Pork sector sets standard

NZ Pork chairman Ian Carter says they often hear from other primary industry people who feel they are under the pump of public and media pressure.

“They are contacting us – especially from the dairy industry – saying they are keen to understand ‘what you guys have done, how you have addressed this’,” he told Rural News.

Carter says he supports farming in all its forms and sees these approaches as the rural community coming together again. 

“Farmers are recognising we are all farmers, all producing food and we want to do it in a sustainable manner. How can we understand what other industries are doing in these modern times and the modern challenges of transparency and openness... and the scrutiny we come under?

“People can have an opinion and it can be aired to everybody in the world these days in a matter of seconds without it being substantiating much. So we are working under the new pressures of producing food or farming.”

Carter says it is a positive that the primary industry is starting to work more collectively in looking at all aspects of the environment, animal welfare and consumers’ needs.

“It is good there is some unity coming forward. I have presented to DairyNZ and have some of their people coming to us now, to meet and understand how we go about biosecurity for our animals.

“They hadn’t had any major disease challenges until M.bovis [was identified in] the dairy industry. Now they are realising it is not in their farmers’ psyche to think about biosecurity onfarm,” he adds.

“We have lived and breathed it all our life and it is second nature to us. We do things we know are of benefit without costing us any more’ it is just something we have done because we know the cost if we don’t do it.”

Another issue is how to deliver messaging to the New Zealand public. “We’ve modernised our farming systems, but we haven’t taken our consumers always with us,” Carter says of the primary industries in general.

The pig industry was possibly the earliest to be challenged, he says. 

“Pig farming has always been under the microscope a bit more or challenged a bit more than some of our larger primary industries in NZ over some practices. 

“Farming has become so complex it is hard to necessarily understand all the facets.” 

But the challenge facing the primary industries is how to win back the NZ public’s trust.

Carter says pork has gone about things slightly differently.

“The dairy guys have gone about it trying to work out what they want to tell the consumer,” he says.

“What we’ve done is gone to the consumer and said ‘what do you want to hear…?’  “It is a subtle difference but we think it is significant.”