Have you used our website to give DairyNZ and Beef+Lamb a friendly reminder who pays their bills?
Farmers have been taking full advantage of the Groundswell NZ levy refund website to give their levy bodies a wake-up call.
It only takes two minutes to use the website to point out that your levy bodies’ advocacy has been working against farmers interests and ask for a cheeky refund on the advocacy portion of your levies.
Click here to send your message
This is sending a strong message to DairyNZ and Beef & Lamb that farmers are not happy with the return they are receiving for their investment.
DairyNZ are even taking notice and have been replying to farmers, wanting to discuss their work.
We hope Beef+Lamb will follow DairyNZ and reply to their farmers too.
In Dairy NZ's communications to the farmers who used our website, they say they’ll call for a chat. Perhaps those farmers will get answers to the questions Groundswell NZ has been trying to get out of the levy bodies!
Here are some ideas you could put to them, if you are lucky enough to get a phone call:
- Why have they agreed to HWEN, when it relies heavily on farms being planted in forestry to achieve emission reductions targets?
- Why have they agreed to HWEN sequestration rules that exclude most of the sequestration farmers provide?
- Why doesn’t HWEN use GWP*, the much more accurate way to measure impact on climate change, instead of the outdated GWP100? (GWP stands for Global Warming Potential)
- Why is agriculture going to be the only industry forced to produce cooling?
- Why haven’t you stood up for farmers on winter grazing rules? Farmers are already doing grazing well without the consent process, which is a mess, and will end up costing farmers huge time and money.
- Do you really think it was DairyNZ that “secured major changes to freshwater policy”, as it wasn’t until Groundswell NZ encouraged farmers to get their tractors out that farmers were taken notice of?
- DairyNZ needs to keep what is best for NZ Farmers at the heart of everything they do, not what fits best with the Government.