Deer Aunty Thistledown

Don’t you get sick of all the busybodies and politicians casually discussing the demise of the meat industry? New Zealand’s livestock numbers are trending downward, the national ewe flock is being decimated, and still they clutch their pearls and ask “when will something be done about the farmers”?

I’m sick of them discussing the guardians of the land like we aren’t in the room. I’ve had a gutsful of them proposing a 20% reduction in livestock numbers like it’s an aspirational goal. I say it seems like we have too much bureaucracy per hectare in this country! I say we make them justify stocking rate!
Yours sincerely,
How About That!

Dear HAT,

That seems more like a rally cry than a question, but watch me jump in anyway.

Yes, the livestock numbers have reduced across the red meat industry. I would love to put this in stocking rates, but it is difficult to work out which land is housing what. So, let me take a leaf out of the mainstream media’s book and do this on a per person basis. Ten years ago, here in the land of the long white sheep, there were 7.3 sheep per person, 0.9 beef cattle per person and 2.6 deer per person. Now each person shares NZ with 5.2 sheep, 0.8 beef and 0.2 deer. Or, reverting to more useful numbers for a quick second, the total livestock numbers have dropped 5.5 million head (-15%) across those three classes and the human population has gone up 726,000 head (+17%). Team “red meat” is making do with less.

How about the bureaucracy? We will look at this on a full-time equivalent (FTE) per person basis. Actually we look at it per 1000 people which is roughly how many souls a politician eats annually. Let’s think of a whimsical unit like “hecta-people” (Hp) instead of saying FTE/1000 people all the time.

The stocking rate of politicians (0.02/Hp) themselves is trending downward, because the number of parliamentary seats has stayed about 120 for the past 26 years despite a growing NZ population. Politicians are running at half the stocking rate of 100 years ago (0.4/Hp) when there were 80 seats in parliament for a population of 1 million people.

On the other hand, the number of public servants (loosely defined as the people doing the government’s bidding), has gone up, up, up. In 2021, there were just over 61,000 public servants compared with just under 44,000 in 2011. The stocking rate is up from 10/Hp to 12/Hp. Sounds intensive to me, I hope the government is wintering them responsibly.

Of course, there are certain public servant types we could stand to see more of such as, say, teachers and police. But, the stocking rate of teachers is on its way down. From 11.7/Hp to 11.5/Hp. Police numbers are variable year-to-year, but sticking pretty close to the 2.1/Hp. It seems the public servants who serve have to keep it efficient.

Also, hats off to the Ministry of Environment staff who were able to drive everyone’s blood pressure up with only 300 full time staff (0.07/Hp) – although it has now ballooned to over 600 FTEs (0.13/Hp). Hope they updated their resource consent accordingly.

And last but not least, the MPI staff. It’s a reproductive rate to be proud of over that side of the fence. There were 1,721 staff in 2011 and the most recent figures have them at 3,450 in 2021. That’s a 74% increase in their stocking rate- from 0.4 to 0.7/hp. Perhaps they are filling the void left by the M.bovis cattle.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so let me drop this graph here and call the job done.

Love, Aunty Thistledown.