Hello, dear readers; here we are five days into summer, and it’s cool and overcast. It seems El Nino is being a tease this year, though we have seen little rain. But it’s mostly dry, so we’re not complaining that much.
It’s nearly that day that we don’t speak of; with less than three weeks, the capitalist machine is in full swing. You lose your sense of time out here, and the process of preparing for that day hasn’t started here yet; we’re doing stuff.
In the spirit of the Grinch, we received a demanding letter from the Greater Wellington Regional Council making demands not only on us but other farmers in the area. Yet more regulation, more about that later. If there is one thing that the government loves to do, it’s to regulate the hell out of everything except the big corporations.
The shearer has been today and considerably happier than the last time he was here in the wet. K has culled the sheep she didn’t want from the herd and is left with the core breeding stock for next season. With the annoying ones now in the freezer, they were much better to handle. Trust me, with that set of horns, you want them friendly.
Of course, sheep are worth almost nothing to farmers at the moment, and you’re better sitting on them or eating them. Not literally sitting on them, of course; they’re not quite big enough for that.
Lamb goes out the farm gate at about $6.50 per kg to the farmer; it might actually be less than that now. After all, that was a couple of weeks ago, and the price has been falling for months. Now, if you want to know just how much our Australian supermarket duopoly is pillaging from you, then consider this.
Lamb racks in New World supermarkets are selling for as much as $73.00 per kg. That’s over 1,000% markup. Even the average price is nearly a 300% markup. No wonder people can’t afford to eat.
Of course, the new government won’t do anything about that because, like the last government, they love big business, all live in a metro area, and can afford $73.00 a kg on their outrageous salaries. Anyway, they are now busy, like the last lot, changing the names of things, which clearly is a great priority. Not off to a good start.
The sheep are now ready for summer, when it appears, and are in great condition.
K has been training with the horses when she can and working on the glamping site when she can. There is not much left to do, but the wet days slow the process down.
Horse management kicks in at this time of year, hard. Most people won’t know that you can’t just leave horses to do their own sweet thing, because they will die. We’ve talked about laminitis before, but let’s revisit it.
This time of year sees a lot of new grass growth, and that grass is like sugar to a five-year-old. A lot of sugar. So it has to be severely limited for Mahi and Strider, which does annoy them. If they eat too much of it, then not only do they become a little more difficult to manage they can also become lame. A lame horse is a dead horse.
They can put so much weight on that laminitis can kick in, which is inflammation between the leg and the hoof, basically. In extreme cases, the two can separate, and that’s game over.
Back to the five-year-old analogy, it’s like letting a kid loose in a candy store, and they eat so much they turn into fat buggers and then fall over when their legs snap.
So to this end, K has spent the last few weeks monitoring the horses, adding supplements where needed, and strip grazing, which they hate, because they can see all this sugary grass in front of them and are not allowed it. There is an art to it.
It also means that the tractor is brought out of winter retirement, the topper attached, and the paddocks given a haircut. It’s an impressive sight, grass in all directions, great roaring noises, the smell of cut grass, and order restored to a Country Calendar-level paddock.
For my international friends, Country Calendar is New Zealand’s oldest television show at fifty-seven years old. It used to focus on traditional farming and horticulture across the entire country.
These days it’s lost its way and features things such as incredibly rich booze barons buying farms and installing mattresses for sheep, organic flowers tended by near-naked modern hippies (not a good near naked I might add), robotic pruning machines that no doubt will kill everyone when artificial intelligence escapes, exotic animals that are not much good for anything other than a petting zoo, seaweed farms producing products no one can afford, solar powered sheep, communes for the woke, electric tractors that work for an hour then stop, and gerbil farming.
Sorry if you are reading this, Dan; I know you are doing god’s work, and I do tease. Dan is the associate producer and soothing narrator for the show and a good friend who should be recognised for his part in helping make Wellington predator-free. Can you come out here and do us next, mate? The Greater Wellington Regional Council seems to have got fixated on train tracks and Certified Farm Environment Plans, of which I am about to grumble.
David Seymour is the Minister of Regulation. Despite promises during the election that they’d cut back the public service, they immediately created a completely new Ministry of Regulation. I can only imagine the kind of staff they will employ. I see walk socks, sandals, clipboards, pen protectors, and portable filing cabinets filled with paper.
They also promised that for every new piece of regulation, they’d remove two old ones. So it was annoying when yet another piece of new regulation appeared in the mailbox this week. Apparently, we now have to have a Certified Farm Environment Plan in place. The letter is vaguely threatening, with little information and the promise that if we haven’t booked in a certifier by the end of December, then we’ll need a resource consent (more regulation) starting off at around $1,500.
Now, I’m all for environmental planning, and so it happens that most of us do it around here, and we title it The Common Sense Farm Plan. Clearly, if we don’t look after the environment, then it will eventually stop working for us, poison us potentially, and piss off the neighbours. We take it pretty seriously because we are surrounded by organic farms that have to meet really high standards. That limits what we can do anyway, which is fine because we are all about supporting the community and those businesses.
Then it all starts to get a bit of Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy crossed with Monty Python. Stay with me, stay.
The letter arrived sans envelope, which was suspicious in itself; it looks like it may have been a last-minute mail drop. It tells us that there have been “previous communications” around this, in a somewhat accusatory way, as if we should have known about this already.
I saw the previous communications today; I happened to stop on the way to town, and in a far-off paddock, I spotted a small sign declaring that the Certified Farm Environment Plans were on their way. No other information. No contact information that I could see at that distance.
In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, our hero complains to the Council about not knowing anything about the fact they are going to destroy Earth by putting an intergalactic highway through it.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
The mysterious letter offers an inducement. If we book in with a certifier, then we get a $200 credit. But we need to do that by the end of November. Very difficult to do when the letter arrived on the 2nd of December.
A closer look at the website (it took quite some finding) seems to show that you need to be over 20 hectares to need one of these plans, of which no mention of the cost to attain is made. We are 20% of that, as are most blocks out here, with a few exceptions.
On the back of this strange and hasty letter is a map showing the zones that need one of these plans. This is handy because half of us who got the letter are not in the zone.
I mean, FFS. The wording in the letter gives away a stuff up. Having written and reviewed communications for decades, you can read the subtext. “It has taken extra time to get all the process, support material and certifiers in place. This means we will be taking a pragmatic approach to complying with the date set.”
Subtext: “We’re not ready, but you better be.”
So I’ve emailed them; of course, I have. And there’s been radio silence; of course, there has. One of the neighbours has called them, as did I (purely out of curiosity), and promises have been made that mysterious strangers will call us back.
You know you are in trouble when you are telling the person on the end of the phone that you don’t think you meet the threshold because we only have four hectares, not twenty.
“What’s a hectare?” the voice asks. I mean, they were helpful and nice, so there’s that.
This is starting to look like a shambles and it’s also piling stress on some of our elderly community who are retired with small blocks out here. It’s yet more money, and frankly, some of them don’t know what an Internet is. They’ll roll over, pay the money, and then wonder how the power bill is going to get paid.
It’s an example of the absolute pile of weird regulations that we have to meet because we are rural.
The Minister of Regulation promised that he’d remove two regulations for each new one introduced. So, on that note, I’d really like NOT to pay any more tax. So if we could get rid of tax regulation, then we would be more than happy to create a Certified Farm Environment Plan.
I hope you are all well. Be careful as the silly season approaches. Oh, and an unashamed plug for the glamping site. We are doing a soft launch with friends, of which you have been; there will be a website at some point, but if you want a good deal and a night away in the Wairarapa, then contact K directly at karene@threefires.co.nz for availability and let her know you read Urban to Bucolic.
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