Spread a Little Happiness
The cost of butter in the land of milk and honey.
Even when the darkest clouds are in the sky
You mustn't sigh and you mustn't cry
Spread a little happiness as you go by
Please try
What's the use of worrying and feeling blue?
When days are long keep on smiling through
Spread a little happiness 'til dreams come true
Songwriters: Vivian Ellis / Clifford Grey / Greatrex Newman.
Skyrocketing butter prices, mountainous profits for Fonterra, no more pesky regulations, and happy farmers. Have you ever seen so much winning, Aotearoa?
“Agriculture is responsible for over half of New Zealand’s emissions, primarily due to methane and nitrous oxide produced by farming. The dairy sector alone contributes to about half of these biological emissions. Understanding and managing these emissions is crucial to meet government targets and market demands.”
Gees, way to bring things down, don’t you think that sounds a bit woke these days? Like the sort of scare tactics, leftie do-gooders have been coming up with for years to sabotage the economy.
Yeah, but also, nah, because those words aren’t from activists or climate scientists.
They’re from Dairy NZ, whose purpose is “Progressing a positive future for New Zealand dairy farming.” As such, they’re not advocating that we necessarily do anything about said emissions, like counting them. But they at least acknowledge that dairying is, hypothetically, an enormous part of the climate change problem.
You know, if there was one.
Fortunately, that’s no longer something we have to worry about due to the “she’ll be right” attitude of our coalition, who are agnostic at best and certainly not about to do anything to prolong the survival of humanity on this planet if it makes for unhappy farmers.
Without them and those who believe dairy is our past, present, and future, it’d be a whole lot harder for National to get elected. What are they going to do - leave it up to climate change believers?
The Prime Minister definitely knows which side of his Marmite sandwich is buttered, and he doesn’t want ACT hoovering up National support. For goodness sake, those buggers are so austere they don’t even put butter on dry bread rolls.
In the article above, the co-principal of Te Wharekura o Ngāti Rongomai, Renata Curtis, said, “Some days are better than other days, but we get a fright when it’s a really bad day. They get a stale, frozen, hard, crumbly bun …. Even looking at it, it’s unappealing, the kids won’t even try it some days because it just looks like slop.”
It’s difficult to reconcile the high-quality food we grow and sell worldwide with these lunches. Considering our meat, dairy, and produce - why are we feeding kids this?
I know I’ve gone on about these lunches a bit, but they speak volumes about how this government sees the people of our country.
In his weekly multi-choice quiz, David Slack suggested that “Because you’re worth it” could be the next marketing slogan for butter, given the price we pay for a pound of the stuff. Sadly, these lunches communicate ACT’s message to our children: “You’re not worth it.”
So what did the Prime Minister have to say?
I’m sure farmers are hardworking, just like nurses and teachers. However, that doesn’t mean that you can attribute the current boom in dairy prices to their heavy lifting—surely consumers have played their role by getting well and truly milked.
According to a report from 1 News this week: “The price of butter has increased by 60% in one year, with a 500g block now averaging $7.32, up from just under $4.50 at the start of last year.”
That’s a hell of an increase, and the knock-on effect was Fonterra releasing its half-year profit of $729 million this week. It makes you wonder how such a price rise can possibly be justified - I mean, what goes into butter?
I’m not sure about other countries. I hate to think what the Americans might put into theirs now that food standards are deemed woke. Here in Kiwi-land, it’s pasteurised cream (from cow's milk) and salt, and I can’t recall the price of either of those going up by anything like that amount.
The argument will be that it is an international commodity, so even though it obviously doesn’t cost 60% more to produce butter, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t charge us as much as they possibly can. What’s the point in running a monopoly if you can’t increase your prices far above production costs and get away with it?
The issue is that the Kiwi public is making a rather large investment in the sector, and price gouging at this level seems pretty unreasonable in return.
The government can ease all the restrictions it likes, and the PM boasts here of “taking agriculture out of the ETS, fixing winter grazing and stock exclusion rules, bringing some common sense back to freshwater rules.” However, that doesn’t mean the damage won’t be caused. It just transfers those costs to the Kiwi taxpayer.
With increasing regularity, we will see the impacts of climate change as more variable weather causes havoc, leaving the public who has already paid an excessive amount for their butter to cover the costs of pretending agricultural emissions don’t count.
Sooner or later, our trading partners will say, “Enough is enough; those dairy emissions do count. They’re wrecking the climate, and the piper has to be paid.” Would you like three guesses as to who’ll be paying for that?
Donald Trump appealed to the American people, saying he would lower the price of eggs, whereas National spoke of a cost-of-living crisis and promised to help New Zealanders put bread and butter on the table.
So, how’s that going?
If you watch any of the US late-night shows, you’ll know that the ongoing increase in egg prices over there is providing a wealth of comedic material. Meanwhile, the price of butter we pay heads for the stratosphere, and bread isn’t exactly cheap either.
I’m all for our agricultural sector doing well, provided that we fully consider the costs of that production and don’t use taxpayers to subsidise it.
What I find unacceptable is that we’re making the food we produce unaffordable to our own people, and we’re sending some of the best food in the world overseas while we feed our own children low-quality crap.
I reckon we can do better than that - don’t you?
I’m pleased to share this newsletter with everyone, thanks to the supporters who back Nick’s Kōrero through their paid subscriptions. If you’re interested in joining this community and gaining full access to my writing, the special below costs about the same as a block of butter per month—a small investment for a wealth of goodness.
Have a good weekend, all you lovely people. As Sting says - let’s spread a little happiness. 🙂
It pushes people in demographics that just wouldn't comprehend buying butter, into buying cheap imitations as there normal food. These are filled with bad oils and nasties that led to illnesses, inflammation and poor health.
Just as "cheap bread" is filled with sugar and preservatives with no nutritional value. No Fibre to fill you means you eat more to be full.
It stacks up to a massive inequality in access to adequate nutrition that both adults and children require for basic function.
The outcome of this insidious rolling stone is generational health problems.
So the price of cream has stayed pretty much the same, but the price of butter, made almost entirely from cream, has doubled. Hmm... it must be the heavy lifting that's the problem!