Who killed my river? The price of milk

Recently I wrote about how upset I was to hear that a river I spent a lot of time on, in, and around has become so toxic that you can’t touch the water. You can read that first post here, but to sum it up:

• My river is dead – and I’m really upset
• Dairying did it
• And it was deliberate: in my opinion the pursuit of dairy intensification at a political level, when everyone knew what it would do to the environment, was a conscious choice; a decision to turn rivers into money.

I feel so angry about this – someone killed my river – but instead of ranting and fuming I actually want to do something about this. I want to understand how this happened, and then I want to find a way to fix it.

To do that I think we need to talk about money. The dairy industry is crucial to our economy, and we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater but, before we get to that, I want to clear the gloom with some good news and great ideas. Because I think it’s important to recognise that this is a fixable problem.

So, for starters, can we get a ‘hell yeah’ for this dairy farmer who worked out a way to make more money, off fewer cows, for less work, less debt and – crucially - less pollution.

And, how about one for researcher Alison Dewes? In her Master’s Thesis at the University of Waikato she showed that farmers can cut their pollution (from 40kg to 4kg of nitrogen leached into the water per hectare) by letting land revert to manuka scrub, then leasing it to beekeepers. When the milk price is $6.10/kg, the average return on investment for dairying is 4.5%, compared with 4.3% for growing manuka honey – which is pretty good considering the milk price is currently far lower than that. Plus, with the honey option THE BEES DO ALL THE WORK (seriously – there’s no getting up at 4am for milking when you’re leasing land to beekeepers).

Okay, so now let’s talk about money.

I’m into it.

I want to be clear about that. It helps you do all sorts of interesting things – from the basics, such as buying good food and houses, to educating your kids, having rad holidays and flying rockets to the moon. 

So as we have this discussion let’s be clear that we understand how important our agricultural industry is to our economy. And let’s be grown-ups and acknowledge that a thriving economy helps create a thriving society – the taxes that businesses generate pay for top quality schools, universities, hospitals, police forces and so on. No money = no infrastructure.

With that said, let’s look at the contribution dairying currently makes to our economy.

The good news is that two years ago milk made this country an astonishing $18.1 billion. The bad news is that last year the global milk price crashed, and dairy revenue dropped to $13.2 billion, leaving a $4.8 billion dollar hole in our economy.

Things are looking bad this summer too – we’re now in the 2015-16 milking season and the price forecasts are for $4.60 per kg of milk solids. What does that mean? Well, the average dairy farmer needs to make $5.75 per kg just to break even, so it means the average farmer will have to work like crazy and spend money on fertiliser and feed, just to lose something like $200,000.

I find that absolutely mind-bending.

It’s a big blow to our economy – and a bitter pill for me to swallow personally. Because not only has someone killed my river, they’ve done it – this year at least – a loss.  

In the next episode of “Who killed my river?”…

Okay, talking about money is all well and good, but it’s people who have made the choices that killed the Selwyn River.

So in the next newsletter I’ll try to understand how this happened by talking to Kelvin Coe.

This will be a trip down memory lane for me – I’m an old friend of his daughter and spent many happy hours on their farm.

But he’s also the mayor of Selwyn District and from the old farming family that gave their name to Coe’s Ford (the swimming spot that’s now so toxic it can kill dogs).

So if anyone can give insight into what happened here, it should be him. We’ll also look at what the big players such as Fonterra the Government, and regional councils are doing about dairy issues.

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Read part 1: 'Who killed my river? A rant from the editor