Critics wrong about dairy industry strategy
All manner of selfappointed experts have recently been making claims around the dairy industry’s strategy, and how we associate with others. About the only thing they got right is that we actually do have a strategy. Its official title is The Strategy for Sustainable Dairy Farming. Its purpose is firstly to inform DairyNZ’s funding priorities, but also to co-ordinate industry action on the various strategy objectives.
The strategy is focused primarily around on-farm, but also covers domestic issues that will take into account the processors. So it’s not about telling the various processors which markets to operate in, and what products to sell.
The strategy gets reviewed every five years or so. I was on the team that reviewed it last time and we are just starting another review. It is quite timely with all this noise about it, as hopefully that will encourage more farmers to get engaged and offer their feedback on what is working well with the strategy, what isn’t, and most importantly what’s missing.
The latest version of the strategy was signed off in 2013 and comprises 10 objectives. Five of these relate to what we call the competitive side of dairying, the other five are on the responsibility side.
The competitive side includes farm profitability, research and development, talented people, biosecurity and product integrity and industry information systems.
Most self-appointed experts would say that farm profitability is all about increasing production by converting all the sheep farms and buying in heaps of cheap palm kernel. That isn’t what it talks about. Instead the discussion is about improving productivity efficiency.
The critics often don’t quite grasp the difference between production and productivity.
Production is the action of making or manufacturing from components or raw materials, or the process of being so manufactured. Productivity is the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.
It is all about getting a better return for the effort you put in. Maybe it will be from increasing production but maintaining costs, or it could be from maintaining production but decreasing costs, or even decreasing production but dramatically reducing your costs and time.
The responsibility objectives include environmental stewardship, animal welfare, the work environment, communities and national prosperity.
The main drawcard obviously on the responsible side is environmental stewardship, and The Sustainable Dairy Water Accord is the action plan for objectives around environmental stewardship.That objective is overseen and monitored by the Dairy Environment Leadership Group, which is made up of Federated Farmers, the Fonterra Shareholder’s Council, an independent farmer, regional councils, the MPI, the Ministry for the Environment, processors, the Federation of Maori Authorities and environmental NGOs. It is chaired by DairyNZ.
Yes, that’s right. Environmental NGOs have a say in our action plan as regards the environment. Currently Forest and Bird have a representative on the group and prior to that it was Fish & Game.
You will also see a lot of collaboration happening locally; I know in my province there is a lot of work being done with local iwi.
People should not just rely on media press releases or the selfappointed experts to tell them what the dairy industry’s plans are and they are all online on DairyNZ’s website.
Farmers, you will get the opportunity this year to engage on these items, so please do.
Andrew Hoggard is Federated Farmers dairy industry chairman.