The Price of Showing Up

Lately, headlines seem stuck on the cost of butter. It's being spread a bit thick, if you can pardon the pun. I get the concern, no one wants to take out a second mortgage for their bread-and-butter pudding. But somewhere we've missed the real conversation.

We're an export nation living in a global paddock. When commodity prices are high, we all benefit, from taxes, to jobs, to community investment. But we're also a small team of five million in a world of eight billion. That's one Kiwi for every 1,600 people out there. So, hell yes, let's make money while the sun shines... but we also need to look after each other, and that part's getting lost.

Consider feed, for example. Dairy crunched the numbers and found that palm kernel extract (PKE) made economic sense. It was cheap, available, and helped keep the bottom line in check. But while we were importing feed from across the ocean, our own grain growers were hanging on by a thread.

Remember seasonal work, where somehow minimum wage became a thing. When hard working Kiwis walked away it created a desperate need for overseas labour. Back when seasonal workers earned bloody good money and then went shearing, fencing, or similar they came back year after year because the money was worthwhile. Imagine the appeal of living in a pre-fab or van for a few months and earning minimum wage.

Are we now in a time where short-term economic efficiency drives long-term social disconnection?

This isn't a guilt trip. I'm being the devil while wearing an Aertex shirt. How we purchase is a signal. We can either weave our social fabric tighter or pull it further apart. Imagine an ethos where produce down the road took priority over shipments from overseas. Where local-first procurement was about dignity and mutual survival, not charity. Where manufacturers invested in regional economies, because they knew neighbours and communities would support the product they produced.

Moral muscle. It builds communities that can weather more than just the perfect storm. It's easy to flatten economics into statistics: yield, profit, cost of labour. But in the local hall, around kitchen tables, at the grain growers gate, who can afford to stay in the game? Who gets priced out? Who shows up, and who falls silent? It's relationships that help numbers.

This is rural engagement, too. It's why some voices speak up and others don't. Why some communities open their gates and others shut them. When we treat the economics as something we share, social responsibility shifts. When we treat the engagement as anything other than a workstream or a project to knock off, our engagement shifts. When we stop designing for outcomes and start designing for community everything changes.

I think the primary sector can be a model for productivity, for social responsibility and for principled interdependence. So do price debates serve up solutions?

When economic choices become acts of community care, when rural engagement stops being something we do to people and becomes something we do with them...

That's when a product is worth spreading.