Bobbersome – eager, impatient, and a little bit excitable.
Rural round-up
31/05/2022Labour’s economic mismanagement hurting farmers :
Grant Robertson’s refusal to rein in spending and take meaningful action to dampen inflation is piling pressure on primary industries, National’s spokesperson for Rural Communities Nicola Grigg says.
“This Labour Government has unleashed unprecedented levels of spending in last week’s Budget, with more than $9.5 billion in new spending forecast this year alone. To put it in context, they are now spending 68 per cent more, or an extra $51 billion per year, since coming into office.
“This out of control spending is putting huge pressure on the economy and is driving inflation to a record 30-year high, with the cost of farm inputs rising by 9.8 per cent since the March quarter last year.
“This week we saw another 50 basis point jumps in the OCR, the first back to back 50 point increase since the OCR was introduced – which has never happened before and will effectively double interest rates compared with last year. . .
Farmers encouraged to make the most of wetlands :
A new guide has been developed to help farmers get the most out of wetlands on their land – and it features a case study that shows a wetland on one Waikato farm removed about 60 percent of nitrogen from the water it receives.
As more farmers look to reduce their environmental impact, there’s growing interest in re-establishing and constructing new wetlands.
Dairy NZ and NIWA, with guidance from the Fish and Game Council have teamed up to create a guide for farmers, which features a Waikato dairy farm as a case study.
Gray and Marilyn Baldwin developed a wetland on their 713 hectare dairy farm, where over 12,000 native plants were put in. . .
Critical questions – Owen Jennings:
A number of critically important questions have been raised in recent discussions I have had with farmers about their greenhouse gas emissions. They deserve answers. The mainstream media ignore them preferring to bag the farming community saying they are getting off lightly and are not meeting their responsibilities.
Question 1. Why is Article 2 (b) of the Paris Agreement ignored when it states clearly that countries should not reduce food production in their pursuit of emission goals? Proposals that will reduce production by 15% or more violate the Agreement.
Question 2. Why are we taking unilateral action that will cut production in NZ that has the planet’s lowest carbon footprint when we know that other countries, with a worse record, will make up the shortfall leading to increased emissions overall?
Question 3. Why is 1990 used as a base date for measuring ruminant emissions when methane emissions only last 9 to 10 years in the atmosphere? Isn’t that deceptive? The Climate Change Commission showed clearly ruminant methane emissions are stable or falling slightly since 2005 which means farmers have achieved ‘net zero’ and are actually contributing to cooling the planet. The amount of methane from the farm in the atmosphere is falling. Farmers are heroes not villains. . .
Pioneering viticulturist receives Wine Marlborough Lifetime Achievement Award :
A stalwart of the Marlborough wine industry, Dominic Pecchenino, has been honoured by the board of Wine Marlborough with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
The award, which recognises service to the development of the Marlborough Wine industry, was presented to the viticultural consultant during the Winter Pruning Field Day held at Matador Estate today [Wednesday, 25 May].
Wine Marlborough General Manager Marcus Pickens says Mr Pecchenino has played a significant role in the development of Marlborough’s wine industry as a scientist and viticulturist.
He arrived in Marlborough from the US in 1994, as vineyard manager of Matador Estate – the very place where he was honoured with his award, almost 30 years later. . .
Olive oil pressers optimistic despite low olive oil produce :
Olive oil growers in Wairarapa are optimistic about the season’s harvest, despite some very wet weather to start with.
Leafyridge Olives manager and grower Craig Leaf-Wright said the weather had thrown growers a curveball.
“We’ve had a lot of rain in the Wairarapa since December, and then on and off since then, and that kind of skewed things a bit for people,” he said.
“Some people thought that their fruit was ripening earlier, I think it’s probably about on par, and some people believe it should be a bit later. . .
In Sri Lanka organic farming went catastrophically wrong – Ted Nordhaus & Saloni Shah:
Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million. . .
Word of the day
30/05/2022Quiddling – a fussy or fastidious person; given to or characterised by quiddling; consisting of or concerned with minute or insignificant detail; wasting time, fiddling around with; paying extra attention to trivial matters as a way of avoiding the important ones.
Sensible change to surrogacy law
30/05/2022The Law Commission is recommending several changes to surrogacy laws:
Surrogacy law is out of date and requires reform, concludes Te Aka Matua o te Ture | Law Commission in its report, Te Kōpū Whāngai: He Arotake | Review of Surrogacy, presented to Parliament today.
The report acknowledges a pressing need to change the law in order to meet the needs and reasonable expectations of New Zealanders.
Nichola Lambie, Principal Adviser at the Law Commission, said:
“Surrogacy has become an established method of family building for people who are unable to carry a child themselves. Their experience with the current framework shows improvements are needed.
“A key problem is that the law does not recognise surrogacy as a process that creates a parent-child relationship between the intended parents and the surrogate-born child. Intended parents must instead rely on adoption law which was developed over 65 years ago and did not contemplate the modern practice of surrogacy.
“The Law Commission is recommending a new framework for determining legal parenthood in surrogacy arrangements. Surrogacy is a legitimate form of family building that requires a specific legal framework to promote and protect the rights and interests of surrogate-born children, surrogates and intended parents.”
The report affirms the existing prohibition on commercial surrogacy in Aotearoa New Zealand and makes recommendations to improve surrogacy law and practice, including amendments to the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act 2004 and the Status of Children Act 1969.
Key recommendations include:
- Introducing a simple administrative pathway for recognising intended parents as the legal parents of a surrogate-born child without the need for a court process, where the surrogacy arrangement was approved by the Ethics Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ECART) and the surrogate gives her consent.
- Providing a separate court pathway for recognising intended parents as the legal parents of a surrogate-born child in situations when the administrative pathway does not apply.
Current law doesn’t recognise intended parents as parents, they have to adopt the child.
- Giving effect to children’s rights to identity by establishing a national surrogacy birth register to preserve access to information by surrogate-born people about their genetic and gestational origins and whakapapa.
- Clarifying the law to allow payments to surrogates for reasonable costs actually incurred in relation to a surrogacy arrangement, including compensation for loss of income.
Paying someone to be a surrogate would still be illegal but this would allow recompense for costs incurred.
I am not sure if it would allow payment for services, for example housework and child care.
At the moment intended parents could give up work and wait on the surrogate hand and foot but could not pay someone else to help with housework or child care.
The new law should allow payment for this sort of help.
- Changes to the ECART approval process to improve its operation and to enable ECART to approve traditional surrogacy arrangements.
- Commissioning Māori-led research to provide a better understanding of tikanga Māori and surrogacy and Māori perspectives on surrogacy.
- Accommodating international surrogacy arrangements (where intended parents live in New Zealand and the surrogate lives overseas) within the court pathway of the new legal framework in order to promote the best interests of the child.
In developing its recommendations, the Commission has been informed by its consultation with the community of those with experience of surrogacy, members of the public, experts and interested organisations. It has examined recent developments in surrogacy law and regulation overseas and incorporates international best practice into its recommendations.
The Government will now consider the Commission’s recommendations and decide whether to reform the law.
These are recommendations for sensible changes that would make the surrogacy process simpler for the surrogate and the intended parents.
The existing law is out of date and needs to be brought in to the 21st century.
Word of the day
29/05/2022Wamble -a wobble or roll; an unsteady motion; to move unsteadily or with a weaving or rolling motion; an upset stomach; feeling of nausea; rumbling of the stomach.
Trees at Night
29/05/2022TREES AT NIGHT
by Helene Johnson
Slim Sentinels
Stretching lacy arms
About a slumbrous moon;
Black quivering
Silhouettes,
Tremulous,
Stencilled on the petal
Of a bluebell;
Ink sputtered
On a robin’s breast;
The jagged rent
Of mountains
Reflected in a
Stilly sleeping lake;
Fragile pinnacles
Of fairy castles;
Torn webs of shadows;
And
Printed ’gainst the sky —
The trembling beauty
Of an urgent pine.
Hat tip: The Marginalian
Sunday Soapbox
29/05/2022Sunday’s soapbox is yours to use as you will – within the bounds of decency and absence of defamation. You’re welcome to look back or forward, discuss issues of the moment, to pontificate, ponder or point us to something of interest, to educate, elucidate or entertain, amuse, bemuse or simply muse, but not abuse.
A man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see. But he goes on to another act. As a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season. – Marcus Aurelius
Word of the day
28/05/2022Futzing – idling or busying oneself aimlessly; wasting time or effort on frivolities, playing around; dealing with or handling idly, reluctantly, or as a time-consuming task; dealing with tediously and nigglingly.
Organic farming can’t feed enough
28/05/2022Ukraine crisis reveals folly of organic farming – Bjorn Lomborg
The energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine disabused many politicians of the notion that the world could make a swift transition to green energy powered by solar, wind and wishful thinking. As food prices skyrocket and the conflict threatens a global food crisis, we need to face another unpopular reality: Organic farming is ineffective, land hungry and very expensive, and it would leave billions hungry if it were embraced world-wide.
For years, politicians and the chattering classes have argued that organic farming is the responsible way to feed the world. The European Union pushed last year for members roughly to triple organic farming by 2030. Influential nonprofits have long promoted organic farming to developing nations, causing fragile countries like Sri Lanka to invest in such methods. In the West, many consumers have been won over: About half the population of Germany believes that organic farming can fight global hunger.
The rise in food prices—buoyed by increased fertilizer, energy and transport costs—amid the conflict in Ukraine has exposed inherent flaws in the argument for organic farming. Because organic agriculture shirks many of the scientific advancements that have allowed farmers to increase crop yields, it’s inherently less efficient than conventional farming. Research has conclusively shown that organic farming produces less food per acre than conventional agriculture. Moreover, organic farming rotates fields in and out of use more often than conventional farming, which can rely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticides to maintain fertility and keep away pests.
Taking this and the lower production in a given field into account, organic farming produces between 29% to 44% less food than conventional methods. It therefore requires as much as 78% more land than conventional agriculture and the food produced costs 50% more—all while generating no measurable increase in human health or animal welfare.
This higher cost is untenable in developing nations, and it was irresponsible for activists in wealthy economies to push inefficient farming methods on them. Nowhere is this tragedy more obvious than Sri Lanka, where the imposition of organics has been calamitous. President Mahinda Rajapaksa ran for election in 2019 promising a transition to organic food production. This policy produced nothing but misery. The eschewing of fertilizer caused rice production to drop by 20% in the first six months after the switch to organic farming was implemented. Last winter, farmers predicted that tea yields could fall by as much as 40%. Food prices rose; the cost of vegetables quintupled. Protests finally forced Sri Lanka mostly to give up its organic foray this past winter, too late to rescue much of this year’s crop.
Sri Lanka’s example underscores the irresponsibility of organics. Organic farming rejects synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, but there is currently far from enough organic nitrogen to feed the world. It turns out that synthetic nitrogen is directly responsible for feeding four billion people, more than half the world’s population.
Wealthy consumers can take the related price increases, but many poor households in the developing world spend more than half their income on food. Every 1% hike in food prices tips another 10 million people into global poverty. Advocating for global organics implicitly means suggesting that billions should forgo food.
It is easier to ignore these inconvenient details when food shortages aren’t in the headlines, but the war in Ukraine has put world hunger on everyone’s mind. Russia and Ukraine normally provide more than a quarter of the world’s exported wheat and significant supplies of corn, vegetable oil and barley. Almost a third of global potash, a potassium-rich product crucial for plant growth, comes from Russia and Belarus and most is likely subject to sanctions. Russia also produces 8% of the world’s nitrogen, the price of which had already more than tripled over the two years before the invasion. Most nitrogen is made from fossil fuels, and many factories have had to stop production as the pandemic and climate policies have raised the price of nonrenewable energy. And it doesn’t help food prices that the costs of transport have more than doubled since the pandemic began.
The result will be devastation. Rising fertilizer prices could decrease rice yields by 10% in the next season, leading to a drop in food production equivalent to what could feed half a billion people.
Policy makers and nonprofits must urgently focus on ways to produce more food for the world’s poorest at less cost. Genetic engineering, better pest management and more irrigation would go a long way toward increasing yields. Ramping up the production of artificial fertilizer, as well as considering removing regulation that makes its fossil-fuel inputs more expensive, will also help. These simple, common-sense approaches can curb price hikes, avoid hunger and even help the environment. Agriculture already uses 40% of the ice-free land on the earth. Increasing its efficiency will allow us to keep more land wild and natural.
It’s time to let go of this self-indulgent obsession with organics and focus on scientific and effective approaches that can feed the planet.
Far too much of the push for organic farming is based on politics and emotion with little if any understanding of farming, economics or science.
Organic farming can produce food for the wealthy who can afford to pay more for less production but it’s a recipe for starvation for the poor, and the humanitarian crisis and social unrest that would accompany it.
Speaking up for free speech
28/05/2022National MP Simon O’Connor speaks up for free speech:
SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): Against the spirit of free speech, Mr Speaker, may I suggest that for mine, you can turn your hearing aid off for five minutes and then turn it back on.
To illustrate the very problem that the left and the radical left are putting across tonight, I would just like to say I have found every contribution from the Labour Party and the Greens—$200,000, Chlöe Swarbrick—offensive. It’s hurt me. I’m mentally anguished by what they’ve said. My tribe, my community, and my identity has been deeply offended, and no one on that side could dare to critique that, because that’s my experience.
Don’t you dare question what I’m feeling. My feelings trump anything you think and anything your group thinks. My tribe, my feelings, are right, and I am very upset tonight.
I want everything that the Labour Party and the radical Greens say banned. I don’t want to see them on the universities, because if I walk there tomorrow, I could have a hurt feeling. I could have a hurt feeling.
Do you know what—do you know what? I could go to a university and someone could say “Simon O’Connor, we don’t agree with you.”, and do you know what? That’s just going to cut—according to the Labour Party—so much to my heart. They’re going to say, “Gosh, you’re a Catholic.” Oh, what terrible sin could that be? That’s a terrible thing, you know, and I’d feel really hurt about that. “You’re an academic—you’ve studied. You’re privileged.”—gosh, that’s going to hurt.
I’m doing this as parody, because what doesn’t seem to get the left is that freedom of speech relies on the ability for, actually, an array of ideas. The whole point of freedom of speech is not for the speech we agree with; it’s the speech we don’t, and, unfortunately, our universities have been captured by a bunch of left-wing progressives.
It only needs one quick example: Auckland University of Technology—I’ve written to them recently. Guess what? A bunch of women—that’s probably the wrong pronoun and collective pronoun, but anyway. A bunch of women—I want to be really specific about that gender; a bunch of women—wanted to go on to the university and talk about women, and do you know what happened? They were banned. Women were banned from talking about women’s rights, and not only that; they were abused, they were given hateful speech, they were harassed, and they were bullied from people who called them inclusion officers—from academics. It’s an absolute disgrace.
It’s an absolute disgrace, and let’s be under no illusion here: this is nothing to do with freedom of speech from the other side; it’s all about control. You will only be allowed to think, say, and preach what they believe in. That is autocracy, that is a totalitarian mind-set, and it infects like a virus our universities. It’s an absolute cancer, and like any cancer—and the doctors know this—you rip it out, and the best way you rip it out is some sunlight.
There is an absolute arrogance, an arrogance of the highest degree, from the left and the radical left that they know best. The thing is that you don’t, and I can say that with confidence, because I might be on the other side and I might have a different opinion, but do you know what? I don’t think I know best. I think I have an opinion; I could be wrong.
I’m actually willing to be told I’m wrong without having a bloody cry-baby in the corner—”I need a safe space.” Grow up.
To those academics, those of you who responded to the survey talking of freedom as some appropriated colonial concept: get out. We pay our taxes; you’re an absolute disgrace. To those academics, including those who fought for COVID, who bullied and harassed other academics, those seven who stood up at the Royal Society—an absolute shocker and a shame. To those COVID scientists being paid huge amounts of money by this Government who were harassing their colleagues—an absolute disgrace.
So we need legislation like this. We need more legislation like this, because at the end of the day, our universities are no longer filled with academics. They’re filled with activists, and their mind-sets are weak—and they shake their heads on the other side. We know it’s so weak, because they cannot even sustain the most coherent, simple, basic arguments without crying.
University has flourished throughout the world. It’s been given to New Zealand. By the way, universities are appropriated into New Zealand—I just thought you left-wing academics needed to grow up. They have a lineage of free speech and ideas.
So the final message is really simple. To those on the left, to those academics who do not believe in freedom of speech: grow up. And if you’re not prepared to grow up, go and become a kindergarten teacher.
The link to the transcript takes you to the full debate which includes speeches by Labour and Green MPs speaking against free speech.
Saturday soapbox
28/05/2022Saturday’s soapbox is yours to use as you will – within the bounds of decency and absence of defamation. You’re welcome to look back or forward, discuss issues of the moment, to pontificate, ponder or point us to something of interest, to educate, elucidate or entertain, amuse, bemuse or simply muse, but not abuse.
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded peoples re the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.– Christopher Hitchens