A new six-part documentary investigates the impact and future of the dairy farming boom in Aotearoa.

It's called Milk and Money and is streaming now here.

The journalist behind the series, Baz Macdonald saw the intensification of dairy farming first hand growing up in rural Southland.

"When I was born, there was only about 30 or 40,000 dairy cows in Southland and now there's over 600,000. So, I've sort of seen the effect of that transition over my lifetime,” he told Jesse Mulligan.

Much of that intensification has occurred in areas long deemed unsuitable for dairying, Macdonald says.

“In the case of Canterbury it was considered too dry and irrigation has been the solution to that, incredible amounts of water 70 percent of all irrigation in New Zealand happens in Canterbury.

And then in Southland, conversely, it was considered too wet.”

Large parts of Southland were originally wetland, he says.

“And nature wants to go back to the state that it comes from and so it's a real battle for farmers to not have Southland return to a swamp. And big, heavy, closely-kept, dairy cows are the last things you want to have in a swamp. And so that's why we see these issues of in the winter in particular places like Southland going to mud.”

He has great empathy for farmers growing up as he did in rural Southland, and his extended family works in the industry, but he says the current trajectory is unsustainable.

“Some people in the industry may say it is, but you only have to look at any graph of those externalities to see that there's degradation happening, and it'll only continue to do so if we continue on business as usual.

“So, my goal with the series was, let's have a look at what we do, what the issues are and what the barriers are to fixing them.”

He didn’t want the documentary to be a farmer bashing exercise, but the programme did focus on what he calls “progressive” voices in the industry.

“We chose to speak specifically to really progressive voices in the farming community, and hold up those thinking creatively, thinking progressively, thinking empathetically and ethically, and hopefully holding up examples of the right way forward, will get people onside. This series it's on the farmers side, we're all in this together and we all want to find a way forward together. And that was really the goal.”

The documentary makers spent two and a half months traveling the whole country from Southland to Northland producing the documentary.

Macdonald has also written six companion articles to go with each episode.

“One of those is that I went to work on one of these dairy farms for a week and wrote a sort of First Person narrative about some of the revelations that I had, you know, doing the job.”

The commodity-based approach of the industry puts demands on the land above its carrying capacity, he says, when a better model is value based.

“We're trying to kind of live in two worlds at the moment where on one hand, we're saying oh look at this amazing premium product that we produce.

“And then on the other hand, we're selling it in its least premium form a lot of the time.”

Ireland makes more money from less intensity, he says through selling premium dairy products.

“And there is a version of New Zealand dairy going forward that finds that economic and environmental equilibrium.”

From Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan, RNZ

Republished by Arrangement