Environment – Rural torment

New Zealand is one of the most urbanised countries in the world. This means there are many hundreds of thousands of people who have never lived on a farm or grown up with farm animals. They have missed the foundational pleasures of roaming over wide open spaces, the peace and quiet, and the rawness of rural nature. What a lot these people are missing! No wonder there’s talk of a rural-urban divide.

But rural areas can sometimes be fraught. People shift to the country thinking it will all be peaceful and bucolic – a pastoral idyll. If all you ever do is drive through the countryside you can be forgiven for thinking that it’s all rolling hills with pretty cows and horses. TV and movies convince us that farm life is all like Woolly Valley, or the movie Babe. Travellers through Rodney may well perceive that the rural environment is a static backdrop to city life. Our picture-perfect regional parks certainly reinforce that impression. Visitor destination marketing encourages this view – we’re ‘Auckland’s playground’, and ‘fruit bowl’. Surveys show that people are moved most by the combination of cultured landscapes – green hills and paddocks, contrasted with ‘wild’ areas of bush, and that these form outstanding natural landscapes that deserve to be protected.

In reality, rural areas are noisy. There are bellowing cows, loud tractors, and in my area a farmer who uses every swear word under the sun on his dog and his wife, to little effect; his colloquialisms reverberate for literally miles around the valley. The countryside is smelly – cow poo and silage – smells I quite like, but not to everyone’s taste. And the countryside is full of death. Cows are killed outside my bedroom for the meat they’ve been raised for – their guts spilling out in the butchering process onto the green, grassy pasture. Sheep fall into holes and drown. Legions of invading rats and mice need to be killed. And because there’s a perception we live in the middle of nowhere, there’s often the dumping of carcasses on the roadside including the remains of the biggest fish I’ve ever seen, a tuna or similar, that was filleted with the head and fins discarded. It reeked for months and set all the neighbours wondering if it was lost stock instead of a dead fish.

In reality, farmers work hard to maintain the ‘landscapes’ that urban visitors enjoy. But weeds are a problem, rubbish and stormwater coming off roads causes issues. Development pressures spilling over from Auckland increase land values and rates and no one except the landowner wants subdivision or fragmentation of rural land. Many urban dwellers wouldn’t realise their meat meals require animals to be farmed and killed and would reject these practices if they were disclosed. Rural areas have a traditional mystique, but to be sustained face future challenges.

Christine Rose
christine.rose25@gmail.com