This email from Ag ITO
Dear Robin
Building on the success of previous climate change workshops, Agriculture ITO is running further workshops on behalf of MAF and DairyNZ for all agriculture, horticulture and forestry tutors and teachers to discuss the impacts on land management from:
– changing climate
– changing marketplace
– changing legislation.
These workshops will not just introduce you to the key issues that your students/trainees must deal with on the land; they will focus specifically on how to teach your students/ trainees to manage this changing environment successfully in order to become resilient to these new pressures.
Geoff Mavromatis (the Agribusiness Group) and Sandy Scarrow (Fruition Horticulture) will be facilitating the sessions. They are free to attend and will take place from 1pm until 5pm on the following dates:
Hamilton – Thursday 11 November (tbc)
Masterton – Friday 12 November
Gore – Monday 15 November
Christchurch –Tuesday 16 November.
Venues will be confirmed once numbers have been established, so please contact Ruth McLennan on 04 381 0865 or email ruthm@agricultureito.ac.nz in order to book by Friday 5 November.
You are welcome to pass this email on to others who you believe will be interested and will benefit. Farmers and other land managers are welcome.
From Robin
The last one I went to was a real fiasco with Dairy NZ’s Dr Clyton Moyo unable to explain his contradictory statements that steady state emissions of enteric methane do not increase the concentration of methane in the atmosphere and the statement that steady state emissions of enteric methane cause global warming because methane has a greater warming effect than the CO2. He was at a total loss when pressed to explain how something can cause global warming when it does not cause an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gas.
It was also a little heated with Dairy NZ accused of doing nothing to help farmers seek the truth about the real effects of livestock emissions.
This is quite true, but these workshops will be a little different as it is not Dairy NZ sucking on the Climate Change tit this time but The Agribusiness Group and Fruition. Good on them I say.
You will learn something by going along and you might be able to put a few spanners in the works by asking them a reasonably simple question such as the one I asked Dr Moyo. The information they will present is MAF’s propaganda, it will not stand scrutiny and I imagine they will have difficulty if asked to defend a position that does not stack up in the real world and the real atmosphere.
It will be interesting to see what they say about farming and changing climate when there has not been any increase in temperatures measured in NZ over the last 100 years. There is also no evidence that adverse weather conditions will increase. There has been plenty of speculation about droughts and floods and even more earthquakes for goodness sake. But it is no more than speculation. Should we change our farming systems for something that some say is going to happen but there is no evidence that it will ?
If anyone is going and wants some info beforehand about enteric methane let me know what you want to know. If any one goes along let us know what you learnt and how it went.