Farmers in mood to spend as farmgate prices rise
Don't be surprised if there is a bit more spending at the Central Districts Field Days this year.
Primary industry “gave the finger” to attempts to overhaul the original NAIT scheme, Biosecurity Minister Damien O’Connor says.
It was important that the minister had the ability to direct, O’Connor said in a parliamentary debate on the NAIT Amendment Bill.
The industry body in charge of NAIT, OSPRI, was focussed on getting tags on animals and traceability, not the wider issues of M. bovis management, he said.
“When we asked them for a bit of cooperation to help us [with M. bovis] they were, quite frankly, uncooperative and gave us the finger, quite frankly.”
Under existing law “there was no ability for the minister to step in and ask them to step up their game and focus on not just animal tracing but actually being part of a useful biosecurity system,” he said.
Under the NAIT bill, OSPRI would no longer have a specific biosecurity function, but a clause in new legislation would allow the Government to instruct OSPRI to use NAIT for a biosecurity programme if required.
O’Connor said NAIT needed to be amended because it was missing basic requirements, eg tags linked to a single location.
It appeared a growing number of farmers had been sending stock to processing plants without tags because tags were inconvenient. Farmers would pay a $35 fine for untagged animals but some farmers found the penalty “too easy”.
Now, a tag could only be left off it was genuinely unsafe to tag. Inconvenience would no longer be acceptable, O’Connor said.
The previous biosecurity minister in charge of NAIT, National’s Nathan Guy, said the bill was a good one and his party supported it. One of his concerns, however, was that the ministerial direction clause was snuck in to the NAIT Bill “late in the piece” and that it could give a minister excessive influence over the NAIT scheme.
Guy said he hated to think a minister of the day could direct NAIT officers as to what they should be doing based on a particular government’s priorities or expectations.
“I would have thought that [the expectation of] any government, whether it’s a blue stripe government or a red stripe government, would be for NAIT to do the right job for farmers, for animals, for biosecurity, for food safety and the like,” he said.
The 2025 South Island Agricultural Field Days (SIAFD) chairman, Rangiora farmer Andrew Stewart, is predicting a successful event on the back of good news coming out of the farming sector and with it a greater level of optimism among farmers.
WorkSafe New Zealand is calling on farmers to consider how vehicles move inside their barns and sheds, following a sentencing for a death at one of South Canterbury’s biggest agribusinesses.
Now is not the time to stop incorporating plantain into dairy pasture systems to reduce nitrogen (N) loss, says Agricom Australasia brand manager Mark Brown.
Building on the success of last year's events, the opportunity to attend People Expos is back for 2025, offering farmers the chance to be inspired and gain more tips and insights for their toolkits to support their people on farm.
Ballance Agri-Nutrients fertiliser SustaiN – which contains a urease inhibitor that reduces the amount of ammonia released to the air – has now been registered by the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI). It is the first fertiliser in New Zealand to achieve this status.
Precision application of nitrogen can improve yields, but the costs of testing currently outweigh improved returns, according to new research from Plant and Food Research, MPI and Ravensdown.
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