Sustainable Agriculture for New Zealand
New Zealand needs to adopt a system of sustainable agriculture; currently the country pays for its huge oil imports by exporting an equivalent value of milk and dairy products. The New Zealand dairy farming industry does not practise sustainable agriculture and dairy farming has a number of unsatisfactory side-effects, which should ideally be rectified. It requires a form of intensive dairy farming which can only be described as agribusiness. It is not good for animal welfare, and it requires excessive inputs of chemicals, antibiotics, growth hormones and other unacceptable and unhealthy substances into the food chain.
Intensive farming inevitably entails the increase of parasites and pests, and fails to improve soil fertility through a robust rotation of crops in the traditional style. The globalisation of food production and dairy exporting has meant food miles that can no longer be justified. Fortress New Zealand suggests that we must return to a more local form of sustainable agriculture, where each community largely feeds itself on a self-sufficient basis. This will bring about the return of the horse, the vegetable garden and the orchard.