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.
A large Māori farm on the Mahia Peninsula in northern Hawke's Bay has rocket science to thank for improving its viability.
Wools of New Zealand will soon launch the international version of an online global wool marketplace designed to bring farmers and manufacturers closer together.
New Zealand is so far escaping the unpredictable vagaries of President Donald Trump's trade policies by the skin of its teeth.
The Ministry for Primary Industries' (MP) head of their On-Farm Support Team, Dr John Roche, says the declaration of a drought or adverse event is a recognition that things are tough in a region such as Taranaki.
Rural Communities Minister Mark Patterson says the present weather conditions remain challenging for farmers.
The quick response to the discovery of another fruit fly in Auckland is being praised by fruit and vegetable growers.
OPINION: Your old mate reckons a wake-up call is overdue for the platoons of non-productive (and now unemployed) bureaucrats, researchers…
OPINION: If you're one of the few still reading the NZ Herald, you'd have seen Chicken Little academics screaming that…