Farmer’s lives matter
We have heard many times recently the saying that lives matter and we should add that farmer’s lives matter for if we don’t have farmers then we don’t have security of our food and produce supply.
What or who is a farmer? A farmer is someone who works and produces products from the land or the water and this includes, Fishermen, Foresters, Dairy Farmers, Sheep and Beef Farmers, Horticulturists, Market Gardeners, Viticulturists, Goat Farmers etc. I would also define a miner and a quarry man as a farmer as they work the land too.
We need to realise what farmers do to make “everyone’s” lives better. Their first action when they wake up is usually to look outside and see what the weather is going to do. They do that because the weather will normally dictate what they are able and likely to do for the day.
If they wake up and find an overnight storm has happened that may have washed out fences or access roads and their neighbours are marooned. They may find the stopbanks are looking at over topping with the flood waters and they need to help rescue their neighbour and also move stock out of harm’s way.
This can and does happen and farmers often perform miracles in times of need. They have to do this because often they are isolated and need to work together to protect lives and livelihoods. All lives, including farmers lives matter.
In the current situation we are seeing people from all walks of life that are saying that farmers are destroying our environment and that they need much stricter rules to protect the environment. This is causing a huge amount of stress and making a lot of genuine farmer’s question, whether they should be in or want to stay in the business of farming. They are questioning whether farmer’s lives do really matter?
If these farmers start to think their lives don’t matter, then the food which we need to survive might not get produced or the extractive industry may not produce the material needed to maintain and grow our infrastructure. What would then happen to all our lives?
If you have a garden in your back yard just think why you do this? I would say this gives you pleasure and are concerned about feeding your family so in the back of your brain you already understand that the production of food matters and therefore you should understand how much the farmer’s lives matter.
At a recent Young farmers awards judging day, half of the young farmers said that they had left the towns to become farmers this year and a common comment from them was that farmers aren’t single focussed but multifunctional and multi focussed to be able to achieve what make their lives and our lives matter.
From listening to these young farmers we can see that when they worked in their previous jobs they mostly only had one thing to do and were not multi-tasking the same as they are required to do on a farm. They joined young farmers and found that they had a family in this organisation and also found that farmer’s lives matter when it comes to producing high quality food, so that we can all have a secure supply of food that is safe for consumers.
What farmers are seeing is that there are a vocal number of people in New Zealand today that don’t see farming as an industry that is aware of their responsibilities in looking after land or the environment. The farmers are wondering if their lives matter as they are being told they don’t know how to farm (an example is being told in regulations, when to plant) and questioning our reliance on agriculture.
When these rules and regulations are applied then the perception amongst farmers is that their lives and the lives of rural people don’t matter.
To tell a farmer who understands that nothing stands still from one year to the next and you need to take into account weather conditions and be flexible when you are farming or cropping the land that they have to wait for a certain date before they can plant, can and will cause poor outcomes. When farmers have poor outcomes then the country has poor outcomes for the economy and stresses that the farmers are put under by this will have a detrimental effect on farmer’s lives.
Many farmers are currently questioning whether they want to or should stay in the farming industry and if enough of them decide to get out then we will need to rely on imported food for our population to survive.
As New Zealand farmers leave the industry due to the stresses being applied through the prevailing perceptions that they are bad, we will have to import food and what in effect that is doing is just exporting our production to overseas places where in many cases they have much lesser environmental standards.
But still we will lead the world and look like the perfect example of an environmental citizen of the world, while we go broke and the population starves and the world adds to the climate change problems.
The vast majority of farmers within New Zealand do a great job and at the same time they look after the environment in which they operate. Like any industry there are the odd bad operators and these should rightly be encouraged to improve, or moved out of the industry but we should not denigrate the whole of the agricultural industries on the basis of the very few bad ones.
In this post Covid 19 economy we need to support every possible method of our country earning an income that will pay our overseas debts and whether we agree or disagree, at this present point in time agriculture is the industry that has in the past, and will in the near future, carry us through these times of severe debt loading of our economy.
Farmer’s Lives Matter!
Peter Buckley
Board Member P.L.U.G.