Well, this is my first attempt at blogging. So you'll have to be patient.
A little bit about us, you know, so we're not complete strangers.
Living on a dairy farm way down here in a little place just outside Invercargill, New Zealand. We milk about 580 cows from August to around the end of May. Then we dry the girls off and they get to go off on holiday for two months.
Right now, there seems to be a real negative attitude towards Dairy Farmers and, quite frankly, I'm getting a bit tired of it.
Now don't get me wrong. I hate complaining, or conflict or anything like that. But when an 8 year old yells at me while I'm dropping my kids off at the bus "I hate you bloody dairy cockies!". Or when I open our local newspaper looking for balanced reporting and fair, objective news, the majority of articles are of the minority of us, that is, people who abuse their responsibility as farmers. This publication never seems to print articles about the Dairy guys out there who are actually doing way more then their urban counterparts. When I or my counterparts try to send letters to the editor to rectify some blatant inaccuracies or misconceptions, they are "filtered".
Really annoying.
Especially for us.
You see, When we converted our farm from sheep and beef to dairy cows two years ago, it was so we could carry on the 5th generation family farm and actually do better by the environment. By milking cows, we can now afford to fence off waterways, manage nutrients, and generally, monitor just about everything on the farm including water usage and nutrients in the soil.
So, I guess the reason for this blogg is to dish out the real dirt about modern farms in New Zealand. I don't know how frequently I can update this, hopefully weekly at the longest. Feed back would be fantastic and I'll do my best to answer any questions as openly and honestly as I can.
Our aim is to produce really good food in a way that is humane, environmentally friendly and, because we have to eat too, profitable.
So, hopefully this is a start and we can get some dialog going about this. Unlike newspapers or magazines, I don't have to sell papers, so, even though some of it is probably a bit boring, it is the truth.
Untill next time, take care, from 4cowgirlz.
