Mark Peart: Blood, sweat and tears drive NZ farmers

Several weeks ago I was fortunate enough to travel to Switzerland for the annual congress of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists, a professional body of which New Zealand's Guild of Agricultural Journalists and Communicators is a member.

There were 200 journalists from 30 countries attending. Many wanted to know about the farm subsidy elimination that was a key plank of the Lange/Douglas Labour Administration of the mid-80s.

Claudia Wirz, an editor for the Zurich-based Neue Zurcher Zeitung, was one of three keynote speakers at a seminar looking at the media's role in agriculture.

Wirz, who doesn't have an agricultural background or training and doesn't specialise in agricultural journalism, caused a few ripples with a blunt assessment of how her financial journalist colleagues categorised farmers: "Old-fashioned, grabbing, constantly complaining, always against any sort of reforms, gobbling up public subsidies. Not one colleague saw farmers as businessmen."

Wirz said it was no longer the farmer who fed the Swiss population, but the taxpayer who fed the farmer - "through the unshakeably high subsidies".

Despite that, said Wirz, the overriding image of agriculture in Switzerland was still positive.

The Swiss Farmers Union - the equivalent of our Federated Farmers - has a well-oiled PR machine. Wirz said it dealt "swiftly, professionally and credibly" with the media, and journalists from daily papers, who were always under pressure to meet deadlines and therefore often not able to gain a deep insight into the details of agricultural issues.

All this got me drawing parallels with my New Zealand experience garnered over 25 years in journalism, of which a considerable portion has involved dealing with farmers.

There isn't any doubt that farmers and the rural sector generally here are seen as the backbone of the New Zealand economy and significant creators of wealth. Unlike in Switzerland, farmers here don't rely on a nanny state mentality to safeguard them. They succeed or fail through blood, sweat, and tears.

Swiss farmers would argue New Zealand farmland is much more conducive to profitable farming than their in-some-cases marginal alpine land. And perhaps so.

But that doesn't mean farmers here have any more of a free ride just because their pastoral conditions happen to be superior. The hard yards still have to be done to till the land and farm the animals.

I might be wrong, but certainly townies like me don't have any trouble seeing farmers as businessmen. That image has been enhanced in recent years as some of our savvier farmers have seen the benefits of diversification in an agricultural sense and in investment opportunities not necessarily related to farming, like property.

That said, I still have vivid memories as a reporter in Southland in the 90s being assigned - first thing on a Monday morning, no less - to Federated Farmers section meetings where some individuals took it upon themselves to determine what I could report. It was as if they were doing me a huge favour by admitting me to their inner sanctum.

Pockets of that mindset still prevail in the agricultural sector, but things have improved.

Nevertheless, campaigns on issues like the fart tax and land access should have underlined to farmers that without the media, communicating to the wider public is nigh on impossible.

The reverse is also true. Specialist agricultural publications wouldn't last five minutes without farmer support.

Commentators raking over the ashes of the recent general election have been quick to highlight the apparent schism between town and country highlighted by voting patterns.

But we all have to co-habit and co-exist together in a tiny, geographically isolated nation of 4.2 million people. So let's get on with it.

* Mark Peart is a Dunedin-based freelance writer. He visited Switzerland as the 2005 Rabobank agricultural journalist of the year.