Genuine Hipkins
OPINION: At the recent NZ Dairy Industry Awards, opposition leader Chris Hipkins made a surprise appearance.
He says NZ needs to keep giving customers around the world reasons for continuing to buy our primary products.
His comments came at the announcement at Fieldays of new $17.5 million project to build a greenhouse gas testing and research facility in Palmerston North to monitor and measure emissions from cattle. This was just one of a suite of measures announced by Hipkins and Agriculture Minister Damien O'Connor at a function at the Fonterra stand.
Funding for the new emissions testing station will come from government - $11.7m, the Centre for Climate Action on Agricultural Emissions - $4m, and AgResearch - $2m. Massey University will provide the land, cattle, services, and utilities for the project. The centre is expected to be built in just over a years' time.
Hipkins say climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing the world and NZ wants to lead the charge in reducing agricultural emissions.
He says the new facility will provide methane measuring equipment which in turn will accelerate and help the wide scale testing of new tools and technologies many people have been asking for.
"Our goal is to partner with farmers to ensure New Zealand retains its brand as a low emission, environment friendly source of food and fibre. Farmers can't do it all on their own and agriculture is too important for the Government not to be investing in better environmental outcomes. We want the best price for the best products, produced by the best farmers in the world," he says.
Hipkins says NZ farmers are already well placed to meet the latest consumer demand trends and says this latest package is about the Government being at the table to help them do even better.
Agriculture Minister Damien O'Connor described the establishment of the new facility as a smart investment. It will include 12 respiration chambers which allow researchers to measure and monitor changes to methane emissions in individual cows.
"We are leading the world in some of that investment technology, and this will allow us to do with cattle what we have doing that with sheep," he says.
