Fonterra lifts forecast milk price mid-point, advance rate
Fonterra has bumped up its forecast farmgate milk price for the season on the back of rising commodity prices and a strong balance sheet.
Fertiliser makers Ravensdown and Ballance Agri-Nutrients have voluntarily withdrawn DCD from their product ranges after traces of the cyanide-based plasticiser was found in milk. DCD is a nitrogen inhibitor applied to pastures to reduce the harmful environmental effects of what biological advocates claim is excessive urea fertiliser use.
However, for Tichinin, DCD is “just the tip of the food and milk iceberg. There are many other chemicals that can be found in our foods that shouldn’t be there; it’s just that many are not tested for, or standards or limits haven’t been set, so food is declared ‘safe’.
“We should be working from the basis that nothing foreign should be in our food. We should be applying the Napoleonic Law for chemicals or contaminants, that is, they’re guilty until proven innocent.”
Tichinin promotes speaking tours in New Zealand by the biological farming exponent Dr Arden Andersen, and consults to farmers on soil biology. Andersen is to speak this month at biological farming and human health seminars.
He asserts that “urea is the cocaine of agriculture” and is said to show, during the seminars, how growers and farmers can operate more productively and profitably without chemicals detrimental to the environment and human health.
Says Tichinin, “There are science-based ways to grow nutrient dense food that is truly healthy for us, profitable for farmers, and helps to restore water and air quality.”
Biological agriculture focuses on re-establishing mineral balance and enhancing beneficial microbiology in the soil and suits all production sectors. It uses conventional and organic farming methods and combines chemistry, physics, biology and microbiology, with the use of sound agricultural management practices, Tichinin says.
These practices include a focus on calcium and trace element availability and supporting microbial diversity that leads to rapid increases in humus, reduced use of petrochemical inputs, and results in nutrient-dense food, while sequestering carbon in the soil for better water retention. About 200,000ha is now farmed ‘biologically’ in New Zealand.
Tichinin says the dairy industry’s drive to intensify, urging annual percentage increases in production, had lead to a mindset of ‘grass growth at any cost’ resulting in a 600% increase in urea use on dairies in the past 20 years.
“High urea use means high nitrate, low sugar grass, which results in cows with diarrhoea, mastitis, elevated methane emissions, and high levels of nitrate in the milk,” says Tichinin.
“Along with the mastitis antibiotics used to prop up ailing cows on this deficient diet, continuous growth-promoting antibiotics such as Rumensin are being used to speed animal weight gain.”
In addition, Tichinin says American genetically modified distillers’ grain was increasingly used as a feed supplement in New Zealand and there was serious overseas concern with the animal and human health impacts of glyphosate residues and toxins in those grains.
“All of these serious issues that impact farmer profit and milk quality can be traced back to unbalanced fertilisation and excessive petrochemical inputs to farming.
“These problems can be reversed rapidly in a straightforward and scientific way through biological farming.
“We have to start taking human health and the health of our environment seriously. Consumers around the world do.”
www.regonline.co.nz/arden2013
