...proudly brought to you by Mazda. Kia ora. I'm Miriama Kamo. Lately, Sunday's been investigating the impact of agriculture on our environment, from GM food to the state of our waterways. And the news isn't good for farmers. New Zealand has just been warned we're pushing our environment to the limit, and our cow population needs to be slashed if we're to meet global greenhouse gas targets. So where does that leave the dairy farmers who bring in billions a year in export earnings? Well, they're taking plenty of heat from the pundits, from outsiders looking in. So tonight, we take a look from the inside out. Cameron Bennett gets his gummies on and heads to the Waikato to hear the farmers' side of the story. Now, it shows the reality of life and death on a working farm, so some scenes may be confronting. I've drunk a lot of milk in my time and never really given much thought to it, and as for the guys who produce it, our dairy farmers, well, they aren't the heroes they were when I was growing up. They've got a serious image problem, and they're spending up large on PR to win back hearts and minds. Now, I'm a townie. I hardly ever set foot on a farm, and have little idea of what dairy farmers actually do and think. RADIO: Is New Zealand dairy industry going to hell in a handcart? The dirty dairying message seems to be everywhere; farmers abusing the environment, abusing their animals. I want to find out from them what is the real price of milk. The Hauraki Plains in the Waikato. This is traditional dairy heartland, and that's why I'm here. I'm looking for that quintessential Kiwi cocky to give the farmers' perspective. Now, I chanced on Gavin Flint, or Flinty, down at the North Rugby Club, and thought, 'Well, you're a character, mate. You'll do.' Gavin's a fourth generation Plains farmer, and he's agreed to show me how it's done. We've just got two new mums in here. Let's go and have a look. They calved last night, but they've had a bit of time` These are newborn? Yeah. These are newborn. Yep. Yep. It's just had a bit of time on its mother. He runs a herd of around 600, and that's nearly 200 more cows than the national average. Just be careful walking over there. The rain sort of flooded in. It used to be bone-dry. It's a swamp in here. I know. I know. It's only grass with the money taken out of it. It's going over the top of my gumboots. Yeah. No. You should have probably got the longer gumboots. Ugh! Gavin's farm is showing the effects of one of the soggiest winters to hit these plains in years. And get used to it. With global warming, there will be a lot more weather like this. This one here. You can see that it's had a good feed. Look at its belly. Nice and round. If they don't have a feed within six hours, they're not getting all the good antibodies. Millions of calves are born on New Zealand farms every year, then separated from their mothers within days. So the cows don't get defensive if you took their calves? Oh yeah, sometimes they do. If you pick it up and put it into a trailer, the mothers will follow. And they'll bellow. They only bellow for a couple of days... Formed a bond like any mother and child would, I suppose. So it's got to be hard. 'It's one of those harsh realities of rural life.' At this stage we're separating the calves off from the mother? Yeah. And that's the last the mother will have to do with the calves? Yeah. That's the bit that a lot of people don't seem to like. That's the tough bit. That's the tough bit. Do they go to the works or are they going...? What's going to happen to these guys? One of them will. That grey one's got a bit of beef, so we'll actually probably keep that. You just pick that one up and I'll pick this one up. Arm under the belly. What's the idea? I've got to catch him first. Ooooh. Arm around the front. Uh, not quite. COWS BELLOW (COW MOOS) The males, the bobby calves, aren't much use to dairy farmers, so they're slaughtered and end up as tender schnitzel. 70% of calves when they're born don't actually get enough colstrum. You've just got to get it in, though. I was as shocked as anybody at hidden-camera footage activists posted ` newborns beaten and flung into piles. Is that truly what happens? Yeah. I thought a lot of new rules had come in and sort of stopped a lot of that. As far as the` Was it shocking for you? Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, watching the guys load it on the trucks and throwing them on, oh, you know. I know the guys that pick up our calves don't do that. So seeing that, that's, you know, that pisses you off. It's just that there are a few dodgy critters out there. Yeah. We always seem to be in the media for the wrong things. You know, it's the price of cheese is too high or, um, we're getting paid too much or now it's, you know... Then it's the bobby calves. And it's kind of frustrating. But it's no different if their dog has puppies and then once they're weaned, they sell their pups off to someone else. I mean, it goes on all the time. Well, I hope Flinty is right, but it's hard to tell just how widespread mistreatment is. There aren't many animal welfare inspectors to monitor cruelty. Maybe that's why few cases ever make it to court. They just need a bit of a squirt. Once they get a taste... It's not working for me at all. Not working at all, Flinty. What you do is open the mouth. STRAINS: Come on, bubby. You kind of made that look extremely difficult. (GRUNTS) I think I've got it. Whoops. (LAUGHS) This is hard yakka. (LAUGHS) Jersey calves are actually the worst because they're more stubborn and they tend to want to sulk more. Oh, OK. Sometimes the harder you pull, the more they pull back. With Flinty out milking since before dawn, it's up to his wife, Cheryl, to get the kids ready for school before starting her day job at the local Four Square. Now, this surprises me. I thought a farm like Flinty's, 600 cows, would provide a decent income. There's a lot of farmers out there that are really, really struggling, and it's sad. Money is very tight, especially when they're not actually making money at all with the price of milk at the moment. It's sad. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you just... I can see Gavin come home, and he's just doing his absolute best, you know. He's working so hard, and he's doing his absolute best, and then you hear all this negativity, and it's just like,... you know. He takes such pride in the farm. I reckon he'd be lost without the farm. All right. So this is the real deal. Raw milk. Proper milk. Oops. A little bit spilt. Jeez. Throwing money away. The champagne of the Plains. Into it. That's very good. Very creamy. Yep. Why can't we buy this in the supermarket, then? Well, I dunno. It's got to be pasteurised and all the goodies have got to be taken out of it. I dunno. Why can't I just sell it here? Probably make a fortune. It may be white gold for New Zealand, but is it too much of a good thing? 4 So, you're up at this time, what, seven days a week? Yeah. But I love it. It's actually my favourite part of the job. Up the road from Flinty, Jasmine Purnell is also a fourth-generation Hauraki Plains farmer. She farms very differently from her neighbours. SHOUTS: Let's go. Come on, girls. Jasmine describes her farm as 'back to the future'. Minimal inputs. No nitrate fertilisers to boost grass growth. She reckons that damages the soil and water. Jasmine runs less cows per hectare than her neighbours. She worries about the trend towards intensive farming causing long-term damage. Good morning, Nellie. All right. Tanker's coming. Let's go. So you really don't rush the animals at all. No. If they need a drink or go to the toilet, it just seems... I mean, obviously, if there's a major rush on that day, I mean, I have to, 'Come on.' And do you find working on foot gives you a much closer contact`? Well, you can really watch for any issues, lameness. You know, if a cow's not doing well, you can literally just go, 'All right, let's dry you off. Give you a rest.' And they do. They come back tenfold. Yeah. All right. I'm pretty fussy about the shed being clean. It's much easier to keep the cow shed clean than the house, to be honest. Well, it's a tough job doing this and then going home and doing the housework. I actually think that's true. Yeah. I use a lot of my energy up here. My husband is pretty amazing. He does nine to 10 hours building. Definitely takes a lot of teamwork. We supply a fresh-milk company. It goes to Wellington and some of it goes to China. In four days` In four days' time, this will end up in China? Yeah. Wow. Come on, girls. Wake up. This should be simple. Place suction cup on teat. Uh, right. He's not sure about this. There. Kind of twisted, but, you know... Oh, OK. Yeah, it is a bit twisted. It's still going to work, though, so it's fine. Everything here is as natural as possible. No palm kernel feed to boost milk production. Not on this farm. We use a lot less inputs. It costs us a lot less money to produce cows like this, but we can't have the same number on the farm as somebody who's piling on the nitrogen and palm kernel. So, it's a balancing act. Most Kiwi dairy farmers milk twice a day, but not Jasmine. I like having a life in the evenings. I like going to the beach with my kids. But, um, we don't get the same teat issues. You get much less lameness. Vet bills go right down. It actually makes economic sense. It's not just about lifestyle, it's about economics. Oh, there's a huge economic` I mean, we've got to live off this. Yeah. When you are really and truly honest about the cost of an afternoon milking, the margin is very tiny, and is it worth the strain on, not just the cows and the land, but your personal life as well? The reality is that the workload that I have isn't comparable to a high-input farm for a guy's that getting paid a salary. And they get exhausted. And I'm imagining that it's quite a terrifying jump for some people if you're driven by fear of not being able to pay your mortgage. That's real. Hey, babe. Oh, hey. Jasmine's fortunate. Her husband, Matt, a builder, can get their three kids ready for school while she's away milking. Farming is fast-forwarding. 15 years ago, the amount of share milkers there were. There were grass-root farmers that had young families that were working their way up to own their piece of land, that was going to be their family land. And they were going to stay there, and they were going to enrich their communities, but... And I think that it just really quickly became, um, impossible. It's the same as the Kiwi dream to own a home. It's so similar. The ties between rural New Zealand and urban New Zealand is really similar. Like, you know. People are just trying to survive. On Flinty's farm, a cow is struggling to get up. She's not moving. She's trying. She's not quite up. She's given birth to a stillborn calf, and I'm feeling as worried about her as Flinty. She's had a difficult calving and I just want to give her a bit of dextrose and a little bit more energy, and it's got a little bit more mag and calcium in it. So, she was walking around this morning, but, so... She hasn't been down too long. Just got to check and check, and, yeah, I'll be glad when these ones here have all calved so I don't have to keep checking all the time. Like, I've been checking every night since mid-June. It's time for some heavy-duty post-natal care. I mean, it looks kind of like medieval. It does, actually. They're probably an old British torture. In reality, all it is is a set of hip lifters. They lift a cow that's approximately 400kg, which you and I are not going to lift, to try and stand her up so we can get her walking again. Come on, girl. Ooh. So her legs... She still can't support herself, eh. Yeah. She's probably a bit sore. Might be a touch of paralysis. So how long are you going to leave her standing like this? Maybe 10 minutes. Just get her standing up. She could be right this afternoon. It might take about five days of it. You know? And sometimes they don't come right. I'm not sure I could do that. Yeah. No. I was just checking that she wasn't going to push her uterus out and have a prolapse. Flinty has done it this way for years, but now all farmers have to worry about how accepted farming practices might appear to the Facebook generation. Anything that they perceive as bad, just gets thrown on there, and, um, all you've got to do is word something like, you know... Anyone could drive past and say, 'I saw a cow chained to a tractor.' You're kind of buggered. I can't not do this. Jasmine has far fewer calves to deal with, but still faces the stark reality of life and death on the farm. From a townie perspective on this, Jasmine, these calves are still being fattened to go to slaughter? Yeah. It certainly not something that you can think too deeply about. It is what it is. And they would be out in the wild, and they could be suffering a really tough time. And we are breeding them, and, yeah, we're breeding excessive amounts of them, so it's our responsibility to feed them. I think if you can respect them in their nature and their natural ways, and respect that they are existing... I don't know how to say it, really. Do you get upset by the way farmers are portrayed by animal rights activists? No, because I think they have their place. Even in our own practices, yeah, we do take the calves off their mothers, and it's not pleasant. And I'm a woman. I've had babies. But, um, I think it's good that they are speaking really loudly on behalf of animals, if that's what it takes for them to treat animals with respect. Jasmine's perspective is, of course, female, and come to think of it, dairy farmers are mostly blokes, and yet dairy farming entirely revolves around the female cycle. See, that bull's going to have a massive good time shortly. What? With all those cows? When the cows come on heat. You know, as a townie, I kind of didn't appreciate that in order for us to get milk, these cows have got to be permanently pregnant. Oh yeah. Yeah. I feel sorry... (LAUGHS) sorry for them sometimes. I had chronic morning sickness for, like, 16 weeks where` And I said to Gavin, 'I so hope cows do not get morning sickness, especially having to be pregnant once a year.' And what did he say? Do they get morning sickness? You'd never know. You kind of wish the cows could actually talk to you and say, 'Oh my God, not again!' (LAUGHS) We're standing by for a birth. It's 160 here. We've been waiting all night, and what do you make of her? Yeah, well, it's a bit odd. Either she's having trouble or, um, doing it the slow way. I might just get her and bring her up to the shed. It's almost 24 hours since cow 160 went into labour. She needs help and fast, so Flinty's turning the milking shed into a maternity suite. So you've got a hoof. But this time, things aren't looking good. I'd hung around a day and a night. I was quite excited about the prospect of seeing a calf being born. Now Flinty warns me this might not be pretty. Hit gut feeling? It's another stillbirth. Nah. No change. So she died in utero. Yeah. A bit of a shame, but, yeah, unfortunately it happens. But the cow survived, and that's, you know, one good thing out of it, I suppose. And we can start... start milking her, and everyone can have their Weet-Bix with coffee. 4 Morning, Flinty. How's it going? Not bad for 5am. This is what you're doing every day of the year? Oh, yeah, all about six weeks probably. Yeah. It's pretty unrelenting, though, isn't it? Yeah. Well, once you start you can't stop. Cows don't have days off, so they've got to be milked, so, yeah. It's just the way it is, you know. But you guys have to get up early and go to the gym and have a latte, don't ya? 'Yeah, yeah. Got me pegged as the soft townie type. Heard all that before. 'Right. My chance to step up.' How am I doing? It's hard to put a finger on just one thing, really. It's certainly not as easy as it looks. 'Yep. I thought reporting from Iraq was a tough assignment.' The rain's been non-stop this winter. Water is both a blessing and a curse for farmers, and now water is the most contentious issue they face. Each cow produces around 100 litres of dung and urine a day once you add cowshed washdown. 100 litres. It's all got to go somewhere. Our waterways and rivers are becoming increasingly polluted and farmers get the blame. You can't help notice hosing down this yard, just the quantity of crap and fluid. I mean, how do you handle that? It must be a huge headache for a farmer. Um, oh, it's just kept in storage ponds. There's a couple of storage ponds there. We've probably got just over 90 days of storage. It's got a huge fertiliser value to it. Like, it's not a bad thing. Like, it's bad if it gets into the sea; if it gets into the waterways. Well, that's all a lot of us hear about, isn't it? And that's where the issue is. Yeah. This run-off from this sort of operation ends up in the waterways, pollutes the harbours and so forth. That's the story we get told. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when it's wet around here, we stand our cows off. They stood off on here or on woodchip pads. So you're actually capturing all that. And then managing it right, spreading it properly, spreading it at the right thickness, the right rate so we don't get run-off. I think where we're seeing a lot more is where land that used to be either forest or sheep or beef, it's all been just either cleared, sheep are gone, beef are gone, and we're seeing cows in place. So, you know, yeah, so perhaps we shouldn't be milking cows on it. Jasmine's solution to run-off is care for the soil. She reckons that by working with nature and not against it, much of the problem will disappear. The theory is to stimulate what nature's already doing; the natural systems that are happening in there ` the fungus, the root systems, and any artificial intervention can be quite detrimental to that. When I look at grass, technically, it's like a little rainforest. Each and every plant and diverse species is acting as a solar panel which is, in turn, taking energy from the sun and taking it deep into the root system. Putting the nitrogen on turns the root system off, and it goes, schup, and it looks fantastic but what's going on underneath isn't fantastic. I didn't realise that our dependence on nitrates to grow more grass has only taken off in the last 50 years. It's how we've massively increased our cows per hectare. So, what, we do these every couple of metres or something? About 10 steps or paces, rather. Hey, um, Jasmine, if you don't mind me saying, um, most of the farmers around here grow grass. You seem to be growing weeds. What's that about? To us, this is magic. We put in a massive variety of herbage, so I guess` Well, why do you put in a massive variety of herbage? What's the point of that? Well, it fixes the soil. The cows get an incredible diverse amount of nutrients out of it. Most dairy farmers grow only two varieties of grass ` rye and clover. For us, it would be eating the same meal, every meal, whereas this is kind of like a big variety of food. It's a big salad. It's a big salad. Yeah. And what about the weeds, themselves. How do you spray them? How do you keep them down? Where are the weeds? OK. Where are the weeds? Did you have to use spray? No. The paddock got some seaweed nutrient put on it, and, yeah. No, in fact, we probably do the opposite. Instead of putting antifungicides and things on the seeds, we put healthy fungus on to the seeds. Well, it seems to make a lot of sense. Why isn't everyone doing it? I don't know. Yeah. To be able to put our stock on to this right now is obviously going to have a direct effect on milk volumes. Better quality milk, more milk, happy cows, happy life. Happy farmer. Happy farmer. An average dairy cow eats around 85kg of grass every day to produce 17 litres of milk. You can do it. Other way. That's it. (LAUGHS) See? That's how it's done. Nice. (CHUCKLES) You're a real farmer now. Having fenced off the salad field, well, sort of, we let the herd in to graze. My concern is we're stripping the top soil off our land, and we're doing that by intensification, by forcing land to have to produce far more than what it's naturally capable of. In the short term, it might look viable, but the actual damage ` you can't see. So what's our next job, Flinty? Oh, we'll just fire up the old tractor there and get the pump going to start pumping a bit of this green gold out on to the paddock. So what happens, you know, your pools are at overflow level? It's raining out there. You've got to get rid of this stuff. What happens? Uh, well, cross my fingers I don't get into that sort of situation. But, um, yeah, I-I don't know. You just, um, cross your fingers. Farmers like Flinty now face tough and expensive environmental regulations. I can understand why, but it's big money. Yeah. It's probably the biggest thing that's probably going to hit farmers in the history of New Zealand farming, I think. We don't want to wreck the country. It's simple. And, you know, I would like to take my kids swimming in a stream and all that sort of thing, and that's what it has brought in. Um, and I think you'll probably speak to... 99% of farmers will agree that, you know, 'Hey, we've got to look after it.' Cos it's an image thing too. When you're selling your product, and 97% of our product is sold overseas, it's gotta look good. The agricultural sector is a huge part of our economy. You start crippling it, it has flow-on effects to communities and other jobs, and so on. And do you think some of these environmental controls that are coming in run the risk of crippling this business? How they're implemented, I think, yeah. Yeah, they do. I go right down. You don't need to go fast. Right. Let's start the tractor. (ENGINE STARTS) The idea is to spread the effluent when it's dry to avoid run-off into the waterways. But I don't know. That's a lot of effluent to get rid of. Dairy New Zealand claims farmers collectively spent more than a billion dollars in the last five years on environmental protection, but water pollution is growing faster than we can fix it. I think you've got a responsibility to be really honest about what's your contribution to the waterways. This river was my playground when I was a kid. Of course we want to protect it. Can you still...? I mean, can you still swim in that water? Absolutely. Is it inevitable that you're going to end up with polluted rivers if you're going to have intensified dairy farming? I can't see any other way, or what the outcome could be in another way. There are a lot of farmers that are genuinely caring about the effect` Most farmers? ...being held accountable. Well, it's not what I see. I see the use of nitrogen as` Like the intense use of nitrogen, I can't see how that... Where is it going to go? And, also, it's killing the ecosystem in the soil which would protect the waterways. Flinty's out to use every bit of his land for maximum productivity. It's a big ask. 100 years ago, the whole Hauraki Plains was one gigantic peat bog. All over the country, farmers are maximising every bit of arable land. This is part of the government's goal to double agricultural output by 2025. This is a pretty rugged bit of land here. Yeah. Well, it's never been developed. My great-grandfather owned this. And my uncle bought it, and we bought it off my uncle. So we developed the other side. We just haven't developed this. The biggest thing with peat is drainage, so you can imagine this many years ago would have just been a big` Yeah, well, it still is. It feels like a bog to me. Just needs a lot of lime, spraying out the rushes and so on and get it a bit more productive. This industrial model of modern dairy farming requires enormous inputs. We've already put the lime on the paddock first. Uh, that gets turned in by the discs. We'll put the fertiliser on top. The power harrow will be here in the morning, and that will break it up real fine. Put the seed on at the same time. We're just planting a chicory crop. It grows a deep tap root, so it goes hunting for water. So during the dry months, it will just keep growing. Once the crop's finished, we'll spray that crop out and we'll drill in a new species of rye grass. It's a proven formula used throughout the country on a massive scale. Dairy returns billions of dollars a year in export earnings. The same approach keeps the bank manager off Flinty's back. In terms of the way that you are written up in the paper and online, what's the impression you get? I think they think there's a money tree that the cows all shelter under. If I sold up tomorrow, I probably wouldn't be able to buy a house. If I really didn't think that I could, um, you know, get a good future and get myself to a point financially to have a good life, um, I wouldn't be getting out of bed at 4 o'clock in the morning to do it. Mm. But what about the next generation of dairy farmers? What's in it for them? 5 Five minutes up the road from Flinty's farm is Ngatea, agricultural service town to the Plains. Ngatea only exists because of the cows, but as farms grow larger and the population gets smaller, towns like this struggle to survive. But Ngatea is fighting back. They're selling off farmland for Aucklanders fleeing their overcooked housing market. 'Live the Kiwi dream' the slogan reads. The dream is for people who like a rural, safe lifestyle. And are they coming in their droves or what? They're very, very interested. We've got quite a few that are commuting up to Auckland for work. Mum doesn't have to work because it's cheaper to live down here. Gill, you know, say there's lots of reasons to come here, but looking around, what is there to do? (WHISTLE BLOWS) In Ngatea, rugby is still king and farmers still see themselves as the backbone of the economy. But they feel all they get in return is criticism from the media. Well, they never put anything good on about it, do they? They never put on something that's looking after an animal or anything like that. It's always somebody... You do get the odd person that's doing the wrong thing, obviously, but no one's perfect. But they never put on anything good about farming. The Hauraki Plains rural show. It's a highlight of Ngatea's social calendar. And there's Flinty and the kids. You've got to love it. This is real heartland NZ. The calves, the kids. It's a celebration of community and a way of life that's under all sorts of pressure. It's quite intense on some of the older kids. They're really competitive. I mean, is it kind of like a beauty contest? You could call it like that. It's a pretty formal occasion this, Bruce. I see you've got the tie on and` If you're going out there, you've got to look the best. We don't like to see you in gumboots or anything like that. And, we as judges, we've got to look the part as well. Shiny black shoes. Yes. No gumboots. No gumboots. Impressive. Yes. Tayla's a show veteran. She's just 12, and she knows where she's going, put it that way. I wanted an animal that I could sell at the end and make a bit of money to buy my own heifer. I have a real passion for this. Um, this is what I want to do with my life. I want to breed a new gene of better quality cows. So did you do calf day yourself here? Yep. Yep. No, I did it for a few years at Ngatea Primary just over there, so... You know, I did that for a few years. Won a couple of ribbons. Cos it's bloody hard. Every day you've got to be out there and you've got to feed it and lead it and it's a bit of work. So it's a real commitment? Yeah. Actually, it's a good thing for kids to do. There's no PlayStation remote on a calf. You guys are brushing this cow up beautifully, but where's it going to end up? Um,... dead. Dead? It will end up in the freezer eventually. It doesn't know it, but, yeah. And country kids just get that. They understand that's just the way it is. She just thinks it's part of life. She's not going to end up being an axe murderer or something stupid like that, you know. It's just... Yeah, she knows that's part of the way of life, and you teach the kids this is what happens to the animal eventually instead of them having a big drama about it later on when the animal gets older and it's got to go off to the works. Yeah. A lot of people like to bury their head in the sand about it all, and I think if the world comes to an end, there will be a lot of people who will starve pretty quick cos they wouldn't know how to do this side of it, you know. Generations of farm kids have been through Hauraki Plains College in Ngatea. Flinty's an old boy too. Right. So I found this photo of Flinty from an old school magazine. You can tell right away that's him. Yep. That's Flinty. You taught him? Yep. And his grandmother taught me, and his great-grandfather was actually a principal of this school. What sort of student was he? I don't think he liked pushing a pen around a desk all day. I don't think that was his thing, really. I get that impression as well. As a career, um, there's so much against farming now. It's not just the financial returns, but also the dirty, daring image seems to have gone with farming. There's been so much bad press about treatment of animals, um, the waterways, that that whole thing has made farming just a whole lot less attractive. But the school's persevering. It even has its own farm. Though as career options go, farming's increasingly difficult. The kids are well aware that cow cockies aren't revered like they used to be, and guess who they blame. Do you feel that your farmers are getting a bit of a hard time these days? I think that the media changes it around a bit, and I reckon they actually do a really good job for this country. The media shows the negative stuff. Damn media! But here's the thing. Flinty doesn't employ any local kids. He's hired two Filipinos instead. A lot of young New Zealanders, they like to have their weekends, play their sport and go partying. Young boys want to chase birds, as they do, and I suppose milking cows is not exactly a trendy thing to do. James Aralar has a degree in animal science, and has just spent the last five years dairying in the Middle East. Around 80% to 90% of the migrant workers in the dairy industry are Filipinos. Filipinos are hard workers who are doing it not only for our family, but also for our country. Once you do good, then New Zealand dairy owners will be employing more Filipinos. And in a way, we will be helping our country as well. Unions say they're vulnerable to being worked long hours for low pay. Most are here on short-term visas. Flinty's provided James and his family with this house. He's also supporting James' application for permanent residency. So in terms of identity, you're both Filipino but do you want to be Kiwi? When you are a migrant, you'll always feel like you're a second-class citizen. But here I was never treated that way, so from that very moment, I decided to get my wife and kids just to settle here. So what is your dream? The ultimate dream was to be a citizen. We love it here and the kids love it, and it's all about the family. The dairy industry is now dependent on some 2000 Filipino workers like James to keep the milk flowing ` 21 billion litres of it a year. But might our dairy farmers end up victims of their own success? 4 Now, I've enjoyed eating meat all my life, and as a dedicated carnivore, I feel there's something I really should watch. Yeah. So what's the plan? How does this work? Well, we just go over to the yard there where the animal is, which Gavin's had locked up in there, and then I will dispose of it type thing, and then I'll back me truck in and deal to the rest of it. It's just a Jersey-Angus cross out of our herd. Just rear it up until it's big enough, and, uh, yeah, and on to the barbecue. (BANG!) That was a good shot. Yeah. Done. Dinner. (LIQUID SLOSHES) And that's it. They're all different to shoot. Like some of them see me and they're off, you know. Don't blame them. If someone was going to shoot me, I'd be gone too. And what about you, Isabella? No problem with any of this? No. Do you like it or do you, sort of, just feel OK about it? You like it, don't ya? Yeah, I like it. Well, it's what we try and call 'relaxed slaughter', you know. The animal's in its own environment. If you take them somewhere else and truck them off, they get weary and upset, and, you know, it's not normal for them. Better than the stuff you get in the supermarket, anyway. I bet it is, but, as I say, it is a very real kind of visceral experience to see this happen first-hand. People don't realise where their meat comes from, you know, and they go on about us murdering animals and all this sort of carry-on, but, at the end of the day, they all eat steak and drive a car, and then they bitch and moan about everything else, you know. Nick's world famous for his skill with the knife. His You Tube videos have more than a million hits. When I was a little kid, I couldn't wait for the home-kill guy to turn up. No way I was going to school on that day. I think all kids should see it. So how many of these would you do a day? Today there's about eight to do. I've already done about two or three this morning. So that's how many a year? About 1500, I suppose. I've been doing it for probably, oh God, probably about 27 years now, and I still like doing it now as what I did when I first started doing it. I think if they saw how they're killed from here, on to a truck to the meatworks, they would definitely say, 'Yeah, I would rather have my meat killed on the farm.' I'm not knocking the freezing works. That's just bulk. You know, that's just how it is. You can't kill millions and millions of animals on the farm, you know. These guys are heading home to have their calves, basically. We're going to put them in a paddock nice and close, and watch them closely and... Well, you know, this model of yours, this low-intensity model, is that really applicable to the industry as a whole? I mean, you know, it's a drop in the ocean. Is the other model working for New Zealand and is it sustainable? And at what cost? Not just to our waterways and our soil, but the impact that it's going to have on New Zealand's image. Yeah. So what I'd really love to see is the consumers asking for this. Asking is this milk that I'm drinking from a sustainable model. How much nitrogen was used to grow the grass? Yeah. Those are really important questions, I think, that people need to start asking. Bon appetit. So this is the animal that I watched being killed? That's the one. Yep. Good stuff, eh? Mmm. It's good being a second-hand vegetarian. Cows eat grass and we eat cows. Flinty, do you reckon we've reached peak cow? I mean, can we afford to keep on having bigger farms, more cows or does something have to give? Yeah. I think at the moment we're pushing the boundaries to the limit. People need to eat. Our economy depends on it. Still got to find little ways to keep growing. But we've just got to be a bit more clever about how we do it. So, what is the true price of milk and is it a price we're willing to pay? Head to our Facebook page to have your say. Now, we're off air next Sunday, Easter weekend, so we'll see you the week after. Thanks for joining us tonight. Have a safe and happy Easter. Nga mihi nui, hei kona. Captions by Anne Langford. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017