THE GOVERNMENT is considering financial help for stricken kiwifruit growers in the Bay of Plenty.

It's the year of the dragon in China, a particularly auspicious time to have a baby. Someone who is destined to be self-assured, clever, generous and loyal.

New Zealand's major livestock industries have welcomed the recently introduced enhancements to the national animal identification and tracing scheme (NAIT).

WELL, CUT off my legs and call me shorty; my long-held prejudice about organic enthusiasts being smug, superior types has been all but confirmed by research. According to a paper in the Journal of Social Psychological & Personality Science, people exposed to organic foods ‘’judged moral transgressions significantly harsher’’ than the control group. They also volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger. Lead author Dr Kendall J Eskine says about the study: “There’s something about being exposed to organic food that made them feel better about themselves. And that made them kind of jerks a little bit, I guess.” Erskine’s researchers called it ‘’moral licensing’’ – whereby because you do good deeds in one area of life, you feel you’ve paid your dues and can give up on being good in other areas. So, according to this study, people who eat organic food are more likely to be judgmental about their fellow man. Which surely now gives us free rein to judge all those ‘I’m better than you because I only eat organic’ types; who tend to infest the suburbs of Grey Lynn in Auckland, Wellington’s central city region, Lyttelton in Christchurch, plus the rank-and-file of the Green Party…

FOOD PRICES have dropped in the course of the past year. Supermarket shoppers might question the evidence, but the mid-June data from Statistics NZ was clear: since last May the cost of the overall shopping basket has dropped by 0.2%. 

HOW DO you use your scanning data? Do you even scan?

KNOWING EXACTLY what’s going on in the milking shed is now made easier thanks to the Halo milk monitoring tool new from GEA Farm Technologies.

SMOOTHER GEAR shifting on the new Kia K9 luxury ‘flagship’ model is one result of aviation technology adopted by this South Korean car maker.

The New Zealand Emissions Trading scheme (ETS) has taken a big step towards forward, yet remains the harshest treatment of any agricultural production system on Earth.

THE UNITED Nations general assembly in December 2009 declared 2012 to be the International Year of Cooperatives in recognition of the contribution of cooperatives to global, social and economic development.