Trekking Toward Literary Ramble IV: Patronising Email to Young Share Milking Couple. Goals, Books and the Farm Budget.

My coming disquisition – I was aiming for critique but failed - on our modern literature is now past thirteen thousand words, and no matter how much I tinker, it’ll still go down like cold sick. So while I work on that, this email to a young share milking couple on why, amongst other priorities, they should read literary fiction, (noting for the wise, literary fiction is not a literature, per se, it’s part of a literature, but I would love over my career to wean one farmer – if they read fiction at all, and I ask them, most don’t - off a staple diet of airport bestsellers.)

I have learned over the years that the wealthiest self-made clients, who are often the most innovative, laugh on mention of formalised business plans and five year budgets – perhaps don’t tell [name of bank manager] this. Formal financial planning is not ‘huge’ within the psyche of an entrepreneurial spirit. One of the world’s richest businessmen, Richard Branson, of Virgin Airlines, admits he’s never been able to learn the difference between gross margin and net profit, and can’t read a set of financial statements. (I’ve done okay, yet have never in the twenty three year life of my practice ever done a financial budget or written business plan. Time spent on that would've been a waste of time for me, in my specific circumstances. ) I believe the important characteristic of these people, and individuals such as Branson, is they tend to work on a conceptual, goal driven level, as well as a life-is-fun, glass-half full, ethic, plus they’re interested in everything, not just the specific fields in which they work: particularly they read and travel widely, which educates and broadens their minds to new and differing opportunities.

By read widely, I mean within your industry, in order to understand the drivers of the economics of dairy in New Zealand, changes in technology, staff management, farm management, etc. Especially staff relations: that's huge in dairy. When the Dairy Exporter enters your mail box, actually make time to sit down and read it, for it’s part of your job. But also read widely outside farming, including general news – NZ Herald, Stuff, NBR, BBC, CNN (Internet great for this) – read and have opinions about politics, economics, and most certainly, shock, horror, read literary fiction novels to understand what life is, and the experiences of others – it’s a cheap way of travelling through other cultures, other countries, in other lives.  (If for no other reason, reading widely as well as broadening your minds to new opportunities and developing interests in other fields, including artistic, means when you’re out socially with non-dairy farmers you won’t bore them witless. Truly, I’ve been out with dairy farmers, I know what I’m talking about, as I've been bored witless. I've been at nights where if I heard the words, payout, heifer, rotary, conversion, tax, income equalisation, et al, one more time, I would have self-immolated.)

I love the courses your bank runs, one of which you’ve done. Albeit I think their value is not so much the content, as forcing you off the farm and talking to each other about your aspirations and your lives together. When stuck in the often stressful, hum drum routine of the farm, on-farm, it's very easy to 'drift into' automatic pilot and not talk to each other at all until your relationship ends up on auto-pilot, as with your farm management. The only reason I've ever seen farmers on my client base leave farming- outside retirement and carking it - is over relationship breakdowns: I've not had a single one go broke, or forced off for lack of a five year budget. At least four times a year arrange, if nothing else, long weekends to get away by yourselves. Surround yourselves in ‘difference’ as much as you can, so you don’t end up old in your forties, thinking in straight lines. Always have a part of your mind off the farm, looking for other skills, no matter how unrelated they seem.

So, go through the exercise of the five year plan, and we’ll have a look, remembering my own opinion that you really mostly need a detailed cashflow for year one to negotiate the current facility and which can be revised as you go through the year; a near detailed plan for year two, but year three and beyond is really broad strokes only at this stage, and capital budgeting set by your goals for your lives. The year one and two detailed budgeting will have (hopefully) come from earlier goals you were striving for. My point being it’s the goals that are important, and budgeting doesn’t give you those, rather, it’s based on them. My challenge for you, outside of that, is get away at least once a quarter, and by this time next year have read  three literary fiction novels: if you want to know what, off the top of my head, a New Zealand great, Maurice Gee, perhaps his novel Going West; Milas Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; and Elizabeth Knox, another Kiwi, Glamour and The Sea. (I can see your faces from here.) If not that, then take up painting, or something, anything, just not directly related to farming. If you must, sport, but mixing with a different crowd to what you normally would - ie not all farmers - I particularly like solitary pursuits, as they force you to live and cogitate inside your own head.

Will ring soon to tee up time for me to come out. Regards Mark.

PS: You’ve got a shitload of tax coming up, luckily you’d planned well for that in your two year budget, though understand, I feel your grief.

A Fishy Post from the Imperator: Farms as Dumping Grounds – Don’t Think So.

Or, sub-title: How do you turn the remainder of the South Island into a dairy farm? Answer: Vote in a Greens/Labour coalition.

Scott Yorke has had a dig at the rural community, calling New Zealand farms a 'dumping ground'.  I've grown tired of this emoting nonsense that otherwise sensible men, such as Yorke, seem to have swallowed from New Zealand’s Green theocracy, which, like Leftist state crony capitalism, doesn't stand up to the facts.

Think about this.

I see all my farming clients on their farms at least once a year: I've not seen one dumping ground. The opposite. Just this Sunday my wife and I had lunch at a friend's dairy farm under the shadow of Mt Hutt, a one hour drive through pristine countryside, and flowing rivers. After the cheesecake, and the walk to the end of the farm and back, in which not one bit of litter was visible, nor one shred of silage wrap, Farmer Friend spent the afternoon teaching me his favourite pastime; fly casting (on the lawn, note, the season doesn’t start to October). Now does anyone think he will be careless with the river ways? Why would he destroy one of the activities that gives him such joy in life? More, the majority of dairy owners, and every farm manager, live on their farms; why would they turn their homes into dumping grounds? Perhaps Scott is imputing city values onto the country? No doubt Queen Street after a Friday or Saturday night is quite the ‘dumping ground’. Finally, I'd wager there's more pressure exerted in the pub on those few farmers who fall short, than in the Environment Court.


And though Scott's post didn't mention the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), when I commented to his thread, that scheme was soon brought up, with the point made by the respondent that I must be a climate denier. Um, have I written ... Oh, yes; sick of emoting, politico-theocratic nonsense'.
 

Though for the sake of argument, despite the science on climate change being nowhere close to resolved, one way or the other, let me, regardless, hand the Greens the argument; for a moment I'll give them man-made climate change. Because they believe - as in faith, rather than facts - in man-made climate change, they want carbon trading and all livestock forced into an ETS. Okay, now I’ve given the Green camp that, explain to me, any of you, with facts and figures, how putting New Zealand’s livestock into an ETS will change the supposed global climate equation, for the ‘better’ - whatever that means - in anything other than symbolic terms?
 

 And then stand that against what can be proven. Due to over-regulation and a viciously enforced taxation in every aspect of our lives, from the RMA ramped price of land our homes sit on, many families in New Zealand are already having trouble making ends meet. The state has destroyed, utterly, free markets, and, quite apart from the philosophical issues - read my blog byline - our standard of living is being decimated. Well put livestock into an ETS and the price of protein will be finally beyond the reach of many more Kiwi families completely: if you think dairy products and meat are expensive now, wait until a callous government actually does that. Then add on top the passed on cost of a carbon tax on energy. Ironically, the families that will bear the brunt of the hardship both will cause are the Greens/Labour constituency. Though no doubt they’ll blame it on a capitalism that doesn’t exist anymore, like they always do, and the soft minds, incapable of critical thought, churned out by the state school system will swallow that, hook line and sinker, Mr Imperator Fish, instead of being able to eat the fat of the land.

Worse, when labour first published the figures that were to be imposed on livestock via the ETS, I put them into a spread sheet and ran some rough figures. Note, I no longer have that spread sheet, it was three or four computers ago, and I can no longer remember the sums, but what I can remember, clearly, was the knowledge that even a family sheep, beef or deer farm with no debt would have trouble meeting the added cost, and still provide a living, indeed, the only livestock farm activity that possibly had enough cash falling out from the bottom line was dairy. So if you want to ensure that the remaining marginal dairy land in the South Island, including, ultimately, the McKenzie Country, is converted into dairying – and I don’t want to see it either, because for economic strength we need diversity – then the best bet for this to happen will be to vote in a Greens/Labour coalition in 2014.


Before it’s too late I would ask Scott, Greens and Labour voters, and National who are still threatening the viability of farming in 2015, to look up: ‘unintended consequences’, and ‘own goal’. And perhaps get yourselves down to a farm: I've got this suspicion not many of you have been to many.

Postscript: I see Homepaddock has just put up an article on how an ETS will increase the cost of food also.

UPDATE:

Note I'm aware in the above that farmers' are price takers, however, it is inevitable that the increased cost of protein production will end up with the consumer: for example, less sheep farms will mean less supply of sheep meat which will mean increased price, etc.