You would think a story about a farmer breaking cow tails would have an image of a cow tail wouldn’t you?
Not so at the Herald. Instead they have a drooling gob of a cow.
Far be it from me to argue with “decent journalists, trained and skilled“:
The Crafar Farms deal settled yesterday. Shanghai Pengxin issued the following statement:
Two years after it made a successful bid for the 16 North Island Crafar farms, Chinese company Shanghai Pengxin has withstood all legal challenges and finally been able to settle on the properties and take possession.
The properties, have been purchased in the name of a subsidiary company, Pengxin New Zealand Farm Group. They will be managed by a new joint venture company, Pengxin New Zealand Farm Management Ltd, a 50/50 joint venture with Government-owned Landcorp, which will be the managing partner, and which is increasing staff numbers to run the 16 farms.
The 13 dairy farms and three dry stock farms total almost 8,000 hectares and currently carry some 16,000 cows. The company is committed to investing $15.7 million in the next three years to upgrade the properties and increase milk production, which will initially be sold to Fonterra.
Great stuff, now we can get on with the other aspects of the deal opening up new access and markets in China.
Cows and cattle are so evil they can best be described as having a wrong end and a wrong end. In this case my understanding is they may have worked out why some of their mates have gone down the road in a truck and not come back. The cows are revolting.
A man attacked by a longhorn cattle beast has been flown to hospital by the Palmerston North Rescue helicopter with serious stomach and chest injuries.
Eyewitnesses say the 61-year-old man was repeatedly lifted from the ground by the animal during the attack this afternoon at a Woodville property.
The man was stabilised at the scene before being airlifted to hospital in a critical condition.
The tipline is running hot with stories of forced sales in the dairy sector, with the banks no longer able to sell off farms who can’t cover their mortgages over time. There are no local buyers out there, and the banks are starting to get very nervous about the prospects of recovering their loans.
Trademe has 390 Dairy farms over 100 ha listed for sale, and from what I am hearing from the rural estate agents, there is not much interest in buying dairy at the moment. Word is a lot more are going to come on the market in the next six months.
The socialists in the National Party, David Carter and Amy Adams, need to explain why they want to give an industry in trouble massive subsidies. They cant hide behind the economic growth argument if the arse is falling out of the industry anyway.
Farmers are just businesses like everybody else. Some aren’t very good, and get into financial trouble. Unlike the rest of us they seem to think they have a god given right to be supported by the state because they are “the backbone of the country” or some other bullshit.
Governor Graeme Wheeler said dairy sector debt had grown rapidly from $11 billion in 2003 to around $30 billion by 2009, where it seemed to have stabilised.
“The worrying thing from a prudential point of view – and it is something the banks need to think about – is that half the debt is held by the 10 per cent most indebted farmers.”
The report says that under the current Fonterra payout forecast of $5.65 to $5.75 a kilogram of milk solids for the current season, more than a third of dairy sector debt would be held by farms with negative cash flow if their working expenses remained unchanged.
The arse falls out of the diary market and a quarter of the farms will be in strife. This is not sustainable, and we are not socialists so we should let the banks foreclose.
With more than 25 per cent of debt held by farms with loan-to-value ratios above 80 per cent, troubled operations could expect less forbearance by the banks than after the last sharp fall in export prices in 2008, the Reserve Bank believes.
No bludging, dairy farmers. This blog is watching you and especially the socialists in the National cabinet, David Carter and Amy Adams, who think that hand outs for farmers is what New Zealand needs to do.
And just while I’m nursing an interest in these troughers and their ideas, all this talk against plain packaging from big tobacco reminded me that these troughers also want plain packaging on infant formula.
Seeing New Zealand’s biggest company Fonterra is proudly selling its Anmum product in countries like Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and Vietnam earning NZ much needed export dollars, I thought I’d scare the horses by showing how their loopy ideas like plain packaging would look for infant formula.
These troughers don’t want anything on the product that seems or may send a positive message to mums. So those happy smiling mum/baby pics would be replaced with an image of a mother that looks depressed and all Aunty Mingy-like, a baby that looks unhappy, a big warning label (now required in the Philippines) and let’s not forget take away the colour is another seducing factor. Whammo
I’m no fan of Fonterra, but the problem I have is that large corporates sit there all high and mighty thinking that loopy ideas that impact on one industry won’t happen to them. Well plain packaging is stalking Fonterra now as it is stalking the booze companies. It is the thin end of a very large wedge.
Meanwhile the troughers who are bitterly against various causes, i.e. the troughers that think infant formula manufacturers are evil, keep pushing their ideas through their government providers. Before you know it, their ideas are written up in reports and presented to government as ideas that have the endorsement of “stakeholders”.
All this talk makes you wonder whether the Government has looked at its values recently…
An interesting challenge for Fonterra…I wonder perhaps if they acknowledge this as their latest milk solids payout announcements start scaring the banks who have been lending money on 100% face value of Fonterra shares.
In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk. At the same time, the number of dairy cows has decreased from a high of 25 million around the end of World War II to fewer than nine million today. This is an indisputable environmental win as fewer cows create less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and require less land.
At the same time, it turns out that cow genomes are more complex than we thought: as milk production amps up, fertility drops. There’s an art to balancing all the traits that go into optimizing a herd.
The biggest hikoi we have ever seen?
Maori are promising the “biggest hikoi New Zealand has ever seen” following the Government’s second green light for a sale of the 8000-hectare Crafar dairy farming estate to Chinese company Shanghai Pengxin.
As Cactus Kate has pointed out repeatedly Farmers paying no tax. Obviously Stuart Nash has been reading up on this and decided to go after the real bludging classes of New Zealand.
The average dairy farmer is paying less tax than a couple on the pension – raising questions about whether the sector touted as the backbone of the economy is paying its fair share.
As the Government prepares one of the tightest Budgets in recent years, cutting into middle-class family benefits and KiwiSaver subsidies, new figures suggest those cuts will hit people who are also shouldering the greatest tax burden – wage and salary earners.
Inland Revenue Department figures provided to Labour revenue spokesman Stuart Nash show that, in the latest full year for which figures were available, the average tax paid by dairy farms was $1506 a year. The 17,244 registered as being in the dairy sector, including companies, trusts and individuals, paid only $26m in tax.
The figures also show that more than half – 9014 – reported a loss for the 2009 year and another 2635 reported trading income of between $1 and $20,000.
This is a major hit for an up and coming Labour MP. An issue that matters, and for follows of global politics a straight copy of the Uk Uncut protests that are railing against corporates dodging tax while the state sector is being cut. The Farming sector are really corporate bludgers. If it rains they want hand outs, if it snows the hands come out, when prices are low they cry poor and when prices are at a record high they structure their affairs to appear to be paupers. Meanwhile they fill our rivers with cowshit and expect to get water for free. These things matter and still Labour pursues helicopter trips and painting of historic buildings as their important issues. It is refreshing that Stuart Nash has stayed about the gutter and done something useful for a List MP.
This highlights one of the major problems for Labour. They have old battle scarred once were warriors like Mallard and Hodgson who are so far past their used by date they have been practically eaten away by maggots. Yet they are setting the strategy, talking about really dumb stuff like BMWs, painting and other irrelevant things. They have yet to get a hit on National on anything that really matters.
This must be intensely frustrating for the very competent up and comers like Nash, Roberston, Adern, Chauvel and Curran. Old timers associated with the failed policies of the Helen Clark regime are still around, and the stench of death pervades Goff, King, Mallard, Hodgson, Dalziel and Street.
Labour’s fortunes won’t improve until they clean out the front bench and put some competent new people in to replace the irrelevant old timers.
Maurice Williamson said that Kiwis are racist when it comes to land investment and from the latest news it would seem he was dead right. Rich, elitist, Americans are just fine for investing in our farms.
The sale of Maniototo’s Big Sky Dairy Farm to Harvard University’s wealthy endowment fund for more than $28 million has been approved and ratified.
The farm was proposed in 2001 to become New Zealand’s first super dairy farm, running up to 6000 cows on 1600ha using supplementary feed but was placed into liquidation in 2009.
Big Sky receiver Murray Frost confirmed on Saturday that the New Zealand Overseas Investment Office had approved the sale to the US buyer, allowing the sale to be ratified two weeks ago.
It has been renamed Dairy Farms Partnership.
“It’s been a slow process getting OIO approval, but I feel happy now that we have reached this conclusion,” Mr Frost said.
“The property sold for a very fair price and all the secured creditors have been paid out.”
There would be no payment to the unsecured creditors.
Harvard is the world’s wealthiest university and already owns substantial forestry and farming assets in New Zealand, including another 450ha Maniototo farm which it has converted to run 1100 dairy cows.
Company reports suggest that by combining the output of both farms it should be possible to produce 1.8 million kilograms of milk solids annually.
And where is the outcry, the anguish and the marches in the streets, more importantly where is the press releases from Phil Goff opposing this land deal? Where are the leftwing lap-bloggers in howling in outrage that our land has been sold to foreigners. Deafening silence.
Nowhere is where, because it is ok to bash Chinese investment and perfectly ok for anyone else to buy up farms in New Zealand just so lok as they aren’t Chinese.
This deal is about half the size of the Crafar Farms deal as proposed by Natural Dairy, Crafars produce about 3,900,000 kgMS and Harvard’s new conglomerate will produce 1.8 million kgMS. Theorretically we should see about half the outrage, but in fact we are seeing none.
This can mean only one thing, elitist, rich Americans and their university endowment fund are ok for investment in New Zealand land and Rich Chinese are just bad, full stop.
So while the left wing bangs on about Paul Henry being racist, and mount campaigns to get the comedian sacked because he doesn’t fit their world view of group think, they conveniently ignore the inherent racism of their protests about foreign ownership of land, protests that only seem to rise when it is Chinese investment.
