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Dairy cows on Southern Pasture’s farms. (Photo: Supplied)
Dairy cows on Southern Pasture’s farms. (Photo: Supplied)

OPINIONBusinessMay 21, 2020

Carbon-neutral dairy farming isn’t just sustainable, it’s more profitable too

Dairy cows on Southern Pasture’s farms. (Photo: Supplied)
Dairy cows on Southern Pasture’s farms. (Photo: Supplied)

Not only could carbon-neutral dairy farming be a sustainable way to mitigate climate change, but it could also be a profitable enterprise for New Zealand’s farmers, writes Prem Maan from Southern Pastures.

The Covid-19 crisis has shown us what can be achieved in New Zealand if we work towards a common goal rather than wholly directed by self-interest.

In my view, farming in New Zealand could be driven by a similarly united ambition to become carbon neutral and then, ultimately, a net extractor of atmospheric carbon. There is a clear need to make our farms more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. Farming that produces more each year with fewer inputs and is resilient to climate volatility is in our common interest.

It would be useful to see this goal articulated by the government. Instead of punitive regulations, a bold approach would be to educate farmers and reward them for improving soil carbon sequestration, preserving valuable nutrients on-farm and reducing methane emissions to make animals more productive – all with the ultimate pay-off that premium markets will pay more for traceable products that have this kind of story standing behind them.

This could form the basis of a uniquely New Zealand solution where farmers are key troops in the war against climate change. Not through relying on the chessboard manoeuvres of traded offsets and market schemes, and not through production reductions, but through the actual capture and storage of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil sinks of our farms. This should be practicable and, equally, profitable.

The EU is planning to pay farmers to capture carbon on their farms – storing it in pastures, trees, hedgerows, and perhaps most critically, in soil. There is logic to this as soil has the ability to hold immense amounts of atmospheric carbon. Carbon-rich topsoil is very productive and the world needs far more of it.

New Zealand could take a similar path and incentivise pastoral farmers to make climate change mitigation central to their farming practices. The techniques are available and largely uncomplicated: rotational grazing, riparian and other planting, the use of earthworms and dung beetles, biochar, inverse tillage, low tillage, and rotational, deep-rooted, cover and catch crops. These and other farm management tactics can all come together to enable really significant soil carbon sequestration. Other countries call it regenerative agriculture. For us, it should be the normal New Zealand farming system.

At Southern Pastures, we’re practising and researching these methods on our own farms. We’re firmly focused on identifying the final pieces of the jigsaw that could see this country leading the way in producing carbon-neutral dairy. We’re a large dairy operator underwritten by long-term pension funds and our sustainability and climate change mitigation ambitions for our farms do not jeopardise this investment. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – our long-term view enables us to reimagine the industry both on and off the farm. Our founding environmental, social, governance policies resonate with our customers, as do our obligations to the UN as a signatory to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment.

I’m convinced that sustainably farmed, carbon-neutral products can earn a premium for the country as a whole. My confidence is also based on what I’m seeing in our own research projects and farm practices and on the international evidence that is accumulating at pace.

We must aim for dairy that’s less extractive but also more enriching for our communities as well as the country’s coffers.

Keep going!
The NZ Covid Tracer app
The NZ Covid Tracer app

BusinessMay 20, 2020

What you need to know about the government’s new contact tracing app

The NZ Covid Tracer app
The NZ Covid Tracer app

The official contact tracing app, released to aid in the fight against Covid-19, is now available for download. So what does it do, what’s good about it, and what are the problems? 

What’s all this then?

As of last night, the government has an official contact tracing app. It’s called NZ COVID Tracer, and is available free from the app store and Google Play store. If you want to know the size, it is 41.5MB.

What does it do?

Strangely enough, one of the things it doesn’t do is automatic contact tracing – we’ll get into why that is the case below.

What NZ COVID Tracer does do is function as a “digital diary,” according to PM Jacinda Ardern. It operates by having app users scan QR codes in public places they visit, so that a record of where they have been is kept. If users choose to allow it, those details are provided to the National Close Contact Service, “so they can quickly get in touch if you are identified as a close contact of someone who has Covid-19,” according to the Ministry of Health website. It has therefore been designed to support, rather than replace, existing contact tracing efforts.

Essentially, two sets of data will be collected by the app, says Auckland University expert Dr Andrew Chen. It will collect personal information for contact tracing purposes – information that can be shared with the NCSS – and track locations to help your memory, which is information that will not be shared.

Do I have to download it? 

No, all use of the NZ COVID Tracer app is purely voluntary.

But it would be helpful to sign up?

Yes, signing up will make the job easier for contact tracers if they need to get in touch with you.

Is it the same as what Singapore and Australia have got?

No, the system being used here isn’t the same at all. Those are Bluetooth-based apps, and the NZ version is not. What’s the difference? AUT computer science professor Dave Parry explains:

“The Singaporean and Australian apps use Bluetooth to detect who you have been in contact with – as long as they also have the app. Bluetooth apps can only give approximate distances to other people and usually need more power, meaning you have to charge the phone more often. They also need everyone to use the app and usage has been very low at around 10-15% in Singapore. The NZ app just records where you have been using its own QR codes to ‘check in’ to places.”

How does the data from those QR code check-ins get used?

There have been quite strong statements from all concerned that the data will only be used for contact tracing, and only when needed. So in context, the data will have not be used to prosecute someone for having 11 friends over for dinner, for example.  This point has been welcomed by Civil Liberties NZ chairperson Thomas Beagle, who says it’s “exactly what I think they should be doing and is key to building public trust”.

However, Beagle has concerns that the assurances over privacy are not backed up by law, and that there is “nothing stopping the police or intelligence agencies from applying for and receiving the appropriate warrants to access it.” He wants that to be changed immediately, so that there is “some form of legal protection for the data captured by the app to stop other agencies accessing it for purposes not related to the Covid-19 pandemic”.

The data will also auto-delete after 31 days, because that will be more than enough time for any potential infection to play out.

So should we be concerned about privacy from using the app?

On balance, the expert views lean towards the app being fairly benign from a privacy perspective. The Ministry of Health has released a Privacy Impact Assessment, and over the course of about 10,000 words it came to the conclusion that the risk is low. The Privacy Commissioner’s office was heavily consulted during the creation of the app, and commissioner John Edwards says the app was created “using Privacy by Design principles which put privacy at the foundation of the process”.

Will it actually work? 

Honestly, the biggest drawback of it all from the perspective of fighting Covid-19 is the very limited scope. There are good privacy and security-related reasons for that of course, but we can’t expect this app to be a silver bullet – it just isn’t designed for that at this stage.

Will more functionality be added to make it more effective? 

Here’s where a few fishhooks start coming in – at this stage, adding Bluetooth functionality or other aspects to the app hasn’t been ruled out. And according to Thomas Beagle, that could start to present problems with what people have agreed to share.

“The scope of the application may be increased with a number of other features such as Bluetooth contact-tracing and so on,” says Beagle. “I believe most people leave auto-update on for apps, so anyone choosing to install this app with its limited scope is also de facto installing all the future expanded versions of the app as well.” He clarified that he wasn’t accusing the government of developing a Trojan horse or anything like that – rather, people should just know what they’re signing up for.

What about the other apps that have been developed? 

Those can continue to be used of course, because as mentioned above, NZ COVID Tracer is just designed to support wider contact tracing efforts. One alternative app is Rippl (discussed in this article) which has been adopted by both Wellington and Dunedin City Councils. Rippl developer Antony Dixon says on balance the official government app would require more from users. “The setup process is multi-step compared to Rippl. Some features of the app required a data connection. Rippl requires no registration and can be used straight away to check in at venues without a data connection.” He also critiqued the possibility of Bluetooth functionality being added to the app, saying overseas that had introduced “stability problems” for apps.

Anything else worth knowing about it?

To store the data that it will hold securely, the Ministry of Health has contracted Amazon Web Services, owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world. As the NZ Herald’s Chris Keall notes, “after so much buy-local campaigning, it’s amazing that a US company would get such a huge cloud computing contract”.

But wait there's more!