The new season is well under way here and the prices are looking pretty good at the moment. The price is around the $6.50/kg MS (28c/l)

There are good stories coming out of the industry too, with plenty of work going in the whole area of value added. Fonterra is doing a lot of good work there.

There also appears to be a lot of increased demand from China for products, so all of that is looking pretty good.

The weather, though, is absolutely atrocious, right across the country.

Canterbury has been hit by some very hard weather and much of it is under water. The Waikato and a large part of the upper north island have taken a lot of rain too. Bay of Plenty has seen lots of rain recently, after heavy floods back in the autumn, so they’re struggling. On my own farm, we’ve had snow for the first time in about six or seven years, so that’s a bit of a novelty.

The only good thing about the weather is that prices are good. If the weather throws you a curveball and the prices are bad, then that’s when it starts to hurt, so at least there is some positivity there.

Last year and the year before we had a combination of bad prices and bad weather, so that was pretty hard on some guys.

So New Zealand is looking good on the economics side of thing, but that’s only half the story.

There’s no evidence really of herds which had been culled hard last year and the year before, rebuilding. Saying that, there’s no evidence either of any more culling going on. The packers (processors) haven’t moved any great deal on prices, so there’s not much happening there.

There’s a sense in those herds that they can be more profitable at the lower stocking rate by increasing output and converting more to milk solids.

That’s where I think the New Zealand dairy herd will go.

There won’t be huge growth in numbers, instead growth will be driven by greater cow efficiency and feed improvement – that sort of thing.

With regard to the environment, there are still challenges for us to deal with. Farmers are fencing creeks to keep livestock out of the water, and about 98% of this is done. We have done about 28,000km.

Fencing is the easy part though, dealing with nitrate leaking is a bigger challenge. You’re seeing now farms having to pull back because of nitrates and to improve their environmental practices. That’s something that will continue to hang around.