Climate Change: Famers finally paying the price

It's official: 2021 was Aotearoa's hottest year on record. And the climate chaos is now affecting milk production:

Challenging pasture growing conditions have prompted Fonterra to revise its forecast milk collections to 1.5 billion kilograms of milk solids for the year to May 31, a reduction of 25 million kilograms on its opening forecast.

Fonterra chief executive Miles Hurrell said varied weather and challenging growing conditions across many parts of the country earlier in the season resulted in actual milk collections down on the same time last year.

“We were expecting conditions to improve over the Christmas-New Year period, but this has not eventuated,” Hurrell said.

Basicly, its been too hot and too dry. Which is I guess one way of fixing it: you can't grow cows without water, so in the long term dairy emissions should reduce. But farmers seem to be incredibly thick about recognising they are destroying their own livelihoods, and in any case, thanks to past pollution, we no longer have a long term. We need to cut dairy emissions now, through water restrictions, consent restrictions, and directly capping and cutting the number of cows to a manageable level. Waiting for farmers to pollute themselves out of existence simply means letting them take us with them.