Milk Price- Please read Mod note in post #1

Dawggone wrote:

Secondly, I would argue that it should be farmers 'reacting' to market demands. Isn't that what the Agri establishment told us we should be doing? (Tongue firmly in cheek!)

I think the pure organic line is farmers should respond first to the soils needs and that cooking evolved to make efficient use of the diversity of nature's produce.

Without that for every chicken breast the market demands you are left with two useless thighs. It takes a caring farmer and a decent chef to rectify this position (coq au vin) and set everything to rights.

The agro industrial solution is for farmers to produce breasts for everyone, then grind up the thighs and feed them to dairy cows, or fish, or children (chicken nuggets).

Out and about these past few days, very sombre moods from sharemilkers around the place.

Half planning to get to a DairyNZ discussion group tomorrow if I don't get too hammered tonight. Don't think there's a set topic but maybe a guest speaker likely to be talking about setting targets for autumn production and possibly transitioning onto winter crop.

Will report back with a gist of things if I make it.

Friesland campina holding at 28.27c/liter

dwag i do see where you are coming from on the organics, it would be a shift in practices but i really dont think the conventional industrial organics you can do in your one stop shop farm is what will be replicated here

its aimed at health/environmentally friendly conscious people how quick before the premium goes when the healthy consumer hears its actually from intensive in door set ups? The french are good at marketing so im sure yell find a way around it but could we?

cuba is good example for organics cut off from fertiliser and chemicals

sure back in the day they were organics here using seaweed as fertiliser carted from the beach, cows housed under furz bushes, twas the finest but i could count the cows they also milked on one hand, funnily they actually made a living out of it, i often look back at previous generations and wonder why we stopped doing some things the way they done!!!

kowtow wrote: »

The part that almost never seems to come up in discussions about organics / traditional methods is flavour.

For obvious reasons it's difficult to be scientific about it (which rather suits the large scale processors) but food dug / milked fresh from balanced soils and healthy pastures really does have a whole different level of taste to heavily processed food, from crops bred for yield rather than for flavour.

And flavour is important, when it comes to food. Or at least it should be.

No no no no.....

The coop produces the food......The plc adds the flavour....

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

What sort of swards do you have kowtow? Would it be possible to taste a difference between a ryegrass monoculture compared to a herbal ley with maybe 8 or 10 different species?

Quaint old lady round these parts, and used to get the visit from the parish priest once a week. There were no modern conveniences in the home but the Priest was always looked after the best. She had hens and one duck and the Priest was always served a duck egg. Sitting down to a fine egg one morning he tried
Urging the lady to update facilities....
"Kitty, would you ever think of putting in a bathroom like the neighbours? It must be awful heading out in the cold and wet to do a bit of business."

"Yera Chryst Father. . With the little bit if business I'd have, the duck can eat it"

Buford T. Justice V wrote: »

I believe the correct term is 'branded lifestyle products';)

That's it so. We have the solution. Avoca milk.:D

keep going wrote: »

All this talk of organic and the one big problem hasnt been mentioned, its unsustainable. If you were to do it by the book without extra subsidies there s not enough premium to compensate for the reduced production that can justify the extra work.yeah its grand to sell your stuff to the "avoca"set but look at the supermarkets and foodoutlets, the volmue is dictated by price

That's certainly the obvious conclusion, but I'm not sure that it's true in the fullest sense. As someone said above - the small mixed farms somehow seemed to make a better living (not to mention the families they fed directly).

It's only during the sixty years or so that farmers have taken up the industrial practice of specialisation lock stock and barrel. Where once farms produced a diversity of food (by and large) we now specialise and produce single ingredients, largely grown as mono-crops, the raw materials for a process which sees food - perhaps - only as fuel.

The availability of synthetic fertiliser has enabled us to make a production line of agriculture, producing food down to a price, but at considerable cost (family economics, environmental, and - importantly - quality). In fact, the resulting industry is so dysfunctional in economic terms that it requires constant taxpayer support just to get the raw material out of the farm gate.

What we've done is to separate production entirely from consumption, which is the polar opposite of what the worlds successful industries do.

I think as farmers we still see specialisation / industrialisation as progress - but I wonder if we are missing a trick, and if that will always be the case. Plenty of industries (not least technology) have discovered that specialisation is a road to dwindling profits and destroys innovation.

In my Fathers day secretaries typed letters, receptionists answered phones, messengers carried messages, drivers drove, computer people did spreadsheets, accountants prepared accounts, Mothers or Nannies looked after children, the girls cooked, and parenting (if it was even a thing) was the province of the schoolmaster.

But we've moved a long way past that today, from the tiniest Cork business to a Wall street skyscraper you'd be pushed to find a middle aged businessman or woman who doesn't do - or take a strong interest in - most of those things themselves.

It's easy to dismiss mixed & organic farming as a fad - but it's a fad which has been going strong for 7950 of the last 8000 years of agriculture.

Who knows, it might come back into fashion.

fepper wrote: »

Where's neath?

Good Spot fepper. .

Back to conventional milk prices..

A couple of articles suggest that EU nations (France, Germany?) are pushing for subsidies to take people out of production when prices fall.

From an EU perspective you'd have thought we'd have learned a bit about moral hazard by now, but apparently not.

NZ / US producers must be thrilled that EU taxpayers, not content with subsidising our own markets, are now going to underwrite the world milk price as well.

fepper wrote: »

Denis brosnan pulls no punches and certainly knows what he is talking about

Pretty outlandish statement to be fair, it ultimately means that dairy/grain/beef markets are screwed indefinitely for the next 5 years as all are pretty much linked together in so far as cheap grain means lots of milk pumped out and to a lesser extent beef....
So the worlds goverments are heading for a situation where they are prepared to basically bankrupt nearly all farmers worldwide and destroy rural economies, if that comes to pass could be a fairly big famine on the cards in the not so distant future