MANAGEMENT
ANIMAL HEALTH
NEWS
Managing sheep drench resistance. PAGE 27
Protect your beef herd from BVD. PAGE 29
Low emissions not production. PAGE 14
TO ALL FARMERS, FOR ALL FARMERS OCTOBER 11, 2022: ISSUE 761
www.ruralnews.co.nz
Is the risk worth it? PETER BURKE
peterb@ruralnews.co.nz
A LEADING horticulturalist is questioning whether enough is being done to infrastructure in NZ to keep pace with the expansion of agriculture in all its forms. Richard Burke, chief executive of Leaderbrand – a large horticultural operation based in Gisborne and other
parts of NZ, says there’s no question that in the past 12 months, on the East Coast and at another of their major growing areas at Pukekohe, weather conditions have been extreme. He says this has had an impact on getting plants to grow. Burke adds that the weather has also impacted on roads and other infrastructure. “My question is whether the present infrastructure is up to scratch to
meet our needs,” he told Rural News. “When we built road roads, we built them for 30 tonne trucks – now we are now putting 50 to 60 tonne trucks down them. I know technology has come a long way but have we really adjusted our roads to deal with what we are trying to achieve with them? We see it on country roads around Gisborne that were built for one or two stock trucks a month and are now
having to handle forestry harvesting at 30 trucks a day.” Burke says another thing that concerns him is the impact of driving up production. He says there are farming and horticultural operations based on land that was previously seen as marginal. He points out that if one doesn’t get caught out by weather initially, the chances are that it may be assumed that such operations are reliable in
the future. “Then we forget quite quickly when things go wrong, but nature is nature.” Burke says, in his experience, there have always been major weather events, but the impacts of these now are being highlighted by growing systems and less appropriate infrastructure. What he is seeing is that the risk of growing a crop now is much higher than it was, especially with the increased cost of fertiliser and fuel and lack of people to harvest it. “All these factors are in the back of your mind when you are running your planting plans. I would suggest that a lot more people have become a bit more risk adverse because you can’t afford to leave crops behind now,” he explains. “You can’t afford to bypass a crop, so when you are little bit risk adverse you don’t have so much supply around you and when an event does occur the loss can be greater.”
A forest for the trees?
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton has just released a report ‘How much forestry would be needed to offset warming from agricultural methane’. In the report, Upton expresses strong reservations about using forests to offset fossil carbon dioxide emissions. However, he believes that using forestry to help offset agricultural emissions might be more justifiable. The report also points out that while methane emissions from dairy cattle have increased, emissions from beef, sheep and deer have all decreased and that total livestock methane emissions have basically remained constant since 2000. – See full story page 4
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