Gordon Mclauchlan: Farmers’ gung-ho attitude still strong after years of political neglect

There was a time when politicians of any hue sat up straight when members of the farming lobby dropped in for a chat.

Featherston St farmers, they were called because downtown Wellington was their home paddock. Farmers then carried the economy and they had voter numbers too.

They lost that lobbying power in the late 1960s and will never recover it for several reasons but mainly because politicians can count and know that many more money-changers work in the big city temples than farmers work on the land.

I was in the parliamentary Press Gallery and then Journal of Agriculture editor when farmers' voices were still heard, and in the early 1980s wrote a history of New Zealand agriculture.

Late in that decade, farming was a shambles.

Farmers had been asked to make the biggest sacrifice during the economic deregulation by the cold turkey of withdrawn subsidies.

Some had to quit the land, and, because I worked freelance and farming journalism was in decline, I turned my attention to other things.

Now I'm back, working on an expanded, updated history of New Zealand farming and because so much has changed, I went to the International Nuffield Conference in Rotorua last week to find out what is going on and particularly to check farmers' reaction to being ignored despite the fact that the production, processing and marketing of food is more important to our export earnings and GDP than ever before.

The industry has outlived the panic of Britain joining the European Common Market, the time when economists dreamed up the scenario that agriculture was out and we would need new ways to make a living - like short-run, niche manufacturing, service industries, and becoming a financial centre because we work here when the Northern Hemisphere is asleep.

But while all this was going on, the rural economy was picking itself up, dusting itself off and starting all over again, as the songwriter said.

And what I discovered at the Nuffield conference was more realism and more entrepreneurial flair and a greater sense of a long-term future than I would find in any of the cities.

I asked farmers how they felt about losing lobbying clout now that all the noise comes from big business, manufacturing and small business groups.

None was deeply concerned, some were mildly chagrined but a surprising number had found it liberating. We just get on with it, said one. And they do.

Some of these laid-back, shorts- and-floppy-hats folk are managing huge assets, and taking risks in diversifying that have gone unnoticed in town.

More than 170 former Nuffield Scholars turned up, 65 of them from Britain and Ireland, and tuned into a conference whose theme was Pushing the Boundaries: World Agriculture 2050.

Futurology tends to be dreamy stuff but these papers were given a hard edge by coolly extrapolating from the facts and figures of today.

Always present was the conflict between scientists and those wary of technological change, and the need to resolve the zeal of one group and irrational fears of the other.

Robert Thompson, of the University of Illinois, looked at world demographic trends, agricultural land availability, food production technology, poverty and plenty, and the clash between technology and resistance to change.

He presented such dilemmas as: the area of land in food production could be doubled but only by massive destruction of forest and loss of wildlife habitat, biodiversity and carbon sequestration capacity, so the only environmentally sustainable alternative is to double productivity on the fertile, non-erodible soils already in production.

And this would need to be done with less water than we use today.

All the papers were thoughtful and challenging, so it was nice to be back among our traditional entrepreneurs.