OPINION: Fonterra's $4.22 billion consumer business sale to Lactalis is ruffling a few feathers outside the dairy industry.
OPINION: Finance Minister Nicola Willis could have saved her staff and MBIE time and effort over ‘buttergate’ recently by not playing politics with butter prices in the first place.
OPINION: "Get us out of Paris” has achieved resonance and volume as a cry to save farming.
OPINION: Demand for red meat is booming, while it seems the heyday of plant-based protein is well past its 'best before' date.
OPINION: The previous government spent too much during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite warnings from officials, according to a briefing released by the Treasury.
OPINION: Your old mate gets the sinking feeling that no matter who we vote into power in the hope they will reverse the terminal slide the country is in, there will always be a cohort of naysayers determined to hold us back.
OPINION: Newsroom is running a series of articles looking into the influence of lobbying and has kicked it off with agriculture.
OPINION: Productive whole farmlands conversions into forestry are becoming a thorny issue for the Government.
OPINION: The global dairy market continues to show resilience, and farmers remain cautiously optimistic as we move into the latter half of 2025.
New Zealand's dairy industry is right to call out Donald Trump over the damage the additional 15% tariff the US is imposing on our exports but also imposition on lower tariffs on our competitors.
OPINION: Milking It reckons if you're National, looking at recent polls, the dream scenario is that the elusive economic recovery finally roars to life.
If voters see some growth and wages rising faster than prices, the government could say they've "fixed" things as they ride into the next election.
Back here on Earth though, the economy they inherited is a basket case, and the long-term headwinds are fierce.
Political commentator Liam Hehir says, "dreams are not plans" and if the turnaround doesn't come in time, National may have no choice but to go negative.
"Everybody wants to fight on the economy if they can. But when neither side has a compelling story, the contest shifts to other issues. That's not new. In fact, it's the stuff of politics everywhere, always."
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OPINION: I was quite casually browsing through some news headlines recently, when one of them really caught my attention.
OPINION: Your old mate reckons townie Brooke van Velden, the Minister of Workplace (or is it Woke Place) Relations is now showing how underemployed she is as a minister by initiating an investigation into whether young children should be banned from collecting eggs on farms and feeding animals.
OPINION: There's an infamous term coined by a US general during the Vietnam war, specifically in reference to the battle of Ben Tre: "We had to burn the village to save it."
OPINION: The sudden departure of Jim Ward, manager of Molesworth Station for 24 years, highlighted some major dysfunction in the way conservation estate is managed in this country - the biggest problem, as the Hound sees it, being idealogues who harp on about "taonga" and use all means possible to block sensible commercial operations on conservation land.
OPINION: While the destruction of NZ's oil and gas industry by Jacinda Ardern's band of merry vandals was virtue signalling on a heroic scale - producing no environmental benefit whatsoever - the politician vowing to make that industry whole again, Shane Jones, is not above a bit of virtue signalling of his own.
OPINION: Nothing it seems can be done in the short term to get Donald Trump to change his mind about removing the unfair 15% tariffs that he’s imposed on New Zealand exports to the US.
OPINION: At the recent Organic and Biodynamic Winegrowing Conference, the Porto Protocol’s Marta Mendonça said, “Grapes are not the thirstiest of crops, but they are a luxury crop”.
OPINION: We are endlessly told that livestock are responsible for half of New Zealand's total emissions.
OPINION: Sydney has a $12 million milk disposal problem.
OPINION: Canterbury milk processor Synlait's recovery seems to have hit another snag.
OPINION: Is the Government's taxonomy proposal dead in the water?
OPINION: There is zero chance that someone who joined Fonterra as a lobbyist, then served as a general manager of Fonterra's nutrient management programme, and sat on the board of Export NZ, a division of lobbyist group Business New Zealand, doesn't understand that local butter (and milk and cheese) prices are set by the international commodity price.
OPINION: The Government has been seeking industry feedback on its proposed amendments to a range of Resource Management Act (RMA) national direction instruments.
