Editorial: Agri's mojo is back
OPINION: Good times are coming back for the primary industries. From sentiment expressed at Fieldays to the latest rural confidence survey results, all indicate farmer confidence at a near-record high.
But we already have the best milk quality in the world. Is this regulation for regulation sake? Why do we need to improve quality or build a better reputation? Well, leaving aside religious claims, great claims require great proof. We need to prove we have the world’s best quality milk.
Well before milk is cooled there are many upstream factors influencing the integrity of milk, eg genetics, seasonality, feed, animal health. In NZ we have great dairy cattle genetics, onfarm practices, open pasture feed regimes and responsible attitudes to health and welfare of animals. Our quality products originate in a large investment in dairy technology, skill and education over time. That’s the way we do things -- the culture – of NZ farming. Much of any culture is invisible: we don’t acknowledge what we do and how we do it because it just seems commonplace.
Other markets may not have such great genetics, may have veritably poor onfarm practices and may not have too good a track record in health and animal welfare.
Quicker cooling and colder storage halts the growth of bacteria and increases confidence in the delivery of a safer, healthier product. In those markets better milk cooling improves milk quality. For this reason, sensitive consumers in our global markets recognise cooling as a proxy for milk quality and safety.
Well known events in recent years have altered the perception of NZ as consistently producing the world’s highest quality milk.
Directly or indirectly our cooling standards have come under the spotlight. For now, milk cooling is the gateway to harnessing our deserved reputation for milk quality.
Without sorting milk cooling at a national level we cannot ‘pass go’. But once we do go, how we can go! Once we have passed the basic proof point we can leverage our upstream milk quality factors such as our internationally advanced work in dairy genetics, our continuous improvement in animal husbandry and onfarm practice, our dedication to animal health and welfare, our commitment to R&D in technology and processes to support dairy systems.
We can challenge our own appetite for downstream value-add and realise the latent value which already exists in our quality milk. With cooler ‘safer’ milk we can start to participate in and create more and greater higher value manufacturing, segregate our milk supply, and use the top-quality milk in a greater range of high value products including personalised foodstuffs, niche health and medical products.
We can tell the NZ story of how our milk, so distant from other markets, deserves to hold the title as the best quality milk in the world. And we can showcase all the factors that lead to that milk quality and which deserve the world’s attention.
If we address the market constraints of cooling we will find we have a more receptive market and potentially a much broader, higher value range of goods to trade.
• Megan Fowlie is a marketing executive at Tru-Test.
