the region's water quality than anything else in the past 20 years.
OPINION: Your old mate reckons townie Brooke van Velden, the Minister of Workplace (or is it Woke Place) Relations is now showing how underemployed she is as a minister by initiating an investigation into whether young children should be banned from collecting eggs on farms and feeding animals.
OPINION: There's an infamous term coined by a US general during the Vietnam war, specifically in reference to the battle of Ben Tre: "We had to burn the village to save it."
OPINION: The sudden departure of Jim Ward, manager of Molesworth Station for 24 years, highlighted some major dysfunction in the way conservation estate is managed in this country - the biggest problem, as the Hound sees it, being idealogues who harp on about "taonga" and use all means possible to block sensible commercial operations on conservation land.
OPINION: While the destruction of NZ's oil and gas industry by Jacinda Ardern's band of merry vandals was virtue signalling on a heroic scale - producing no environmental benefit whatsoever - the politician vowing to make that industry whole again, Shane Jones, is not above a bit of virtue signalling of his own.
OPINION: Your old mate's ear has been chewed off recently by farmers voicing their displeasure with the National Party, particularly relating to how they're treating their farmer base.
NZPork has appointed Auckland-based Paul Bucknell as its new chair.
The Government claims to have delivered on its election promise to protect productive farmland from emissions trading scheme (ETS) but red meat farmers aren’t happy.
Foot and Mouth Disease outbreaks could have a detrimental impact on any country's rural sector, as seen in the United Kingdom's 2000 outbreak that saw the compulsory slaughter of over six million animals.
The Ministry for the Environment is joining as a national award sponsor in the Ballance Farm Environment Awards (BFEA from next year).
Kiwis are wasting less of their food than they were two years ago, and this has been enough to push New Zealand’s total household food waste bill lower, the 2025 Rabobank KiwiHarvest Food Waste survey has found.
OPINION: Sir Lockwood Smith has clearly and succinctly defined what academic freedom is all about, the boundaries around it and the responsibility that goes with this privilege.
