A Radio New Zealand article that doesn’t mince words:

“Forest and Bird agriculture spokesperson Annabeth Cohen said dairy was destroying the land.

"Basically if we continue to allow the fertiliser and irrigation industries to destroy rivers, soil and climate, it's going to be a dead-end road for New Zealand."

“The report said population growth in New Zealand and overseas would pile on market pressure to provide food and dairy to the globe.

“Cohen said the country submitted to these pressures at its own peril.

“She said it was not New Zealand's job "to feed the world milk powder".

This is what caused this outburst:

“A new report paints a stark picture of the environment under relentless pressure.

“The Environment Ministry and Stats NZ today released Our Land 2021 - a look at land use and the state of the environment in recent decades.”

“It describes the loss of productive food growing land to urban sprawl, an eroded environment under pressure from more cows and increased intensification.”

Not only is intensive agriculture basically poisoning whole swathes of NZ’s ecosystems, but urban sprawl is taking over good agricultural land around cities.

Perfect.

New Zealand’s population is increasing at a rate of 1-2% per year, essentially due to immigration; it would be pretty flat excluding that.

If the bipartisan agreement that “growth” is an necessary thing can be gradually put to rest, I fail to understand why balancing immigration with natural births in order to have no net population change is considered unattainable.

Once you have this, the house-building urban sprawl madness can cease once and for all.

It is really that hard?

And if so: why is it so hard to imagine?

“Federated Farmers said it was worth acknowledging given the big jump in food production and value from a declining area in farmland.

"While the report indicates New Zealand's soil profile overall is not improving, we're at least holding even while farm good management practice begin to bear fruit for our land, out our waterways and emissions," Federated Farmers environment spokesperson Chris Allen says.

“Between 2012 and 2017, cattle (dairy/beef) numbers flat-lined at 10.1 million, and sheep numbers further declined from 31 million to 27 million. Fertiliser inputs, including nitrogen, have also been plateauing over the last few years, he said.”

I dare you to find a better definition of greenwashed polished twaddle than those juicy sentences.

[Cover photo: Land on Pukekohe Hill (near Auckland, the biggest city) used for early potatoes now being readied for (housing) development.]