- [Baz] Dairy is a huge part of New Zealand.
It contributes massively to our economy
making up 25% of our exports.
Agriculture's always been the backbone of the country,
but the perception of dairy is changing.
- If you care about the natural environment,
whether it's climate change, whether it's biodiversity,
whether it's rivers and lakes,
you always end up back in agribusiness,
which is driving the crisis.
- [Baz] Dairy cows are one of the most
polluting animals you can farm,
and we've filled our country with them.
The massive growth of dairy over the last 30 years
has come with negative impacts on our environment.
Excessive fertilisers on our paddocks,
pollution of our rivers
and high emissions contributing to climate change.
- Our current agricultural system is very sustainable.
If you compare us to other countries,
we're actually one of the very best in the world.
- [Baz] In this series, I investigate environmental issues
down on the farm and seek solutions.
Farmers are part of who we are as Kiwis
and so is the love of the environment we live in.
These are big issues for all of us here in Aotearoa,
in the land of milk and money.
Most Kiwis have probably heard our dairy industry described
as intensive, but I'd guess that not
many know what that actually means.
I've always assumed it meant how many cows we have,
which is partly true.
But more than that, it's about the inputs
that are required to have that many cows in the first place.
Things like water for irrigation,
synthetic fertiliser, imported feed for cows.
In this episode, I want to look at why
the dairy industry uses so many inputs
and if there's a way we could reduce them
that works for both farmers and the environment.
But first let's get our head around what is actually
intensive about our dairy industry.
Put simply it means we're keeping lots of cows
tightly packed together in order to milk them twice a day.
The trouble is this limits how much grass
your cows have access to and milking cows eat a lot.
Each cow eats around 80 kilograms of grass a day.
The dairy boom has doubled
the number of dairy cows to 6.3 million.
And that's increased how many cows are kept in each paddock
and put more and more pressure
on the amount of grass that needs to be grown.
To do that the dairy industry's become the biggest
user of water in the country
and increased fertiliser use by 600% since 1990.
All of these factors together
are what make our dairy industry intensive.
As former co-leader of the Green Party
and now head of Greenpeace Aotearoa,
Russell Norman's been trying to limit the number of cows
we have in New Zealand to a natural capacity.
- We don't exactly know how many cows we could sustain here,
but it's a hell of a lot less than we have currently.
What people really need to understand is
that this was a completely unregulated expansion.
We had whole areas of the country, which just hadn't been
dairy areas before like Canterbury, Otago, Southland
were just transformed by this revolution in land use.
It used to be dairy happened in places
that had decent rainfall, the Waikato.
What happened through the last 25 years
is you've got this huge expansion of irrigation,
particularly in dry places that used to be sheep country.
They've just converted everywhere you can possibly convert.
Parallel to the great land use revolution,
huge increase in the number of dairy cows,
even though you're using masses of nitrogen fertiliser,
you can't grow enough grass to feed them all.
So you're looking for supplementary feed.
So they discovered this amazing supply
of cheap supplementary feed from the destroyed rainforest
of Southeast Asia, which is palm kernel expeller.
If you think about,
you know, where are the great rainforests of the world?
And some of them used to be in Southeast Asia,
and a lot of those rainforests have now been destroyed.
And the thing that's been destroying them
is the palm oil industry.
The primary driver is palm oil itself,
but a huge secondary market is palm kernel expeller.
And the biggest importer in the world of PKE is New Zealand.
It's full of oil, it's got lots of fibre in it.
And so when you give them PKE, they love it.
So a lot of farmers do, and it's really cheap.
- [Baz] The increase in PKE usage indicates
that we have more cows than we can feed off our own land.
That's even with the increasing amounts of fertiliser
dairy farmers have used to try and grow enough grass.
It's this fertiliser that leaches through the soil,
down into our water table and pollutes our rivers.
- The amount of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser
has gone up more than six fold since 1990.
And, of course, all the phosphate that we're importing
from Western Sahara has gone up as well.
So you've had this whole range of inputs
going into the system and put it all together
and you get an environmental catastrophe.
- After a decade of campaigning by Greenpeace and others,
in 2020 nitrogen fertiliser use was limited
to 190 kg per hectare per year.
This will limit overuse of fertilisers on
between a quarter and a third of dairy farms in the country.
- There is huge institutional inertia.
The big fertiliser companies, their business is selling
people synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.
There are a lot of opinions
as to how much nitrogen fertiliser any farm needs.
And so some farms are using
dramatically more than other farms,
even in similar areas with similar soils.
And the fertiliser companies will sell you
as much as you think you need.
So we just have to intervene
to change the pathway of that institution.
And that means regulation by government
because the fertiliser companies
aren't going to do it by themselves.
Our objective is to phase it out altogether
and to push it towards a regenerative model
away from an industrial model.
- Regenerative is a growing movement to farmers
who are trying to find the natural balance
between their animals
and how much feed their land produces.
Moving away from such heavy reliance on inputs
like fertiliser and imported feed.
- If you move from an industrial model
to a regenerative model,
then you just have much lower inputs.
So you're trying to build a much more bio-diverse system
that relies a lot more on the living creatures
within the soil, in order to produce food.
There's lots of studies now that look
at the amount of food produced through different models.
And so a regenerative model can certainly produce
as much food as an industrial model.
- So we're on our way to the headquarters
of Ballance Agri Nutrients,
which is one of the biggest fertiliser companies
in the country, to ask how we might juggle
a lower input future with a business like this.
How do I look? (chuckling)
This is stuff that's falling away from the rural --
- So we are a fertiliser company.
We actually call ourselves a nutrient company.
We supply fertiliser all over New Zealand
to our farmer shareholders.
We're probably 55, 60% dairy.
Dairy needs a higher amount of input
because you have a higher amount of output.
- What we have is basically
all the ingredients here to make a cake.
This shed pretty much exclusively
comes out of North Africa, Morocco
and this is the one that we hear about,
it's made the news in terms of the phosphate.
- When you talk about fertiliser you think of this chemical,
but this is sand. - Yeah.
- Through the chemical process of impregnating it
with sulfuric acid, what it does is it releases
that phosphorus because for it then to become water-soluble
and taken up by the plant.
And so this is what we come through with the final product.
- You produce 300,000 tonnes a year,
and each of these piles is 4,000 tonnes
so you're producing about 75 of these piles here a year.
- Yes. - Wow.
Western Saharan fertiliser material is so controversial
because in 1975, Morocco invaded the Western Sahara
taking ownership of its resources
and pushing the natives, Sahrawi people, into refugee camps
where over 170,000 people still remain.
Over recent years, human rights advocates
have drawn attention to Morocco's continued profit
from the displacement of this Sahrawi people.
And as they did, companies and whole countries
were off purchasing Western Saharan resources
from Moroccan companies.
New Zealand is the second largest importer of
Western Sahara phosphate in the world.
And one of only six countries still trading in it.
- We import raw materials from four countries primarily.
Our largest one is from
the Western Sahara in the Moroccan area.
We have South African, we have Vietnamese
and we have a bit of Chinese.
The sourcing out of the Western Sahara
is often put on the table
as an issue of violating human rights.
We travelled to that region
and see for ourselves that we feel ethically comfortable,
and we are comfortable to continue
to source from that region.
- [Baz] You know, legally it's still actually
seems a bit of a contentious issue
because there's still things going through the court.
- Well, legally, it's not contentious, it's very clear.
The laws are set by United Nations Security Council
and New Zealand is one of those members
of United Nations who's signed up to the rules.
The rules are very, very clear.
It is not contentious in law.
- [Baz] The UN has extended a referendum
on this issue over 45 times due to lack of agreement.
So, although it's still lawful, in March 2021,
the New Zealand high court recognised
that the ongoing importation of Western Saharan phosphate
poses a reputational risk to wider New Zealand interests.
- It is a finite resource
but at the current rate of off-take,
there's somewhere between 400 and 800 years of supply to go.
We have a wicked problem.
We now have too many people on the planet
to do things the old fashioned way.
New Zealand has a role to continue to produce
high quality food and export that to the world.
(machinery rattling)
- We're really at the limit of what it seems
our environment is even capable of doing.
How sustainable do you think being at that limit is?
- I think the sustainability to our current limit is fine.
Can the farmer still be doing
what we're advising in a hundred years from now?
And if so, then we're quite happy
that the nutrient input is on a sustainable basis
and the farm management practices on a sustainable basis.
- [Baz] How many sales reps do you have in New Zealand?
- We have just over a hundred sales reps.
We call them nutrient specialists across New Zealand.
- [Baz] Do they have sales targets?
- They have targets, they do.
- [Baz] Have those targets increased in the last 30 years.
- Yes, their targets have increased in the last 30 years,
but their targets are increased, they're mostly focused
around acquiring new customers into Ballance,
as opposed to selling more to farmers.
(plane engine accelerating)
Fertiliser is usually the second most expensive
input into a farming system after servicing their mortgage.
So the fact that people think farmers go
and buy massive amounts of fertiliser
and throw it on the land is laughable.
And so they're very careful
how much they put on, when they put it on
and which parts of the farm they put it on.
- [Baz] Is our current agricultural system sustainable?
- Our current agricultural system is very sustainable.
- I hear Mark's point about trying to have farmers
apply just the right amount of fertilisers,
but considering the trajectory of our fertiliser use
over the past 30 years
and the fact that we're seeing all of these
downstream impacts of too many nutrients in our water,
it seems that we haven't been good
at applying just the right amount of fertiliser.
Stan Winter's been part of the New Zealand
fertiliser industry for over 50 years.
At the start of the dairy boom
he suddenly felt like he was being asked to sell
more fertiliser to farmers than they needed.
So he left to become an independent fertiliser consultant.
- As a consultant you have freedom to say things
that you might not necessarily want to be
observed saying when you work for an industry.
I felt it would be easier for me
if I didn't have to consider how the company's policy
would affect any statement I could make to a farmer.
Some businesses may see that as counterproductive
to their aim of selling fertilisers to do such a thing
or some other type of agricultural chemical.
(door squeaks)
This is home for me, the man-cave.
- It's so great, I wish I had something like this.
- No you don't, believe me.
- What, a lab in my basement?
- Yes. - That's the dream.
- It is handy, I must say, yes.
As a former producer of adchems,
fertilisers mainly, of course,
it does concern me that maybe I've contributed
to some of the degradation that's becoming obvious.
So it'd be nice to be part of the recovery process as well.
Quick look at the soil here so we can see
where the fertiliser goes and what it has to do.
- Why is it that we need to apply
fertilisers to our pastures?
- The main reason that farmers do it
is normally to replace losses from production.
In the particular case of dairying,
the animals will consume the grass
and maybe half of that will pass through the cow,
be deposited back in the paddock.
On the other stage they make milk
and some of the nutrients in the grass
will be present in the milk.
So that's where the main loss is.
- Where does the fertiliser come into that calculation?
- Generally fertilisers are inefficiently used.
So they start to have residues that accumulate.
- So it's not that fertilises are bad,
it's that we're using them badly.
- I think that's pretty fair, yes.
When I left the industry, we'd have been selling
50,000 tonnes of nitrogen a year,
and now it's getting up towards 450,000 tonnes.
From a lot of the trial work I had done it was quite obvious
that in some areas we were starting to use too much,
but apparently there's not a much bigger increase
in production for that extra input.
So that's a worry for me.
- [Baz] So Stan turned his mind to how farmers
could reduce the reliance on nitrogen fertiliser
and found the past held some answers.
Instead of grass mono-culture,
cows can eat a salad of different grasses and plants,
which provide different nutrients.
Clover, for instance, is a plant
that increases nitrogen uptake on pastures.
- When I was a younger man, we used to tell farmers
how good we were not being like the crazy Europeans
who paid for nitrogen out of a bag.
We used to get ours free
from the atmosphere using our clovers.
Now we are the crazy ones getting nitrogen out of a bag
and it's the Europeans who have gone back
to getting it from clovers.
- [Baz] Stan has found simple, old fashioned
mechanical methods can also reduce
the need for chemical fertilisers.
And it's free as the air.
- And this little slide I have here,
that was one of the first experiments
we did with soil aeration
and you can see that the half of the paddock
that's been aerated has started to grow
nice green clovers and rye grasses.
The other half of the paddock
is totally (indistinct) and gone to seed.
And that was nothing to do with fertilisers,
it was simply reintroducing air.
So we need to go back to
getting something for free, if we can.
- [Baz] The average age of farmers
in New Zealand is in their fifties.
So many have experienced
two different eras of New Zealand farming.
The dairy era now, and the sheep era before.
While we only have 6.3 million dairy cows,
they eat roughly the same as 35 million sheep.
Sheep also don't have to be kept around
a central location like a dairy shed,
which means you can spread them out further
and give the grass more of a natural chance to grow.
I was hosted by a group of farmers
involved in the Rural Support Trust.
Many have experienced these two modern eras
of New Zealand farming
and had to grapple with this new input-reliant model.
- I've come from a sheep and beef background.
And as a sheep and beef farmer, everyone loved me
and as soon as I went dairy farming,
the attitude was just different.
The problem with Canterbury is
because of the irrigation it's very visual.
So a lot of people have seen a real change
in the landscape over the last 10 or 20 years,
because not just the sheep have disappeared
and the cows have arrived, but centre pivots have come
onto the plains and people can see that.
And I would argue the best thing
that can be done with the Canterbury plains,
which is very free draining with beautiful (indistinct)
is to irrigate it and put a pasture on that.
Now whether dairy cows are eating that pasture,
or sheep are eating that pasture,
I guess we'll have to decide.
And there was issue with nitrogen,
I mean, I'm not going to deny that.
- How have your inputs shifted?
- Per kilogram of product that goes off my farm,
my inputs have reduced.
And that's what really counts at the end of the day,
that's more important than anything,
- But what are you putting on the land?
And how have your inputs changed?
- Well, I'm still putting fertiliser on,
I'm putting on nitrogen onto my land
and I've still got cows grazing the paddock, so-
- But I guess that's the big thing, isn't it?
Is that intensive dairy requires
far more input than extensive sheep and beef does.
- If you're getting more product,
then, in fact, are you actually putting more on?
Aren't you more efficient
and you're actually really putting less on?
- If you go back and look at the palm kernel argument
or the palm kernel usage, there's no doubt
that as part of our values,
we want to reduce the input of that.
We've done that, but to compensate from a feed perspective,
we've increased our nitrogen use.
We've also increased our cropping.
That's great, we're growing it off our own land,
but I don't know the environmental impact that
that has versus my truck loads of PKE, yeah.
- Inputs equate to about 20% of dairy farmer's outgoings.
Isn't there a version of having less cows
and reducing those input costs.
- We've actually doubled our production
in 25 years with 10% more cows.
if we were producing what we did 25 years ago,
it's not sustainable.
It has to be sustainable economically as well.
- We're not some massively evil group of people
destroying New Zealand, cause we're not.
Have we got room for improvement?
Of course we have.
We can't just change the entire farming practices
of all New Zealanders immediately,
but you never underestimate a dairy farmer.
I think that the change
in the last 10 years is quite incredible.
I mean, you go on to farms now,
Mark, just coming into your place,
beautifully planted up all the waterways.
That was an uncommon thing to see 10 years ago.
It is quite common to see that now.
It isn't going to happen like that, it's going to take time.
(crickets chirping)
- Many of the worst impacts of the dairy industry
can be traced back to these inputs.
Water, fertiliser, and supplementary feed.
We just use them at a scale that degrades the environment
and causes ethical and sustainability concerns.
In the next episode, we'll look at the emissions of our cows
and the role they're playing in the climate crisis.