Conservation Comment: Fonterra's PKE statement draws ire of industry bodies

PLAN AHEAD: Our hill country has taken a hammering with slips, fences down, dams filled with slip material and tracks washed out.PHOTO/FILE

IT SEEMS like only yesterday that I was talking about the issues with New Zealand importing PKE (palm kernel expeller) for feeding to predominantly dairy cattle in New Zealand. If I remember rightly, sections of our population were up in arms at importing this product where the internal politics of the exporting country were having environmental issues with the destruction of their rainforests for the production of the byproduct PKE.

Well, what's happened now is that Fonterra has come out saying that when farmers use PKE it changes the composition of the milk, so as with some products their consumers demand to know what's in the milk.

What surprises the most is that Fonterra decided to come out with this without at least talking to Dairy NZ or even maybe their own shareholders' council - in a sense, shooting straight from the hip and drawing the ire of most of the main industry players.

With a suggested 3kg per day - some feed up to 18 to 20kg - there will be some who will have to carefully rethink their farm budgets, as most new conversions have a built-in system for hard feeding their cows with the cheaper PKE. A question may be: what will they feed as a replacement and at what cost?

Now on to things local. As we recover from the recent storm event, serious damage can be seen on the northwest-facing slopes by way of slips and silt along the river flats of the Waitotara, Whangaehu and Turakina river valleys. Possibly it is time to think on how intensively we farm these areas, given that with modern technology we should be in a position to reduce our reliance on them to some degree? Now we all know that the flats are the result of many floods, but as things change should we not look at small but significant things we do in an attempt to mitigate these issues?

Our hill country has also taken a hammering with slips, fences down, dams filled with slip material and tracks washed out, all adding to the ever-increasing cost of farming over the next few years for repairs to be done.

Again, isn't it time we looked at our two main problems of tracks and fences - where our tracks are, should they not try to follow the ridges, should fences not follow the same principle where possible, away from gulleys and creeks so that when we have these events damage can be minimised.

I know some will say this and that won't work, but we need, at least, to think outside the square in an attempt to minimise the effects from an ever-increasing number of these storm events because it will happen again.

-Brian Doughty is Wanganui provincial president of Federated Farmers