agricultural thoughts

Spent a lot of time driving across the Canterbury plains last week. A massive monument to monoculture. I tried to imagine what the landscape would look like if the area was broken up into small largely self-sustaining permaculture farmlets. Profoundly different, for sure.

I'd been following the news of Fonterra, New Zealand's largest cooperative (made up of most of NZ's dairy farmers) before we left home. The writing is on the wall for the voice of the small farmer. I'd be cautious about getting into discussions with current farmers without thinking extremely carefully as obviously they have to feed their families somehow. But:
1. Dairy farming is increasing massively in size in NZ, in response to high prices for milk/butter fat on the world markets.
2. That price increase is, as far as I can understand, due to rising demand for milk products in previously non-milk drinking parts of the world.
3. A big player consumer-wise in this new market is China.
4. A rapidly developing player supply-wise is China which in a fairly short space of time has run up beside New Zealand.
5. So when Asia gets more self-sufficient in meeting it's domestic demand for dairy, what happens to the price of NZ milk and butterfat?
6. And when there is no longer a good price to be gained for dairying, what happens to the large, technology intensive farms which rely on irrigation from afar?
7. And when the big capital boys pull out of Fonterra because the good times have rolled over leaving a nasty hangover, what happens to the small farmers who once owned Fonterra (and the small local companies amalgated into Fonterra only a few years ago - remember Koromiko and Waitohi cheese for example) and who no longer have a significant voice or indeed the right to a slice of any profits which relates to production, real graft, and not to shareholding?
8. What happens to our environment now and in the future?

I still have a lot of questions and thinking to do around dairying, a way of life which is both special to me and increasingly problematic. I learnt to milk cows with my grandad from about eight years old. Later I milked the cows with my uncle on school holiday visits while my grandad was away at monthly cheese board meetings. I still love to visit the farms of my two dairying uncles and to discuss the politics of dairying with my grandad.

More recently, only a few months after giving birth to my daughter, I was driving off the farm of local friends during calving season when I saw a cow bellowing for her calf which had been taken from her. She still had the afterbirth hanging out of her vagina (I presume that is the correct technical term) - such was the recentness of the birth and the quickness of the separation. A turning point for me in how I see the ethics of dairy farming.

So, rice milk. It's quite pleasant I think.