'Peasant' Charlie Pedersen wears pin stripes and polished shoes

As Federated Farmers president, Charlie Pedersen wears pin stripes and beautifully polished shoes. Picture / Mark Mitchell

Charlie Pedersen seems a little taken aback, but not at all repentant, about what he says is "the tidal rush" of interest which has followed his speech at the Federated Farmers conference this week.

A line from the president's speech: "I say shame on the people who elevate environmentalism to a religious status, shame on you all for all your arrogance, shame on all of us for allowing the environmentalists' war against the human race to begin."

Crikey, Charlie, I say, "You sound like a pulpit-thumping fundamentalist preacher."

"I thought that was a pretty good line," he says, grinning. "But I think if you read the speech in its totality ... because if the whole speech was like that, you know, it would be a really damaging piece of work."

He must have known, though, that it would be the controversial bits which made the sound bites. "I should have known, yeah. It always surprises you. Even my own words, when I look at them. You quoted them back to me before and you think 'it does sound a bit like pulpit bashing'. But if you don't come out with quotable quotes, no one's going to remember what you said."

I think he would quite like to give the speech all over again, but I'm not about to let him. This is, for a bit, like wrestling a bull - and the bull looks like winning. But he has nice manners and led not so gently into talking about himself, he does so graciously. He says he is combative, can be confrontational in a political sense "but in my personal life I'm not".

In person he does not, disappointingly, so much as thump a table. He is a man who holds firm opinions, which is no doubt what he would say he is employed to do as the chief advocate for farmers. His personal politics are centre right but he is emphatically apolitical when it comes to party politics. He has been approached by two political parties; he refuses to say which. It's safe to bet that the Greens haven't come knocking.

He rejects outright any suggestion that he is a showman, that he has a flair for the theatrical. I wonder. I'm sure I saw him wink on the telly the other night. "Probably. I do wink a bit." He once put his occupation on the electoral role as peasant. "Well, I felt like a peasant at the time." One of his two cellphones plays Hot Chocolate's Everyone's a Winner, when you call it. He just likes the tune.

He tells me a very long story about the drains on his farm (he is no longer a peasant; he has six farms) and about how, when he has visitors, he likes to get in the drain and drink the water. "I can drink out of the drains, and I do."

The reason this is a long story is not, or not simply, because of the flamboyant act (how he'll hate that description) it involves. He's using it to explain that he thinks farmers "haven't stood up for ourselves enough as far as environmental initiatives on the farm are concerned. And I think we haven't because we've felt a degree of guilt."

This guilt, he says, is "because for years we just did what we did. When I started dairy farming we were still pouring cow shit down drains. It was a really bad look and from a dairy farmer's point of view I think we finally got woken up 25, 30 years ago. You can't just keep pouring your shit out the end of the cow shed because it's just bad housekeeping - and it's bad for the environment."

He is proud of his drains, but I think he must also be telling the story to show that he is not anti-environmental initiatives. "No, God help me, we sort our bloody plastics and glass. We do that at home. And I'm not opposed to that." He pauses for a moment, looks horrified, then laughs and says, "I shouldn't have said, 'God help me' should I?"

Self-censorship is not one of his talents. His diplomacy is a little shaky. When I use the term Greenies, he says: "I don't want to call it the Greenie movement because the trouble with that is it sounds like I'm picking on the Green Party. I chose the word environmentalists and I chose it because I didn't want to come to loggerheads with any particular group." Which is wise enough, but then he says: "If they want to put their hand up and say: 'He's talking about us. We've taken environmentalism to a religious status and we think he's a bastard,' that's fine. They've identified themselves. I didn't do it."

He, unusually, wrote his speech himself, showed it to "some colleagues around here. Who were like: 'Jesus, Charlie, do you really think this is a positive thing to do?'

"I think you have to follow your own instincts and if I'd gone to a committee to ask whether I should have delivered this speech, I think it would have been significantly dumbed down. I think the answer would have been: 'No. Too risky'."

The risk would have been the backlash from "those that don't trust us farmers to be good environmental stewards. And some of the emails and texts I've had from the public kind of back that up."

You could say that. Here's one: "You rabid, raving, redneck dog. You should be microchipped, you F'wit."

He's pretty tough, although he still, a year on, gets choked up when he talks about being elected president. He was elected unopposed but: "God, I'm the president of Federated Farmers. I was unprepared for the emotion and I'm feeling quite emotional just saying that now, which is stupid."

He was vice-president for three years and is a former chairman of Dairy Farmers of NZ. "I was amazed at the threats and intimidation. That was the real toughening up for me. I got knocked over at a dairy farmers' meeting. And I didn't even see it coming!"

He is not unmoved by nasty emails. "It does have an effect on you, that stuff." But he says he has had solid membership support, only one email by Thursday from a woman who said he was a disgrace and that she was going to move to have him ousted.

All of this, I suggest, he could have predicted. "Yes, yes, but the reality is always different to the prior thought, isn't it?" He says he's reflecting not just his constituency: "I wouldn't take the risk of making such a public address in just self-interest if I didn't believe that it also captured the views of a lot of middle New Zealanders."

He doesn't believe there's a huge gulf between townies and farmers. The federation had a climate survey done a few years ago which told them their brand was iconic, that a large proportion of the urban population held farmers in high regard. "They see us as hard-working and honest and dependable: the No 8 wire guy."

He doesn't mind the stereotypes, so he won't mind me saying he has your typical Kiwi farmer's laconic sense of humour. He's telling me about being invited to the opening of a shop which sells Swanndris and, "I thought: 'Oh, that's pretty cool.' So I went down there and that crystallised something for me that I'd already been thinking. And that was that there's a whole bunch of New Zealand people who like dressing up like farmers."

What is that all about? I ask . "Well," he says, "the clothes look good for a start. That's the key." He says this with a face as straight as a furrow.

The irony is that he now wears a suit and tie every weekday. On weekends, on the farm, "I slip back into the farmer garb pretty seamlessly." But Charlie Pedersen, farmer, and Charlie Pedersen, Federated Farmers president are, he says, two completely different people.

So, until recently when he started to relax into the role, if anyone came to interview him on the farm he'd change into his suit. "Because when I was talking for farmers as a national spokesperson, they expected me to be in business attire, not dressed up like a farmer who'd just clawed himself out of the cow shed."

The president wears pin stripes and beautifully polished shoes. Even on the farm he is a fastidious sort. "I throw the jerseys away before they get holes in them." He chucks out the gumboots "when the treads are just starting to slip rather than when they're sliding on ice."

He volunteers this information, presumably, to make a point about the image of farmers: You don't treat your farm like a tip and you don't get around looking like a tramp. He says the real difference between him on the farm and him in the office is that "at home I have luxury of saying what I want to say and how I want to say it".

At which the mind boggles. I don't think this is one of his little jokes, but with Pedersen you can never be quite certain.