Arable advocacy?
OPINION: Spare a thought for the arable farmer, squeezed on one side by soft global prices and on the other by limits on further yield increases.
Your old mate – in an earlier column – expressed concerns about the recent appointment of Mark Townshend as board chair of DairyNZ subsidiary – NZAEL.
Apparently, this appointment has raised more issues, with the Hound reliably informed that Townsend is a shareholder and director of dairy genetics company Matriarch Genetics while chairing NZAEL – which is tasked by Dairy NZ to lead the “independent provision of state-of-the-art national genetic evaluations for the NZ dairy sector”.
As the Hound’s informant asks: “One can’t help wondering how an owner of a private breeding company has ended up at the helm of a public good breeding evaluation one?” It’s a very good question and one which Dairy NZ and its chair should answer!
Rural supply business PGG Wrightson Ltd has bought animal health products manufacturer Nexan Group for $20 million.
While Donald Trump seems to deliver a new tariff every few days, there seems to be an endless stream of leaders heading to the White House to negotiate reciprocal deals.
The challenges of high-performance sport and farming are not as dissimilar as they may first appear.
HortNZ's CEO, Kate Scott says they are starting to see the substantial cumulative effects on their members of the two disastrous flood events in the Nelson Tasman region.
In an ever-changing world, things never stay completely the same. Tropical jungles can turn into concrete ones criss-crossed by motorways, or shining cities collapse into ghost towns.
Labour's agriculture spokesperson Jo Luxton says while New Zealand needs more housing, sacrificing our best farmland to get there is not the answer.