farming

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What if there were only 34 31 more whitebait harvests left?

Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, August 20th, 2019 - 66 comments

If we want to prevent the extinction of whitebait it’s time to stop buying and selling it.

Fertile land is priceless

Written By: - Date published: 7:45 am, August 15th, 2019 - 220 comments

As Labour moves to protect prime food growing land around our cities, we should be having a wider discussion about food security in New Zealand.

Totally shit farming

Written By: - Date published: 7:10 am, August 12th, 2019 - 47 comments

Farmers blockading environmentalists to stop them taking photos of their degraded farms. Is this really what we’ve come to?

Can the Greens rise like the liberal democrats?

Written By: - Date published: 9:56 am, August 4th, 2019 - 71 comments

Only 6 months ago the UK Liberal Democrat party was at a real low, with their leader resigning and the polls about 7%: same as the last five years.  Fast forward five months from that and they are ready to become a major opposition party of opposition.  Can the Greens do the same?

The hard change of forestry

Written By: - Date published: 10:41 am, May 18th, 2019 - 98 comments

Forestry is forcing an important tilting point between mitigating climate change and land use, and it’s going to affect the viability of some North Island towns.

Zero Carbon bill announced

Written By: - Date published: 4:44 pm, May 8th, 2019 - 40 comments

The Government has announced that the Zero Carbon Bill will have as a goal carbon neutrality by 2050 and the halving of methane emissions by that time.

It’s the end of the world as we know it *

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, May 7th, 2019 - 104 comments

* and I don’t feel fine.

National’s Tax review strategy

Written By: - Date published: 11:22 am, March 5th, 2019 - 107 comments

The Government is not due to announce its response to the Tax Working Group’s recommendations for a few more weeks. It appears that National using outrageous assumptions will take the opportunity to raise horror stories in the media on how bad the tax could be.

Sage gets the money

Written By: - Date published: 7:30 am, March 5th, 2019 - 47 comments

Greens Minister Eugenie Sage deserves praise for securing some solid funding increases for her Conservation portfolio.

The end of tenure review

Written By: - Date published: 11:45 am, February 15th, 2019 - 29 comments

Land Information Minister Eugenie Sage has ended the policy of tenure review, under which large tracts of land were privatised and onsold for huge profits and sensitive ecological areas wrecked.

Climate change – the ongoing disaster

Written By: - Date published: 10:00 am, February 12th, 2019 - 32 comments

In my youth back in the late 1970s and early 80s, I did a BSc in Earth Sciences. I learned that our human framework of decades and centuries was but a blink of an eye to nature. Our period, that blink in time, is fast fading.

The Meathead tax

Written By: - Date published: 11:28 am, February 2nd, 2019 - 85 comments

National’s claim that the Government wants to impose a meat tax suffers from the reality that the Government has done no such thing and the proposal comes from an International collective of academics.

Simon Wilson thinks Epsom could be offered to Blue-Greens

Written By: - Date published: 8:17 am, February 1st, 2019 - 62 comments

Simon Wilson has suggested that the only way National may have to establish a Blue Green presence in Parliament is to offer them the seat of Epsom.

New Zealand needs a Government that understands climate change

Written By: - Date published: 9:58 am, January 10th, 2019 - 47 comments

In an opinion piece in Stuff National Spokesperson on climate change Todd Muller has cast doubt on National agreeing to a political consensus on climate change.

No sense, nonsense and a dearth of common sense.

Written By: - Date published: 9:46 am, November 29th, 2018 - 23 comments

We wouldn’t tie a rope to a heavy load and then push on the rope with the expectation of achieving anything, right? So why is the Guardian’s Environment Editor entreating that we do just that? Is he merely stupid? Or is there something more cynical at play?

Fonterra’s loss

Written By: - Date published: 9:35 am, September 13th, 2018 - 67 comments

Fonterra has just reported an after tax loss of $196 million for the 2018 year. It’s never had an annual loss in its history.

The zero carbon bill

Written By: - Date published: 9:06 am, June 25th, 2018 - 88 comments

The Ministry for the Environment has released a discussion paper on a Zero Carbon Bill.  But one proposal is to exempt methane which would mean that effectively half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gasses would not be subject to limitation.

In defence of Eugenie Sage

Written By: - Date published: 7:28 am, June 15th, 2018 - 154 comments

Eugenie Sage has been criticised for granting OIO consent to the foreign buy out of a water bottling company and a piece of sensitive land.  But from the looks of the details that have been released she may have had no choice.

Steaming cow poo.

Written By: - Date published: 11:57 am, June 2nd, 2018 - 54 comments

Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth according to a Guardian headline.

Yeah. No it’s not.

It’s Time for a Cost-Benefit Analysis of Dairy Farming

Written By: - Date published: 7:42 am, May 29th, 2018 - 166 comments

Not just, ‘we’ve got to make the good outweigh the bad’. I mean: why should dairy farming exist here?

Activists bring Mataura River poo to the Environment Southland

Written By: - Date published: 6:28 am, March 22nd, 2018 - 26 comments

“Epic action”

Bio-fuels.

Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, February 11th, 2018 - 35 comments

Biofuels and fossil. The difference?

Fonterra a failure in concept and in practice

Written By: - Date published: 6:10 pm, February 9th, 2018 - 109 comments

New Zealanders 17 years ago accepted the idea of a national dairy monopoly on the condition it would deliver outstanding returns. The cost has been high — filthy and unswimmable rivers. Now it turns out the result has been a financial fiasco – the whole thing is literally bullshit, or more correctly, cowshit.

Fonterra and Fletcher Building

Written By: - Date published: 2:05 pm, February 9th, 2018 - 54 comments

New Zealand only has two businesses of world-competitive scale that are also majority owned by New Zealanders: Fonterra, and Fletcher Building.  And they appear to have lost their way and put much of their value and our wellbeing at risk.

High Country selloff scandal laid bare

Written By: - Date published: 2:11 pm, January 21st, 2018 - 35 comments

A feature in yesterday’s Domion Post Weekend lays bare the extent of the scandalous selloff of huge tracts of our high country. The tenure review of the high country has been conducted since 1992 to  privatise some of the land and also bringing parts into the conservation estate. The process has been followed by both National and Labour governments.

Local Bodies: Climate Change Just Got Personal

Written By: - Date published: 6:15 am, January 19th, 2018 - 27 comments

“At 46 degrees latitude south, New Zealand’s southern most city has regularly been experiencing similar temperatures to cities near the equator. When we were sizzling at 32 degrees, we equaled Cairns, were 2 degrees warmer than Jakarta and Suva and 6 above Nairobi. These cities are used to such temperatures and their ecosystems have adapted to it, it has been a severe shock to ours.”

Guest Post: Monbiot, Attenborough and Soper on environmental collapse

Written By: - Date published: 10:14 am, December 6th, 2017 - 44 comments

Guest post by Ed about the intellectual rigour of George Monbiot and David Attenborough and the rater strange response of Barry Soper.

Progress from the Labour led government

Written By: - Date published: 8:04 am, November 30th, 2017 - 44 comments

Just over one month in the new Labour led Government and it is time to measure progress.

Labour and rural voters

Written By: - Date published: 7:30 am, November 6th, 2017 - 94 comments

In recent years Labour has allowed National to dominate rural politics. Maybe it is time for Labour to think about reaching out to rural voters and suggest to them that a progressive vote is in their interests.

Aquifer recharge

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, October 31st, 2017 - 44 comments

Lifelong angler John Hodgson explains why the water table in Canterbury and what we are doing to it matters.

(post updated with recommendations)

 

A Sugar Coated World

Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, October 24th, 2017 - 42 comments

Yum! That would make for generations of ecstatic kids, no?

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