Displaying items by tag: editorial

NEW ZEALAND’S farming future is not just black and white or – at least – just black and white dairy cows.

‘WE NEED the resources to keep the drive for change moving.’ That’s the plea from meat industry reform lobby group MIE (Meat Industry Excellence) in asking farmers to support its remit for funding from Beef + Lamb NZ (BLNZ).  This and other remits will be voted on at BLNZ’s annual meeting in Feilding on March 14.

THE LATEST media beat-up on Fonterra’s fresh cream recall cannot go unchallenged.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA cries of crisis over the so-called buttermilk lake near Taupo again shows how far our townie cousins are from the real world. A lake of buttermilk seems to be perceived as a national environmental disaster up there with the MV Rena.

QUESTIONS ARE piling up as the Government launches its inquiry into Fonterra’s false botulism scare.

DAIRY FARMERS have been on a rollercoaster of late – especially given the daily misfortunes of Fonterra and its botulism debacle. To see their industry ‘in lights’ in the international media, and being described as less than perfect, has been distressing.

A RECENT Agribusiness Agenda report - Vol 1: State of the Nation - suggests a need for much greater understanding of the agribusiness sector by the country’s wider population.

THIS LATEST fiasco over meat shipments being held up on wharves in China raises the question of just how well the primary sector is being served by the Ministry for Primary Industry.

Vintage 2013 is now over and according to all reports it seems to have been a very good one for the sector. The first wines from the vintage have already appeared in the Wine Export Certification System and we expect May to be a very busy month for certifying 2013 wines as industry stocks are low.

LAST WEEK’S meeting in Dannevirke about the impacts of One Plan on dairy farmers was scary for a number of reasons.