Yet as the acute heat wave recedes, there is a huge chicken in the room, we do not want to talk about: the unsustainable, parasitic relationship between industrial livestock farming and our vanishing water reserves.

The “Yellow Mellow” Solidarity

During the worst weeks of July, drinking water supplies failed in several Hungarian towns, prompting nationwide calls for citizen cooperation. The public response was genuinely inspiring. Friends, neighbors, and family chat groups shared everyday water (and energy) saving hacks: taking two-minute cold showers, saving vegetable-washing water in buckets to keep plants alive, and strictly following the “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” doctrine.

These personal efforts saved dozens, sometimes hundreds of liters of fresh water per household daily. At the same time, they made us re-evaluate our relationship to drinking water as the precious foundation of life it truly is. But as I watched people carefully measure every cup of tap water, I couldn’t shake a frustrating realization: individual domestic habits are a tiny drop in a very leaky bucket compared to the massive footprint hiding behind our plates.

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The Staggering Math Behind Our Food

While we meticulously saved liters at the sink, the industrial livestock system was guzzling water on a scale that defies common sense. Let’s take a look at the rough water footprint of some foods:

• 1 kg of beef: 15,415 liters of water

• 1 kg of pulses: 4,055 liters

• 1kg of cereals: 1,633 liters

• 1 kg of fruits: 962 liters

• 1 kg of veggies: 322 liters

Beyond the sheer volume of water it extracts, industrial animal farming actively pollutes the precious groundwater we have left with excess nitrates, severely degrading aquatic ecosystems and threatening our health.

Of course, choosing a can of kidney beans over steak at a supermarket won’t magically refill the Danube overnight. It won’t help us during a crisis situation. But we need to talk about the chicken in the room: if we indeed take fresh water as a precious resource, then we need to rethink our food system. This is what I call the Goulash paradox: to make a good Hungarian stew of course you’d need a few liters of water to cook. But its real water footprint comes from the beef in it. Let’s see how this mathematical equation works!

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Thermodynamic Double-Work

The core reason livestock requires such staggering amounts of water comes down to a fundamental mechanical inefficiency: thermodynamic double-work. Producing animal protein requires growing immense amounts of feed crops first: consuming vast amounts of water, land, and energy, only to feed them to livestock. Cattle, for instance, require 6 to 10 kg of feed for every single kilogram of weight gain, while 80% to 96% of that feed protein is completely lost through metabolism rather than converted into edible meat. Mechanically speaking, factory farming is an astonishingly inefficient conversion of calories and nutrients.

Privatized Profits, Socialized Drought

Direct personal water use averages a few tens of thousands of liters annually per person, but our total footprint, driven largely by diet, is in the range of million liters. Meanwhile, Big Ag conglomerates continue to consume billions of liters every single day, privatizing massive profits while leaving socialized drought and polluted ecosystems for the rest of us.

If the summer of 2026 taught us anything, it is that water security is non-negotiable. Individual sacrifice is noble, but until we confront the systemic drain of industrial livestock, we are trying to put out a wildfire with a water gun.

So if you can, ditch your traditional Goulash for a Bean goulash this week, to make a mark! And if you believe our water future belongs to people and ecosystems rather than corporate factory farms, join us in taking on Big Ag, sign our petition today.

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With ongoing conflict in the Middle East driving up gas prices and blocking global trade routes, the cost of imported fertiliser has skyrocketed. Combined with heatwaves driven by climate change, our food system is taking hit after hit, raising critical questions about food security. Unfortunately, some of the answers being proposed are pure bonkers - and nowhere is that more obvious right now than here in Aotearoa New Zealand.

As the world’s largest dairy exporter, our intensive dairy industry relies heavily on synthetic fertiliser to grow enough pasture to feed millions of cows. Unsurprisingly, the sector is feeling the squeeze from growing geopolitical tension. So, what is the grand plan being proposed for Aotearoa?

We already have strong evidence that shifting to nature-friendly farming - using diverse plants to naturally fix nutrients in the soil - makes farmers far more resilient to fertiliser shortages, floods, droughts, and pests. But that isn’t what’s on the cards. Instead, the plan is to build a massive, multi-million-dollar factory to dig up brown coal and manufacture more fertiliser onshore.

Think about that: strip-mining precious land for coal, to make urea, to force grass to grow, to feed millions of cows, that pollute rivers and contaminate our drinking water. And for what? To produce milk powder that gets turned into KitKats, M&Ms, and Frappuccinos, of course.

How we got here

New Zealand’s landscape wasn’t always dominated by intensive dairy farming. And what many people don’t realise is that the dairy boom was also directly tied to fossil fuels. Back in the late 1970s and 80s, oil and gas reserves were discovered off the coast of Taranaki. To make extraction profitable, fossil fuel companies required a guaranteed, long-term buyer for all that gas.

Enter the government’s “Think Big” era. Using taxpayer money, the state built the Kapuni urea plant, which turned fossil gas into fertiliser. That single piece of infrastructure transformed New Zealand agriculture, driving a massive shift away from sheep, beef, and arable farming toward intensive dairying. It triggered the cascade of river degradation, drinking water pollution, and agricultural emissions we live with today.

This industrial setup isn’t ancient history; plenty of people still remember when the land looked completely different. And if government policy created this mess, government policy can fix it.

Fast-Tracking the next disaster

Instead of learning from past mistakes, powerful industry players are doubling down on the problem. Rather than going through standard environmental consenting processes, the Australian company behind the coal-to-fertiliser project wants to use the NZ government’s Fast-Track Approvals law - legislation designed to bypass public scrutiny, effectively rubber-stamping unpopular, environmentally harmful projects.

If it goes ahead, this plant will lock Aotearoa into decades of mining, fossil fuel emissions and agrichemical pollution under the guise of national resilience.

What Big Ag doesn’t want you to realise is that there is a far better way to build resilience: breaking our chemical addiction altogether. Nature-friendly farming isn’t a pipe dream. It is working right now, it is scalable, and it delivers on every front. It generates higher farmer profits by cutting out expensive synthetic inputs, restores soil life and waterways, and protects rural health while producing real, nutrient-dense food.

It is genuinely better for everyone, so why isn’t it happening everywhere? The answer is corporate control. The multi-billion-dollar corporations selling chemical inputs and processing commodities have zero interest in a model where farmers don’t need their services.

An election crossroads

This coal-to-fertiliser proposal is bigger than just one factory - it represents a clear line in the sand about the future of farming in New Zealand. As the climate crisis worsens and global trade becomes more volatile, we certainly need to future-proof our food system, but we face two very different paths.

Option one is to double down on fossil-fuelled industrial production, sacrificing the land, rivers, and our health to export low-value ingredients for ultra-processed foods. Option two is to break our chemical dependence, leveraging nature’s diversity to nourish the soil, withstand climate shocks, and support rural livelihoods.

We are standing at a historic crossroads, yet no major political party seems even remotely aware of it. Where a politician stands on this coal-to-fertiliser plant tells you everything about their vision for New Zealand’s food and farming.

The current coalition government has made its stance clear by championing deregulation, incentivising fossil fuel extraction, and fast-tracking industrial mega-projects. But where does the opposition stand?

Will Labour double down on industrial dairy, or will they back a genuine transition toward sustainable farming? What do you think? I’m curious to hear your reckons on this one.

We have seen progressive leadership work abroad. Through smart public purchasing, farmer support networks, and targeted state investment, countries can transition to ecological agriculture in ways that support rural communities and general health. We built our current industrial dairy system through deliberate government policy and public investment - now we can choose to build something better.

Take Action: We cannot let fossil fuel companies lock in another 30 years of agricultural pollution. Sign the Greenpeace petition to stop the coal-to-fertiliser factory here.

Have you ever looked at a fast food ad and thought: Who asked for this?

Take chicken “fries.” They are really just a chicken nugget in a new shape–perhaps to be easily marketed to parents with children. And as much as I can relate to needing to feed your child something they are definitely going to eat without a fuss, their creation makes you wonder how much of what we eat is just marketing.

We live in a world where ultra-processed food (UPF) dominates supermarket shelves, takes up prime real estate at eye level, and accounts for a huge chunk of our diets. Last week, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel where I learned a wild stat: Around half of the Australian diet comes from ultra-processed food.

But why? Are we eating this stuff because we naturally crave a chicken-shaped fry? Not really. We’re eating it because multi-billion-dollar companies spend obscene amounts of money to trick our brains into wanting it.

The brain hacks behind your snacks

Marketing isn’t just making eye-catching social media posts; it’s really a science.

A friend of mine, who has a master’s degree in psychology and works in market research, recently quit her job because her company wanted her to apply her skills to targeting people with gambling ads. When she protested, her boss chewed her out. She was heartbroken — and rightfully so. Some of the sharpest minds on the planet aren’t solving climate change or curing diseases; they’re figuring out how to make us buy things we don’t need and bypass our bodies’ natural “I’m full” signals so we’ll eat another bag of chips.

At last week’s panel event, Dr. Phil Baker from the University of Sydney asked us to consider a simple corn cob versus a bag of neon-orange corn chips:

• Corn cob: Whole food, packed with fiber, good for you. Profit margin? Small.

• Corn chips: Highly processed, stripped of nutrients, engineered to be ultra-crunchy and moreish. Profit margin? Massive.

The system isn’t designed to nourish us; it’s designed to make money from us.

Even breakfast is a trap. Modern breakfast cereal was originally invented by 19th-century religious health reformers who believed a bland diet would curb physical passions (aka libido) and dull the palate. Fast forward to today: those recipes were bought out or commercialised by corporate giants, pumped full of sugar, and sold back to us through aggressive campaigns, often aimed directly at children. Alarmingly, the raw food ingredients make up only a fraction of what you pay for a box of cereal — the rest covers the multi-million-dollar marketing budgets, colorful packaging, and retail markups needed to convince you to choose it over a bowl of porridge or a piece of toast.

What chicken fry culture is costing the planet

To make cheap, mass-produced meat and processed snacks, factory farming is expanding across the globe. Millions of chickens, pigs, and cows crammed into small spaces require millions of tons of feed.

A huge portion of that feed is soy — and to grow it, massive companies are clearing precious ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest. Protective measures like the Amazon Soy Moratorium are crumbling under the pressure of Big Ag’s expansion. Rainforests are being bulldozed to grow feed, to feed chickens, to turn into chicken fries. In Australia, Big Ag is clearing native bushland for cattle ranching, which has prompted a “koala burger” campaign against fast-food restaurants.

At this point, you might think I’m pointing the finger at your eating habits as the cause of all our planet’s pain, but I’m absolutely not. Not by a long shot.

In today’s world, simply resisting temptation is a massive achievement. Public spaces are flooded with ads — at bus stops, on billboards, on social media and during sports games. You can’t even stand in line for a desk lamp at a homeware store without being routed through an aisle of chocolate bars and chips. You are literally surrounded.

How could I blame you, or any individual just trying to live your life in today’s world?

What if they used their power for good?

Someone I met recently posed a great question: What if these massive companies used their insane marketing power and psychological research to encourage plant-based eating instead?

Sure, some people will want a steak from time to time. But does a nugget actually need to be made of chicken? Does anyone care what kind of protein is hidden under all that crispy batter and BBQ sauce? If big brands put their research and budgets into plant-based alternatives, we could save massive amounts of land, lower emissions, and protect forests.

That would move us in the right direction. But in a truly hopeful future, we aren’t just swapping meat for plants in our easy to grab, processed food. We can and should go much further - to make real, fresh food accessible to everyone.

The green shoots of a better way to farm

Nature-friendly farming — growing real food in ways that restore the land rather than mining it for commodities — is emerging around the world. It offers a system that is better for people, farmers, animals, and the environment. (If you watched the recent Groundswell documentary, you’ve seen how powerful this shift can be.)

At the panel event, someone asked: “This is so logical, so why isn’t it happening everywhere?”

The answer comes down to corporate power. As Anna Lappé of the Global Alliance For the Future of Food explained brilliantly in her keynote speech, a tiny group of giant corporations controls the seeds, fertilisers, machinery and feed on one side, and the processing infrastructure on the other. Farmers are squeezed right in the middle.

This system is breaking our food producers. At the same event, my fellow panellist and Queensland farmer, Sally Higgins, shared that farm margins are now so razor-thin it barely makes financial sense to farm anymore.

The current system isn’t working for farmers, it’s hollowing out rural communities, and it’s destroying nature — all to feed us ultra-processed junk that’s harming our health. It’s undeniable: our food system needs a real shake-up.

Here’s the proof that it’s possible.

If you think changing the system is impossible, look at Denmark.

The city of Copenhagen decided to overhaul its public food system, setting a goal for all public kitchens — in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and nurseries — to serve 90% organic and sustainable food.

How did they do it without blowing the city budget?

• They cut out food waste.

• They shifted toward seasonal, plant-based meals.

• They bought directly from local, ecological farmers.

The result? Kids in schools and patients in hospitals now get local, environmentally friendly food every day — and it didn’t cost taxpayers an extra krone. That’s the power of public procurement, and it proves we can fix this if we demand our governments step up.

And Copenhagen isn’t the only example we can draw from.

What you can do to help fix our broken food system

You don’t have to move to Denmark or live on organic celery to make a difference. Nor am I going to tell you to go vegan. Here is how you can push back against the ultra-processed, mega-corporate machine:

1. Support real food rules: Back government policies that ban junk food ads targeted at kids or support farmers to transition to nature-friendly practices.

2. Outsmart the marketing: Next time you see an excitingly packaged new snack food, ask yourself: Do I actually want this, or did a team of market researchers trick me into thinking I do?

3. Vote with your fork (if/when you can): Swap one or two ultra-processed meals a week for something simple like porridge, eggs on real bread, or a plant-based option. If you can’t, that’s okay too — remember, the system was designed this way, and it’s not your fault.

4. Demand better at school or work: Ask your student council, school administration, or workplace where cafeteria food comes from. Could they adopt a Copenhagen-style policy?

If we are honest with ourselves, we know we don’t need chicken fries. We need real food, grown well, made accessible and affordable to everyone. And the movement to take back power over our food has already begun. There’s a lot to feel hopeful about. But there is much more to do. Some of it is personal, but plenty of it is the system–and that’s where our focus must be.

What do you think? I’d love to hear about your own experiences and ideas in the comments.

Last weekend, I hit a personal record: my most expensive ever supermarket bill. I did a double-take when the checkout assistant handed me the receipt.

Ironically, the worst offending item was a 1kg block of cheddar cheese for my partner, coming in at an eye-watering NZ$19.90.

It’s a bitter irony because New Zealand is the largest dairy exporter in the world. Yet our local cheese is both wildly expensive and curiously bland. The block in question was of the “Tasty” variety which, by my partner’s account means “tastes of something”, compared to the other options.

You have to laugh, because otherwise you might cry. Dairy is New Zealand’s biggest polluter, pumping out more climate-heating gases than any other sector while degrading rivers and contaminating drinking water - a trend linked to increased risks of pre-term birth and bowel cancer. We’re paying extortionate prices at the checkout, but a greater cost is being billed directly to our environment and health. And for what? Bland, overpriced cheddar.

Looking at my trolley, it mostly contained basic staples: tins of beans and tomatoes, packs of dried lentils and pasta, frozen veggies and berries, jars of pickles, onions, apples, potatoes, tofu, free-range eggs, cereal, coffee, tea, and milk.

Standard stuff. Nothing unusual or extravagant. So why was the bill so high?

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The big NZ rip-off

Part of this is a New Zealand story. We produce enough food to feed 40 million people - eight times our population. Yet thousands of local families struggle to put dinner on the table. The Growing Up in New Zealand Study found that around 15% of young people experience moderate-to-severe food insecurity, with that rate increasing significantly for Māori and Pacific youth.

NZ ranks as the sixth most expensive country for groceries in the OECD. People in the UK, France, and Belgium pay roughly 30% less for their weekly shop.

Of course a good portion of the blame sits with our supermarket duopoly. The Commerce Commission estimates this broken market generates $430 million in excess annual profits for the two giant chains: Foodstuffs and Woolworths. Every few years it seems, the government commissions a review into the lack of competition. And every time, we get the same response:

• No, it isn’t competitive.

• Yes, you’re being fleeced.

• No, we aren’t going to fix it.

It’s not just the supermarkets, though. New Zealanders pay export prices for our own home-grown produce. Every few months, a social media scandal breaks over a photo of NZ dairy or fruit selling for lower prices in the UK or Australia. We all shriek “How is our own butter cheaper overseas?!” for three days until the next headline takes over.

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That’s what happens when your food economy is built for commodity export, not for feeding local people. As fellow Substacker Fenton Hazelwood explains:

“The levies, the marketing costs, the margin expectations. All calibrated for export. When the produce fails export grade and goes domestic, it carries that full cost stack with it.”

In other words, NZ families pay full export price for sloppy seconds.

The global picture

As messed up as things are in New Zealand, food is getting more expensive everywhere. The New York Times reported just this week how, across Asia, staple dishes that were once cheap are no longer as affordable.

If your grocery receipts keep ticking up, this is probably why:

For 50 years, global food policy has been obsessed with free market ideology and “just-in-time” delivery. But as a recent IPES-Food report highlights, this hyper-efficiency makes us hyper-vulnerable. Extreme price volatility, climate change, soil degradation, and fragile supply chains mean a single event can spike our grocery bills overnight.

When the Strait of Hormuz closed, for example, fuel and fertiliser prices skyrocketed, dramatically increasing food production costs. The recent heatwaves in Europe are already devastating grain yields and wiping out livestock - like the hundreds of thousands of chickens that tragically perished from extreme heat in France.

Food production relies on stable weather patterns and supplies of inputs that are getting less stable by the day. Climate change is both causing food shortages and disrupting global stability. And industrial farming is fueling climate change right back. It’s a vicious loop.

Unsurprisingly, intelligence agencies now view food access as a major national security threat. In the UK, news recently broke that the government buried security reports warning that climate change could cause severe food shortages as soon as 2030.

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So how do we get out of this mess?

We need to make our food systems resilient. True resilience isn’t just about growing more food within our borders - it’s about growing it better and managing it smarter. Here is what the IPES recommends:

1. Public Food Stockholding

Instead of leaving prices to global speculators, governments can step in with strategic food reserves. They buy when prices drop to protect farmers, and release stock when prices spike to protect consumers.

2. Smarter Supply Management

Countries like Canada and Norway use production quotas and price floors to protect family farms from volatile global trade. We need regional supply chains that prioritise local food access over corporate export margins.

3. Ecological Farming

Real self-reliance means moving away from expensive and volatile imported fertilisers to compensate for depleted soils. It means diversifying crops and supporting farming methods that restore the health of the land rather than mine it.

To that list, I’d add a shift away from industrial livestock farming. It’s not just that meat and dairy production is the biggest source of superheating methane emissions. It’s also just a really inefficient way of turning land into human nutrition. (Oxford Professor Paul Behrens makes a great case for this in a recent podcast.) Scientists have repeatedly pointed out that high- and middle-income nations already consume far more meat and dairy than is healthy or sustainable, anyway.

I’ve gone into depth before about innovative policies that are feeding people and supporting local, ecological farmers right now - we need more governments to follow their lead.

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Because, if we keep relying on fragile global shipping routes, chemical fertilisers, and corporate monopolies to feed us, massive grocery bills won’t be an anomaly. They’re going to be the baseline. The New Scientist said as much on their recent podcast: We often hear people say that this is going to be the coolest summer for the rest of your life. But it’s also true that this is probably the cheapest your food is ever going to be.

So what can each of us do?

The media loves a story about some plucky person who cut their weekly food bill in half. But look closely, and the “hack” usually involves driving for hours to an orchard to fill a whole pickup truck with bruised apples before spending days canning them, or making price-comparison hunting across three supermarket apps a full-time job.

Meanwhile, Big Ag is run by literal billionaires whose pockets just keep getting fuller.

Personal choices are a privilege - and for many people facing soaring costs, choosing where or how to buy food isn’t a choice at all. Some of us might have the means to support local organic growers or the good fortune to own a decent-size garden. And we should all do what we can with the means we have available.

But individual choices alone cannot fix a rigged system. Right now, both farmers and everyday families are squeezed by a handful of mega-corporations - from agrichemical giants to processors and supermarkets - that control what ends up on our shelves and what it costs.

If we want affordable, resilient food for everyone, the burden shouldn’t be on struggling households to “shop smarter.” We need regulatory change - and that only happens when we take collective action to challenge the corporations profiting off a broken system at our expense.

The Weekly Yield is going on a two-week hiatus. See y’all in mid-August for more food system deep dives!

It is a bizarre experience to be an environmental campaigner based in Hungary right now and find myself... nodding along with the government. For the past twenty years, watching Hungarian politics has felt like a slow-motion car crash. But since the new government took power in April 2026, the political landscape has changed dramatically.

Don’t get me wrong.

I am under no illusions that we would have a green flagship government, far from it. While, for example, we finally have an independent Ministry of Environment again, this same government just voted to weaken regulations on genetically modified foods in the EU.

It’s a rollercoaster.

And when it comes to the new government’s relationship with Big Ag, it gets even more interesting for me.

A poultry billionaire gets a reality check

The new prime minister, Péter Magyar, exchanged some punches with Master Good, Hungary’s oldest “poultry dynasty”. A massive, €500-million Big Ag empire that processes over half of Hungary’s chicken and historically enjoyed a cozy relationship with the previous regime.

When the new government proposed stricter regulations on foreign guest workers, Master Good’s billionaire CEO immediately threw a tantrum. He publicly threatened to halt a major factory expansion if he couldn’t keep importing cheap labor to fill his slaughterhouses.

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Historically, the government would have bowed. This time? The Prime Minister clapped back with a message that sounded shockingly sympathetic: people over profit.

He essentially told the CEO that if Master Good took a fraction of its staggering €70 million profit and actually paid its workers a living wage, they wouldn’t have a labor shortage. He pointed out the massive state subsidies the company pocketed over the years, noting that if they spent money on human beings instead of absolute profit maximization, locals wouldn’t be fleeing abroad to work.

The poultry dynasty head said it’s more complicated, that it’s not just about the wages, local workers are not tempted to start a career at certain roles in their factories, with shifts admittedly starting at 2:00AM, under 10 Celsius working environments.

Here the government is exposing the Achilles’ heel of Big Ag: its entire business model relies on the systematic exploitation of cheap, disposable labor. As investigative reporting by groups like Sentient Media has shown globally, industrial slaughterhouses are inherently exploitative environments; the fact that a conservative leader is framing this as a local labor rights issue against a corporate monopoly is a pattern worth watching.

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The “healthy erections” counter-offensive

But before I could think we’d got a progressive government standing up to Big Ag, something really unexpected happened. Government officials have started to promote pig products as the healthy food we should put on our table, with some exotic side effects.

Following an African Swine Fever outbreak in Hungary in the past year, the Ministry of Agriculture didn’t question the ecological nightmare of packing thousands of animals into disease-ridden factory farms. Instead, they launched a taxpayer-funded PR campaign begging Hungarians to eat their way out of the crisis.

At a public forum, the State Secretary for Agriculture launched a bizarre promo, urging citizens to choke down an extra 5 to 6 portions of pork this summer. His scientific reasoning? Pork is rich in natural zinc, which supposedly keeps our reproductive hormones “at the top,” leading to “healthy erections and popping ovaries.”

You truly cannot make this up. Our government is marketing pork chops as a national libido enhancer.

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Five times bigger tax on veggies than meat

What makes this political moment so fascinating is the sheer contradiction. On one hand, the government is making genuine strides toward a better food system: they’ve promised to lower the VAT on healthy foods down to 5%, starting with fruits and vegetables. This is huge in a country with a record 27% VAT, where small-scale organic veggie farmers currently pay five times more sales tax than industrial livestock products.

Yet, on the other hand, they are handing out free mini-burgers at festivals to keep the failing pork industry afloat.

The takeaway? It is still far too early to tell where this rollercoaster is heading. We are seeing a chaotic mix of promising signals and deeply frustrating rhetoric. But if one thing is certain, it’s that the stagnant water of Hungarian agricultural politics has finally been stirred up. The old, untouchable alliances between the state and corporate livestock monopolies are fracturing.

We need to keep our eyes open and watch how this plays out. For the first time in two decades, there seems to be room for change, for the better or worse. Now is the time to push for a better food system that actually respects the environment, produces healthier food, and refuses to systematically exploit both human beings and animals.

A landmark study from New Zealand has just dropped, and the findings are deeply unsettling. Researchers mapped over 750,000 births against local water supplies. This isn’t a one-off; it’s the third massive global study of its kind, matching investigations of millions of births in California and Denmark.

The verdict across all three studies was that drinking water contaminated with nitrate is linked to increased risk of pre-term birth. This is happening at levels far below the current safety standards.

Why are we still relying on 70-year-old science?

The current global limit for nitrate in our water was set all the way back in 1958, by the World Health Organization (WHO). Obviously, a lot has changed since the 1950s - but the global nitrate guideline hasn’t. Yet.

The problem is that this outdated standard was only designed to protect babies from “blue baby syndrome” - a sudden, terrifying condition where an infant’s blood can’t carry enough oxygen round its body.

But it doesn’t take account of a growing body of recent science. Today, researchers are finding that chronic, long-term exposure to nitrate is linked to a raft of health risks, including higher risk of bowel cancer and pre-term birth.

This matters because pre-term birth is the leading cause of death in children under five globally. In New Zealand, the researchers estimate that nitrate in drinking water could be associated with 120 premature births every single year. That is 4% of all pre-term births in the country - 120 families plunged into fear and intensive care units, because of what was in their tap water.

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The industrial livestock farming connection

If you look at the three places where these massive studies were done - California, Denmark, and New Zealand - they all share one glaring thing in common: intensive, industrial-scale farming.

New Zealand is the world’s largest dairy exporter, with millions of cows packed onto its heavily-fertilised pastures. Denmark is a factory-farming hub for pork, with more pigs per person than any other country. California is home to industrialised mega-dairies and massive beef feedlots, as well as using heaps of synthetic fertilisers for crop production.

This style of heavy agriculture acts like a giant, toxic funnel. Massive amounts of animal waste and chemical fertilisers soak into the soil, and seep directly into our underground water sources.

You can’t just boil nitrate away or use standard filters to remove it. Getting nitrate out of water once it’s in there is both difficult and expensive. We have to stop the pollution at the source.

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Healing the land to heal ourselves

Our health is not separate from the earth’s health. When we cram millions of animals onto the land to make cheap milk powder for chocolate bars, the ecosystem breaks. The current model is pushing past planetary boundaries - destroying the very topsoil, clean water, and stable climate we need to survive.

Instead of trying to bully nature into submission, we need to farm with it. Transitioning to local, diverse, and ecological farming isn’t a hippie dream; it’s a survival strategy. Leading scientific reports, like the EAT-Lancet study, prove that eating less meat and dairy in high- and middle-income countries would be dramatically better for our bodies anyway.

Instead of trying to put a band-aid on a gaping wound, we need to face the root cause. We need to:

• Stop industrial livestock expansion.

• Shrink the massive herds of cows, pigs and chickens.

• Phase out the heavy use of chemical fertilisers.

And who is benefiting from the current system? The world’s largest meat and dairy companies are run by literal billionaires who live in moated castles. They are extracting life from the soil, from animals, from water and even our own bodies in order to line their pockets.

It’s time to choose our children’s health over billionaire profits.

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The fight for our future

If you feel overwhelmed by all of this, you are not alone. I’ve been feeling incredibly heavy-hearted. It is exhausting to watch the evidence of our self-destruction pile up, all while the leaders meant to guide our way out of this mess are knowingly moving things in the exact opposite direction.

In New Zealand, powerful dairy lobbyists have literally handed draft laws to the government - laws designed to roll back environmental protections and override democracy - and watched politicians copy-paste them into law. We are seeing the same corporate greed in Europe, where the industrial meat lobby is demanding ever more deregulation.

It is easy to look at that corruption and want to give up. But a friend of mine shared some wisdom yesterday that helped snap me out of my despair.

She reminded me that for decades, many of us have lived with a level of peace and stability that is virtually unparalleled in human history. Maybe it made us comfortable. But now that we are being forced to confront this new, harsher reality, something incredible is starting to happen.

We are seeing the beginnings of a massive, collective pushback - a wave of resistance that mirrors the great civil rights and anti-war movements of the past. People are refusing to be quiet, refusing to be complicit, and refusing to let corporations dictate the future of our planet.

And the best part - people power is actually winning.

• In Denmark, public outrage over filthy water has forced the government to start lowering legal nitrate limits.

• In Croatia, local communities are successfully blocking a massive, 100-million-chicken factory farm.

• In Spain and New Zealand, people are taking local governments to court and confronting agribusiness giants directly.

And there is no fight more visceral than the fight to save our children. When we protect our water, we protect our babies. It’s time to choose the health of the many over the profits of the few.

I’m turning 40 next month and, in anticipation, my body seems to be falling apart.

For the last few weeks, a stubborn cough has taken up permanent residence in my lungs. My neck and shoulders have decided they no longer want to move. The physiotherapist says it’s an inflamed nerve. I feel increasingly betrayed by this aging earthly vessel of mine.

In Western culture, we have a deep distaste for anything old. We’re told to buy creams and injections to smooth out wrinkles; “aging gracefully” has just become a polite way of saying “don’t look old.” In our society, middle-aged women become invisible. As injury and time add up, I’ve found myself worrying about becoming irrelevant.

But the irony is that when I was young, I was more insecure. My self-confidence has grown with wisdom. And wisdom only comes with time and experience. You can’t buy it and you can’t fake it.

Yet, our modern world values youth, the new, and the “forward” above all else. We seem completely allergic to looking backward.

To a corporate lobbyist or online troll, the worst insult you can hurl at an environmentalist is that we “just want to go back and live in caves.” The implication is that the past was terrible, and that human happiness only exists in an endless, blind march of industrial progress.

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This Friday, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we are celebrating Matariki - the Māori New Year. Marked by the rising of the Pleiades star cluster, Matariki is a time for reflection. It is anchored in a beautiful concept: Hoki whakamuri, kia anga whakamua, looking backward to honour the past as we prepare for the future.

We need that reflection right now. Today, our global food system is groaning under an extractive model. We are rapidly hitting what engineers call the ‘yield point’ - the moment a structure can no longer support a heavy load and begins to deform. To satisfy multinational corporate profiteering, agriculture is being pushed past the physical limits of the planet. We are rapidly depleting the fragile topsoil, fresh water, and predictable seasons that are essential for feeding our children.

Matariki offers us a different perspective. Within the star cluster, Tupuānuku, watches over food harvested from the earth, and Tupuārangi connects to food from the trees and sky.

Within Te Ao Māori (the Māori world), elders are treasured for their wisdom, not carted off to care homes the moment they slow down. And when you look at the planet through this cultural lens, the land, rivers, and sea are not “resources” to be extracted until they break - they are ancestors to be honoured and cared for.

When you start treating nature as an ancestor, your entire view of the world changes.

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I feel immensely grateful to be living in Aotearoa New Zealand at this time of severe global instability - being able to witness an alternative way of relating to each other and the world firsthand.

When the increasingly frequent climate disasters hit New Zealand, it is the marae (Māori community spaces) that immediately mobilise to shelter the homeless and restore power. When the ever worsening cost-of-living leaves families starving, it is the marae feeding them, while the government continues to cut essential services.

We see this same powerful worldview shifting agriculture. In the South Island of Aotearoa, industrial dairy farming has expanded at an alarming speed, polluting rivers and drinking water while regional government and corporate lobbyists in Wellington do their best to pretend there isn’t a problem. But the local iwi (tribe), Ngāi Tahu, has been fighting in court to reclaim their rangatiratanga (self-determination) over their awa (rivers).

It’s not uncomplicated, though. When decades of Māori protest and legal victories finally forced the Crown to settle historical claims of land theft and treaty breaches, the Crown made a Western corporate structure a mandatory condition for iwi to manage these funds. Today, there is a real, live tension between those corporate iwi structures and the hapū (sub-tribes) and grassroots. Ngāi Tahu are therefore major dairy farmers themselves. But reclaiming rangatiratanga over the awa doesn’t mean shutting down farming - it simply means that the way we grow food has to change. It means shifting from extraction back to long-term care.

As Māori identity, language, and self-determination grow stronger, that political strength grows too. And with it, the possibility for a completely different future expands.

A future in which rivers are looked after as ancestors is not a future that is compatible with industrial-scale agriculture.

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If we want to fix our food system, we have to stop being afraid of “going backward.” I recently read a Substack article by a New Zealand grower who made the same point, albeit from a different perspective. Either way, farming in the future means reclaiming the wisdom of the past. It means working in balance with nature, rather than using heavy chemicals to beat the soil into submission.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) is often described as a promise between two peoples to take the best possible care of each other. I feel incredibly privileged to have a place in Aotearoa as a migrant from Europe. Through the generosity of being invited into Indigenous spaces, I see a realistic, achievable alternative to today’s broken system. One that is growing more powerful through people reclaiming their culture, identity and wisdom from the past.

By looking to Te Ao Māori, I find a profound state of sanity in a world that feels increasingly insane. And it gives me hope that sanity might one day be restored.

This Matariki, as I look up at Tupuānuku and Tupuārangi, I feel myself being able to let go of some of my political hopelessness. There is an alternative to the broken status quo. It is old, it is wise, and it is waiting for us to remember it.

Whenever the World Cup is on, my high school group chat goes wild. My friends are an international bunch, spread across four continents, and for some reason, they’re obsessed with football.

Last weekend, New Zealand was playing Belgium. The group chat went off, soliciting my reckons, but I was blissfully unaware the game was even happening. Instead, I replied with a photo of a stunning waterfall surrounded by native forest— a spot I’d just walked to with my partner and daughter.

One of my friends responded instantly: “I’m sorry, are you in paradise??”

And yeah, I suppose I am.

If you live outside of New Zealand, your mental image of the country is probably built entirely on The Lord of the Rings. You think of snow-capped mountains, ancient native forests, and ice-blue rivers. It’s easy to assume this is a country fiercely dedicated to protecting its environment. For decades, New Zealand has sold itself to the world using a brilliant, two-word marketing slogan: “100% Pure.”

Tourists are fed this green myth before their planes even touch the runway. You see it in the silver ferns emblazoned on Air New Zealand jets and the native bird patterns on the cabin crew uniforms.

When you land at Auckland Airport, you are greeted by bird song on the tannoy and signs for the Tiaki Promise—a nationwide campaign asking visitors to look after New Zealand’s nature. These gorgeous airport signs feature symbols representing the Māori gods of the sky, forests, earth, and oceans.

But behind this superficial postcard image, the political reality is unrecognisable.

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The War on Nature

Since taking power in late 2023, New Zealand’s right-wing coalition government—led by former Air New Zealand CEO turned Prime Minister Christopher Luxon—has been on a rampage. Critics call it a War on Nature.

(Incidentally, this reminds me of one of my favourite jokes from the last election: “You know how just because you can play air guitar doesn’t mean you can play a guitar? Well, it’s the same thing with running Air New Zealand.”)

For over two years, the government has been systematically tearing up decades of hard-won environmental laws. They are acting at the behest of industrial polluters: mining corporations, the fossil fuel industry, and industrial agriculture.

Until recently, the public reaction has been a mix of deep heartbreak and silent ambivalence. The political myth that “the environment must be traded for the economy” runs deep. Many people still believe the idea that we have to destroy our beautiful green backyard just to pay the bills—and who can blame them when it’s the same story we hear from industry and politicians on repeat? This happens even though, time and again, the facts prove the opposite: the economic costs of climate and environmental inaction are far greater than the costs of acting.

But it seems the New Zealand government has finally taken its anti-nature rampage too far. They officially crossed a sacred line with a plan to make it easier to commercially exploit and even sell off public conservation land.

Paradise is on the auction block

The battle centers on a piece of legislation called the Conservation Amendment Bill.

Public conservation land is a shared treasure that makes Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand) unlike anywhere else on Earth. It is core to our national identity. It’s where regular people go camping, tramping (hiking), fishing, and hunting. It is the critical refuge where iconic, endangered birds like kiwi are fighting for survival.

The new Bill is rotten to the core. It alters decades-old laws to make it easier to sell off five million hectares - a staggering 60% of all public conservation land.

Worse yet, the Bill legally rewrites the actual purpose of the Department of Conservation (DOC). Instead of protecting nature, the department would be legally forced to enable commercial exploitation “to the greatest extent practicable.” Suddenly, pristine nature could be slated for open-cast mines, luxury hotels, private resorts, and monorails. Once these wild places are dug up and blasted, you can’t get them back.

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Part of a dangerous trend

This isn’t isolated. This was part of a deliberate pattern by a government that has completely abandoned normal democratic boundaries to roll back environmental protections in the name of corporate interests. Consider their track record. They’ve been:

1. Rewriting laws to override the courts:

When people have appealed to the courts to hold polluters accountable, those same polluters have literally handed draft legislation to the government to bypass the rule of law. Just this week, the Government is pushing through a law to shut down Indigenous elder Mike Smith’s groundbreaking court case against Aotearoa’s two biggest climate polluters: Fonterra and Z Energy.

2. Handing the pen to Big Ag:

The powerful lobby group, Federated Farmers, has essentially written the government’s new policies on freshwater and climate change. These policies benefit short-term private profits while completely ignoring the government’s own expert recommendations, sacrificing public health and future generations.

3. The Fast-Track Approvals Law:

This separate, terrifying law was designed to allow just a small group of ministers to bypass almost all environmental checks and public consultation to approve massive industrial projects.

4. Systematically abusing “Urgency”:

New Zealand’s Parliament only has one house (there is no Senate or House of Lords to check its power), meaning the executive branch holds all the cards. The coalition has heavily abused a political loophole called “Urgency” to ram radical laws through with barely any democratic scrutiny, skipping public consultation and cutting short the select committee process where opposition parliamentarians can review laws and suggest changes.

The political parties behind this claim to be putting “New Zealand First.” The irony is, they are perfectly happy to sell off literal pieces of New Zealand to overseas mining corporations.

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The loaded dice and the miracle of people power

Sometimes, looking at the state of the world, it feels like the dice are loaded against us. Because they are.

Corporations have become wealthier and more powerful than at any point in modern history. The historian Rutger Bregman has pointed out that wealth is actually more concentrated today than it was during the infamous “Robber Baron” era of the 19th century. When you look at the sheer amount of money, lobbying power, and political leverage stacked against the environment, real change can look like an absolute miracle.

But that miracle is exactly what is happening in New Zealand right now.

People have finally had enough of this bullshit. Following an immense wave of public fury, petitions, and threats of mass protests, the Conservation Minister stood on the stage of an environmental conference last week and announced he would back down - removing the land-sale clauses from the Bill.

This proves that the government deeply misjudged the spirit of the country.

But the fight is far from over. The Conservation Minister still has to contend with the rest of the Cabinet to make that change a reality. And even if he succeeds, the rest of the Bill is still active. The plans for open-cast mines on conservation land and private resorts in national parks haven’t gone away. This Bill cannot be fixed—it must be binned entirely.

A beautiful, united resistance is forming. People who don’t usually agree on politics are standing shoulder-to-shoulder: rugged backcountry hunters, weekend trampers, Indigenous leaders, and environmental activists.

Fifteen years ago, a previous right-wing government tried to open up New Zealand’s most highly protected conservation land to mining. The public rose up in one of the largest protest mobilisations in the country’s history and forced a total government retreat.

The people defended nature then, and they are doing it again right now. It is a powerful reminder at a time when it’s easy to fall into despair: there is real power when people unite to protect the places they love.

What do you think? Is New Zealand destroying its greatest global asset? How do we fight back when the political dice are loaded against nature?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, and please share this post to spread the word.

We look back at monumental shifts and think they were just bound to happen. Take the fight against apartheid in South Africa; for decades, it felt like an impossible mountain to climb. There’s a famous saying often attributed to Nelson Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

Or think about the early anti-slavery abolitionists who spent their entire lives fighting and died long before their dream was realised. Look at the multiple generations of women who marched, protested, and went to prison for the right to vote before the law finally changed.

When you look back, progress looks like a straight line. But when you’re standing in the middle of the fight it just feels like bedlam.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since watching Groundswell. Narrated by Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, it paints a beautiful, hopeful picture of a regenerative future for agriculture—farming with nature rather than fighting it.

The film makes this future look entirely logical. Inevitable even. Regenerative farming means better yields and healthier soils for farmers. It means a better lifestyle, lower costs, and more vibrant rural communities. It improves animal welfare, builds resilience against extreme weather, stores carbon in the ground, and brings wildlife back.

It is, quite literally, a win for everyone on the planet. (Except for a very small handful of executives and shareholders at multi-billion-dollar agribusinesses.)

The regenerative future is morally sound. It is deeply logical. But as history teaches us, that does not make it inevitable. Because, in the real world, we are up against powerful forces that benefit from keeping things the way they are, regardless of logic or morals.

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The Empire strikes back

In the exact same month that this hopeful documentary dropped, reality delivered us a cold slap in the face. A leaked copy of the European Union’s Livestock Strategy revealed that behind closed doors, politicians are actually doubling down on industrial farming at the behest of powerful lobbying interests.

This is the EU—the place that loves to brand itself as the global leader in environmental policy. If they are willing to slide backward, one legitimately wonders...what hope do the rest of us have?

The meat and dairy industry is working overtime to game the system in Europe, just like everywhere else. I’ve written before about the complex mathematical details of their climate accounting tricks, but here is the short version: the industry is trying to rewrite the rulebook so they can redefine highly polluting, destructive farming as the new, acceptable “baseline.” To top it off, they are pushing to weaken laws that protect drinking water.

When you read headlines like that, it’s incredibly easy to slide into despair. You find yourself asking, Why is the world going backward?

But if we pause and reflect, this is exactly what we should have expected.

Last month, I wrote about how governments are turning into a Corporate Bodyguard State—using their power to shield massive polluters from accountability. Yes, the industry is fighting hard and seems to be winning outrageous policy concessions against the public interest. But, in my view, this is actually a response to our success. It is the frantic, desperate last gasp of a dying industry using every ounce of its political influence to cling to the past.

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It’s time to scale up the resistance

Thankfully, while captured politicians are rewriting the rules in posh offices, people on the ground are taking their power back.

Look at Croatia. Local communities have been fighting a massive campaign against plans to build a mega poultry factory designed to produce 100 million chickens a year. And guess what? One of the major companies just pulled out of its half of the project, explicitly citing popular resistance as a key reason for quitting.

Now look at Denmark. As we wrote about recently, communities grew tired of living next to dirty, cruel, and foul industrial pork farms. They had enough of drinking polluted water and watching their neighbours be complicit in animal cruelty. Their collective anger forced the political gears to shift.

In America and New Zealand, peer-to-peer farmer networks like Practical Farmers of Iowa or Quorum Sense are groups of growers who are using group chats, field days, and community monitoring to teach each other how to eliminate synthetic inputs. They are working to bypass multi-billion-dollar agribusiness giants, reclaiming the economic reality on the ground, one farm at a time.

Governments backslide. Laws can be rewritten or gutted in a single election cycle. But deeply organised communities? They can create a permanently hostile economic environment for corporate exploiters.

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In recent decades, we’ve become accustomed to a form of changemaking that bears little resemblance to how most change actually happened in the past. It’s time for us to break that habit.

Linear advocacy—where we politely write submissions to parliament and hope for the best—has been hitting a brick wall for a while (so if you’ve felt that way yourself, you’re not going crazy). With rising political polarisation and the far-right appearing to gain ground, hard-won laws are being dismantled at an alarming speed.

It’s time to look back to our elders who fought for and won the rights we enjoy today— to emulate their strategies and their courage.

Going back to our roots

I am very lucky to have played a small part in a successful people-powered resistance movement, and it has informed my thinking as a campaigner ever since.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the current right-wing government reversed our country’s historic ban on offshore oil and gas exploration shortly after coming to power. They even went so far as to introduce fresh subsidies to lure fossil fuel giants back to New Zealand waters.

And do you know how many oil giants have packed their bags and rushed back to drill?

Zero.

Why? Because the grassroots and Indigenous-led resistance that won the political ban in the first place didn’t just change the law - they changed the culture. They created a permanent, hostile risk profile. Oil companies now look at New Zealand and realise their social license is completely dead. The financial and reputational risk of fighting an organised public is simply too high.

So, while politicians give the industry a green light, the people block the path.

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There is a hidden, hopeful truth about us humans

When you scroll through the news, it’s easy to believe the lie that people are fundamentally self-centered, lazy, or just don’t care. In fact, focus group research shows we are trapped in a massive collective misunderstanding: most of us privately assume that other people don’t care about the planet, when the reality is that people care a whole lot more than we think. We are keeping our worries to ourselves because we wrongly assume we are the only ones who feel them.

And it’s not surprising. Anyone who studied economics, like I did, learned that humans are just self-interested individuals trying to maximise their own personal utility. That false assumption plays on repeat in the news, in politics and around our dinner tables at family gatherings.

But does anyone who has actually met a human being in real life believe that?

Whenever I get out from behind my laptop and onto the ground, I am constantly struck by people’s fundamental goodness. Our willingness to help strangers. Our deep desire to protect our kids and our environment. When I feel beaten down by the global headlines, I force myself to go out into real communities, to meet real people. That’s where the cynicism melts away.

With the massive financial forces lined up against us, it is a genuine miracle that regular people ever win anything. And I firmly believe the only reason we do win is because of that essential human goodness. Despite all the noise telling us to be selfish, and despite a Corporate Bodyguard State trying to protect the polluters, regular people still choose to do good things.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It doesn’t bend on its own, though. It isn’t inevitable.

When the headlines make the fight feel impossible, we have to look around us, remember the fundamental goodness of the people in our communities, and draw oxygen from that shared humanity.

We aren’t alone in caring. And when we realise how many of us are standing together, we can always find the strength to keep bending it.

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Colleagues warned me that campaigning against the big dairy industry in New Zealand would be like campaigning against the oil industry in Saudi Arabia. No one wants to hear it.

Shut up. Worship the sacred cow. Sit down and eat your steak and cheese pie.

But the only way to cool the planet in our lifetime is to cut methane emissions from industrial agriculture. Processed meat is a literal carcinogen and humans are undoubtedly eating way too much red meat. The urine and poo from the corporations who are seemingly trying to fill every square metre of farmland with animal agriculture is filling our drinkable water with poison. And the intensive agriculture industry has effectively become a wealth extraction machine. So.

I reckon it’s worth a conversation or two.

After a few months of working with the team in Aotearoa, I moved to Greenpeace’s global agriculture team. My eyes nearly popped out of my head—I can’t believe how much we’ve let the big ag billionaires get away with.

Globally, big agriculture has become one of the most brutal, unregulated arenas of modern class warfare. We are so distracted by the wildly romanticised, borderline-hallucinatory vision of how our food is made that we’ve allowed a group of corrupt weirdos to ruin entire ecosystems.

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Big Ag is worsening inequality, dictating who profits, who does the back-breaking labour, and who gets to afford real food.

And I’m not pointing at the farmers. They also bear the brunt of the bad system. We picture Old MacDonald as a rosy-cheeked farmer in dungarees, wandering around a dewy paddock, giving a friendly pat to a cow named Buttercup before heading in for a cuppa. But that’s a far cry from reality. And across the world, farmers are being squeezed hard.

The real winners, the ones hoovering up all the cash, are the corporate megaliths sitting in castles with literal moats, who have gone full Black Mirror. (I’m not being hyperbolic here. The chief executive of Europe’s largest poultry producer—which processes about 697 million chickens annually—lives in a moated castle.)

A tiny handful of firms control the world’s seeds, the chemicals, the grain trading (ahem, Cargill), and the meat processing. Control of the knowledge has become control of the production.

You own the dirt, but Bayer owns your destiny.

The workers

While the farmer is being squeezed from above, we rarely see who is being crushed below.

Industrial agriculture relies entirely on a vast, invisible, exhausted underclass.

According to an extensive European study by Oxfam, at least one in four agricultural workers across Europe are migrants, routinely paid below the minimum wage. In massive agricultural export hubs like southern Spain—which feeds the supermarkets of the UK and Northern Europe—investigations by Ethical Consumer and The Guardian found thousands of Moroccan and sub-Saharan seasonal workers living in makeshift shacks cobbled together from scrap metal and plastic greenhouse sheeting. No sanitation, no running water, no electricity, picking fruit for pennies under enforced corporate curfews.

Then look at the meat processing sector, where the exploitation moves from physical deprivation to psychological horror. Slaughterhouse workers globally are subjected to some of the most dangerous, precarious contracts in the industrial world. Beyond the constant risk of physical injury, a landmark systematic review published by the National Institutes of Health revealed the devastating mental health toll.

Slaughterhouse workers experience disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. Recently, researchers identified that mechanically ending thousands of lives every day induces a specific form of PTSD known as PITS (Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress). As documented by the Yale Global Health Review and the AMA Journal of Ethics, this manifests as severe emotional numbing, dissociation, and high trauma, which often spills over into domestic violence and substance abuse in the surrounding communities. Recent European studies on emotional detachment in abattoirs show workers are forced to mentally “switch off” just to survive the shift.

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The farmer might be trapped by a mortgage, but the processing and seasonal worker is trapped in a meat-grinder of human rights abuses and mental trauma.

This is the most heartbreaking part of this “agro-feudalism” the agriculture oligarchy has built—they are the lords, ruling over the debt-ridden farmers who are managing the land. The exploited “peasantry” are getting hit the hardest.

Privatised profits, socialised harm

What villain is funding this dystopian monopoly?

You are, mate. Sorry.

In the US and Europe, farmers get direct cash subsidies on the taxpayer dollar.

New Zealand farmers are subsidised differently—we let them pollute our “100% pure” natural world for the steep fine of zero dollars. We exempt them from the Emissions Trading Scheme. We let them suck our aquifers dry for irrigation at virtually no cost, and then we leave the taxpayer to pick up the tab and enjoy the nitrate-poisoned drinking water. We are literally paying them to outsource the environmental damage to the rest of us.

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I’m not sure which system is worse—the harm to our health is turned into privatised profit no matter which country you call home.

They’re exporting the apocalypse

It is estimated that by 2030, climate change could push an additional 120 million people into extreme poverty. Up to 600 million people in Africa are staring down the barrel of malnutrition because their agricultural systems are collapsing under the weight of droughts and floods they didn’t cause. In the world’s poorest nations, crop yields are projected to plummet by up to 30 percent.

Big ag is effectively outsourcing the consequences of its pollution to the people least responsible for it. Industrial meat and dairy production is a massive driver of methane. So the Global North gets to eat the cheap, factory-farmed burgers, and the Global South gets the resulting climate crisis—and the bill for it.

It’s effectively an engineered geographical wealth transfer.

The supermarket has become the theatre of the class war

What do we, the lucky consumers, get out of this arrangement? A stark, depressing class divide that we experience while wheeling our trolleys through the supermarket.

Because of food inflation and corporate consolidation, the supermarket aisle has become a battlefield where your income dictates your physical health. If you have capital, you get to swan about buying “ethical,” locally sourced heirloom vegetables and beef that was sung to sleep by monks. You get to buy nourishment.

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If you are poor, you are a captive market for ultra-processed, artificially cheap caloric sludge.

Big Ag has engineered a system where real food is a luxury good, and the working class is fed just enough cheap, subsidised corn-syrup and filler to keep them on the treadmill.

It creates a vicious cycle—the poorest suffer the chronic health consequences of this diet, bearing the physical and financial burden, while the food giants post record profits. Inequality literally shows up in our bloodwork, and, at least in New Zealand, we’re told to just be intensely, pitifully grateful that the price of a block of generic cheese hasn’t hit twenty dollars yet.

The food system is the most fundamental arena of modern class struggle.

A handful of corporate executives and shareholders are extracting wealth from rural communities, poisoning the public commons, and actively deciding who gets the privilege of health and who gets the burden of sickness.

Do we want a food system run by our neighbours and communities that respects ecological limits, pays its workers, and feeds its people?

Or do we want to hand the keys to our caloric survival over to concentrated capital that views the planet—and us—as a spreadsheet to be endlessly optimised to eke out ever more profit?

I know which one I’d prefer. But until we stop worshipping the sacred cow, we’re all just going to keep eating the bullshit.

Ash Harder is the Digital Campaigner for the Greenpeace Global Agriculture Campaign, and is the former Head of Communications and Engagement for Greenpeace Aotearoa.

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Last week, Amanda wrote to you about the historic change in Denmark’s agricultural politics. As a Dane who has been campaigning for years to improve farming practices and people’s health, I want to share a deep dive from the frontlines of our fight against Big Ag.

Denmark is a small country of about six million people, but we raise about 30 million pigs, making us the most intensive pig producer on Earth.

But something seismic happened. Since 1896, Denmark has maintained a dedicated Ministry of Agriculture and Food. It has taken different shapes over the years, covering fisheries as well as the environment (though mostly by name), but as of this week, that ministry has been completely shut down.

For the first time in 130 years, industrial agriculture will no longer have its own seat at the cabinet table.

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Instead, power has shifted. We now have a Minister for Nature and Animal Welfare, and a newly appointed Minister for the Environment who comes directly from her previous role as President of the Danish Society for Nature Conservation, the largest green NGO in the country.

If the newly formed government carries out its political programme as written, we are looking at the beginning of the end for hyper-industrial factory farming.

If you want to know what it looks like when corporate polluters finally lose their grip on power, this is it.

How the battle was hard fought, and hard won

Nobody predicted that the Danish elections would focus nearly entirely on pigs, drinking water, and nitrate pollution. But this structural victory did not happen in a vacuum. It started in the streets, community halls, and rural living rooms.

Years ago, residents from a small peninsula called Tuse Næs reached out to Greenpeace. They were desperate. They were trapped living next to a massive, expanding industrial pig factory and had run out of options.

When we visited, I found the visual contradiction jarring—a gorgeous coastal landscape choked by the heavy stench of ammonia, narrow rural roads torn apart by heavy corporate trucks, and chemical pesticides sprayed inches from home gardens.

These families had spent years fighting a solitary battle against an extractive corporate machine that sacrificed their health, their clean water, and their peace of mind for international export profits. It is exhausting, soul-crushing work to fight a multi-million-dollar industry alone.

But that evening, we gathered in their local community hall over a home-cooked dinner. When they realised a global movement like Greenpeace was standing with them, the energy in the room completely transformed. That network grew, connected with other impacted communities across Denmark, and became an unstoppable national coalition against factory farming.

Showing up for each other multiplies our strength. When a solitary struggle becomes a shared movement, it turns into a force capable of breaking a 130-year-old political status quo.

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Clean water became the great unifier

Agricultural debates usually get bogged down in highly polarised culture wars like veganism vs. meat-eating, or urban ideals vs. rural realities. We bypassed the trap. The movement rallied under one undeniable, un-splittable banner—Clean Drinking Water.

Regardless of diet, lifestyle, or political party, everyone wants uncontaminated water for their kids. It is a position that is impossible to oppose without looking like a cartoon villain.

By focusing on groundwater protection, we created a massive narrative umbrella. This didn’t silence groups fighting for animal welfare or biodiversity but instead it gave them a main stage to stand on. Using citizen science, we equipped people across the country with nitrate testing kits to map the toxic runoff of industrial farming. This meant that the political establishment could no longer hide the data.

Connecting with rural communities through testing their water for nitrate pollution, we were a part of shaping a movement and public opinion that forced the government to slash allowed nitrate limits by nearly 90%, in a historic first for the EU.

The crumbling lie about being “World leading efficiency”

For decades, Big Ag corporate executives justified their massive ecological footprint by wrapping themselves in the flag, claiming their intensive, damaging systems were a marvel of “world-leading efficiency”.

We exposed that math.

It isn’t efficient when a system pushes animal biology so hard that nine million piglets die prematurely every year in confinement. It isn’t efficient when an industry monopolises vast swaths of land, rakes in massive EU subsidies, yet generates minimal employment while polluting the public’s tap water. We shifted the cultural mood from climate guilt to intense corporate bailout fatigue.

Taxpayers realised they were subsidising their own environmental destruction.

You need to be ready to capture the Overton window

When public outrage boiled over into what the media officially dubbed the “Pig Election,” the movement won because the structure was already built.

We didn’t have to scramble to figure out what an alternative world looked like. Decades of campaigning meant our data, our farm transition models, and our policy alternatives were locked, loaded, and ready to deploy. The moment the political window swung open, we as a movement stepped into the vacuum with ready-made, science based recommendations to take the debate further into a discussion about what should replace the broken system.

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We were not anti-farmer. We were pro-transition

Let’s be entirely clear about the boundary line here—this movement was not anti-farmer.

We have always been deliberate about drawing a sharp line between everyday local farmers trying to make an honest livelihood and the multi-billion-dollar corporate operators sacrificing rural communities for export margins.

True sustainability requires a just transition. Shifting EU agricultural support away from industrial mega-farms and factory complexes towards regenerative, small-scale stewardship isn’t abandoning rural economies. On the contrary, it’s about making sure they can secure a meaningful and safe future for themselves with the support of the rest of society, ensuring that public money rewards those who protect our soil, our water, and our future.

The corporate pork industry, sensing that the tide has irrevocably turned, has already publicly started talking about “compensation packages.” That is the language of a lobby group preparing for a historic loss.

What’s next? In Denmark and around the world

The political discourse in Denmark has fundamentally shifted, but the system itself hasn’t changed overnight. I think it’s safe to assume that industry lobbyists are already mobilising to dilute these promises in the backrooms of Parliament. While we can definitely claim this as a huge win for what’s on paper, it is still just that; on paper. The battle now moves to the implementation phase.

We forced this turn through relentless people power, and we need that exact same collective pressure to push this systemic change across the finish line. In Denmark, and across the globe.

Repeating the success

I am curious if you think what’s happening in Denmark has the potential to accelerate change in other countries. Do you think this is truly the beginning of the end for the destructive industrial meat monopoly? What local issue in your community has the potential to become the “Clean Water” unifier needed to break Big Ag? I am looking forward to hearing what you think in the comments below.

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Jonathan Findalen is the Global Engagement Lead for Greenpeace’s Agriculture campaign. He writes about food systems and what it actually takes to defeat corporate greed.

This week, a new coalition government in Denmark did exactly that. They are shutting down the historic ministry and replacing it with a Minister for Nature and Animal Welfare, alongside a new Minister for the Environment. For someone who lives in another heartland of intensive agriculture, it is nothing short of astounding.

Because here in New Zealand, the reality could not be more different.

When I first stepped into the environmental movement in Aotearoa, I was met with an unwritten, fiercely protected rule: “You can’t take on agriculture. Dairy is the one issue you do not touch.”

In New Zealand, challenging fossil fuels was safe. Calling for more renewable energy was mainstream. But questioning the sacred cow? That was economic treason.

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For generations, New Zealanders have grown up learning that livestock farming is the unbreakable backbone of the New Zealand economy. To challenge it is to be branded a crazy radical - someone detached from reality, intent on tanking our self-identity and our livelihood.

The livestock sector is so deeply entrenched that almost everyone is just a few degrees of separation from a farm. This land was, after all, systematically cleared and reshaped in the late nineteenth century to serve a single purpose: becoming the offshore meat and dairy pasture of the British Empire.

Today, Fonterra is our biggest company. A generation of younger Kiwis grew up drinking free Fonterra milk in schools, ensuring the brand was normalised from childhood. And our perception of the agricultural industry is blanketed by corporate greenwashing designed to make a highly polluting industry seem benign, even environmentally friendly. So, it is no surprise that, whenever you dare question the systematic pollution of lakes and rivers or the dairy industry’s outsized climate impact, the response is a predictable, weaponised refrain: “Why do you hate farmers?”

But the truth is starting to break through. For years, we have been fighting an uphill battle, and the cracks are finally showing. Why? Because people want clean drinking water. They want rivers they can actually swim and fish in. When the previous Labour government brought in freshwater protections, it wasn’t out of radicalism - they had a strong public mandate to improve water quality.

Naturally, the industry struck back. The far-right mobilised farmers’ genuine grievances, pointing them squarely at environmental regulations and “extreme greeny radicals.”

What they conveniently left out is that corporate interests are squeezing farmers from both sides. Fertiliser companies are raking in windfall profits off the back of supply shortages because farmers are dependent on chemical inputs to maintain herd sizes. Massive processors are taking their cut to fill their executives’ multi-million dollar paychecks, all while the farmers’ own drinking water becomes contaminated.

It feels like an impossible, immovable deadlock. But if you are feeling hopeless, I need you to look across the world. Because a country remarkably similar to ours just did the unthinkable.

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The fall of the sacred pig

If New Zealand’s dairy industry has long been treated as a sacred cow, Denmark’s pork sector has been equally untouchable.

Denmark has more pigs per capita than anywhere else on Earth. We have all heard of Danish bacon. For decades, the Danish agriculture lobby has been an untouchable, hyper-powerful political monolith. But just like in New Zealand, the public grew fed up. They grew tired of the suffocating smells from factory farms and ocean dead zones caused by agricultural runoff. They grew tired of worrying if the water coming out of their taps was safe to give to their kids.

And now, the tide has turned.

In its historic new coalition agreement, the Danish government has set out a remarkably ambitious plan for transitioning away from industrial factory farms toward ecological agriculture. If these policies are carried out as written, the landscape of Danish farming will change forever:

Reducing pig production: Denmark currently exports about 15 million live piglets annually (over half its total production). The new policy dictates that Danish pig production should primarily serve domestic use. This will mean reducing current production.

Local veto power: A temporary freeze has been placed on new or expanded conventional pig factories. Crucially, municipalities and local communities will have a strong say over where industrial agriculture can operate, prioritising nature restoration and reducing runoff.

Water protected from chemicals: Drinking water nitrate standards will be lowered in line with recommendations from public health experts, and a national ban on pesticides in vulnerable groundwater areas is being fast-tracked into law.

An end to factory-farm cruelty: Farmers will face strict, concrete deadlines to end routine tail-docking by 2030, phase out “extreme breeding” by 2035, end the confinement of sows, and provide significantly more space and rooting material.

Overhauling subsidies: The government intends to shift agricultural support away from flat, hectare-based payments (which reward wealthy, massive landowners) and instead reward organic, regenerative, and small-scale farming.

Commentators called this the “Pig Election.” What is perhaps even more remarkable is that, for the first time in several election cycles, immigration dropped down the priority list for voters. It was replaced by an urgent, collective demand for animal welfare and clean drinking water.

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Scaling the solution

This isn’t just a story of regulation. There is already proof that alternative systems work.

I’ve written before about how Copenhagen successfully transitioned nearly all of its public kitchens - schools, hospitals, and nursing homes - to 90% organic and local food. They achieved this staggering feat without increasing their budget simply by reducing meat consumption and minimising food waste.

When we scale procurement models like this, we create a guaranteed market. We give farmers the financial confidence and economic bridge they need to shift away from industrial chemicals and toward organic, ecological practices.

Because Denmark is an EU member, I feel hopeful that this political earthquake will filter through to shape policy across the broader European region - a region that has long propped up wealthy landowners and dirty, corporate factory farms over small-scale ecological practices.

We are now in the “fight” phase

There is an iconic blueprint for social change, famously - if inaccurately - attributed to Gandhi:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

I have spent many years in the first two stages. I have been ignored. I have been mocked and dismissed as unrealistic. But look around you right now in New Zealand. We are no longer being ignored, and they certainly aren’t laughing.

We are officially in the fight phase.

The industrial livestock lobbyists are terrified because the cracks are showing. Emboldened by having their literal representatives sitting inside the New Zealand Parliament - former Federated Farmers President Andrew Hoggard is now the Associate Environment Minister - corporate interests are in a frenzied, free-for-all to grab as many policy gains as they can. Federated Farmers, Beef + Lamb, and Dairy NZ have essentially written many of the government’s current environmental policies, from freshwater rules to climate laws.

We are watching them actively interfere in our judicial system - writing draft legislation to hand over to the government so they can override the law, halt active court battles (like the Smith v. Fonterra case), and exempt themselves from being held accountable for polluting the environment we all depend on.

This aggressive pushback from industry isn’t a sign of their permanent dominance. It is a sign of their desperation.

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They are fighting us tooth and nail because they know the status quo is indefensible. They know that when farmers and the wider public realise we can have both a thriving rural economy, clean drinking water and a stable climate for our kids, their empire of pollution falls apart.

So, if you are feeling hopeless about the state of the world right now - if you are exhausted by the corruption and the rollback of environmental laws - keep that blueprint for social change at the front of your mind.

The corporate pushback we are experiencing right now is not a defeat. It is a necessary, positive evolution of our movement. They are fighting us because we are winning.

What are your thoughts on Denmark’s historic shift, and how can we best apply these lessons to break the grip of industrial meat and dairy lobbying in its other strongholds?

It’s almost like someone else… wrote it in advance?

Two weeks ago, I wrote to you seething about how the New Zealand government is changing the law specifically to protect corporate polluters from being sued in court. Since then, they’ve gone from letting the mask slip to tossing it in the bin.

If you want to know what a Corporate Bodyguard State actually looks like in practice, look at the headlines coming out of New Zealand. When a polluting industry wants a piece of legislation, it doesn’t wait around for the democratic process. They just write it.

Recent investigations have revealed that briefings from industry lobbyists miraculously reappeared, basically verbatim, as government reform legislation. After being compelled by the courts to be accountable for their climate emissions, Fonterra and Z Energy worked with their lawyers to draft a change in legislation that would override that specific court decision. They wrote the policy, handed it to the Prime Minister’s Office, and watched the state cover up the paper trail.

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And it’s not the first time this has happened. Look at the Ashburton Lyndhurst Irrigation court case, where the Environmental Law Initiative successfully sued the regional council in Canterbury for granting a pollution discharge consent to a local irrigation scheme. The High Court agreed that the law strictly prohibited councils from allowing pollution that causes “significant adverse effects on aquatic life.”

It was a monumental win for freshwater and accountability. But instead of cleaning up their act, the corporate farming lobby—spearheaded by Beef + Lamb, DairyNZ, and Federated Farmers—went straight to the Beehive. Panicked that this ruling would threaten intensive, polluting land use across the country, they lobbied the government to fundamentally weaken the law. The government complied, rewrote the law, and completely hollowed out the High Court’s ruling.

As political commentator Bryce Edwards aptly put it, “Same year. Same model. Lose in court, draft the law you would prefer, slip it under the right ministerial door, and watch Parliament hand it back to you in legislative form.”

We now know that entities linked to applications for the Government’s Fast-Track Approvals Bill poured over $1 million into political donations. For a million dollars, it seems, corporate interests can buy an Act of Parliament, bypassing environmental protections.

Victoria University law academics Graeme Austin and Bjørn-Oliver Magsig hit the nail on the head, “Courts do things governments cannot… They cannot be lobbied. They decide on evidence and law.” A government that can be lobbied has now systematically used legislation to eliminate the one institution that cannot be.

They’re gaslighting us

The hypocrisy reached a fever pitch last week. At the United Nations, New Zealand voted to support a landmark resolution endorsing the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion (ICJAO) on climate change. The global resolution establishes that countries have a legal obligation to protect their citizens from greenhouse gas emissions and can be held liable for climate harm.

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Our government signed up to it. They stood on the world stage and agreed that climate change is a matter of binding legal accountability, not just political choice.

But back home they’re drafting laws to ensure domestic courts can never hold our own corporate giants to account. They are championing international accountability in New York while passing a legal gag order in Wellington to kill off Mike Smith’s landmark case against our biggest emitters.

It is the ultimate gaslight. They look us in the eye and tell us that climate policy should be made by the government, not set in the courts. But the only reason citizens are forced into the courtroom in the first place is because the government is actively reneging on its fundamental duty to protect us. They say they care, while throwing climate policies onto a bonfire, cutting climate emergency response funding to pay for tax cuts for the already-wealthy, and calling it a “climate dividend.”

The path of a reluctant radical

Which brings me to a question I get asked a lot—How did I end up here? When people see photos of me scaling a building, or when they hear about my criminal conviction for trespassing on Fonterra’s Te Rapa factory in protest against their pollution, they assume I’m a natural rule-breaker. They think I have a predisposition for disruption.

The complete opposite is true! I am a near-pathological rule-abider.

I come from a politically conservative family. For most of my life, even the idea of going on a protest march felt deeply uncomfortable. I’ve cared about nature my whole life and felt compelled to act on climate change since I first learned about it when I was 13 years old, but my first instinct was to try to change the system from within.

I studied ecological economics. I worked in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), genuinely believing we could steer these corporate giants in the right direction. But I was quickly disillusioned when I discovered that CSR is mostly just a marketing exercise. Companies will happily drop their climate targets the moment they’ve milked the good PR.

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So I turned to the next natural avenue— democratic advocacy. I have spent years of my life writing dense submissions, giving oral evidence, compiling facts, and meeting with MPs and the executives of our most polluting companies. I made the evidence-based arguments.

It did not work.

I started caring about climate change when I was 13. I became radicalised in my mid-thirties. That is what I call reluctant radicalisation. I wasn’t driven by a desire to break the law; I was driven by sheer necessity, because the system has been captured.

Two standards of justice

Look at the stark disparity of the system we live in today.

When I break a minor law to pull the emergency brake on a corporate giant that is destroying our biosphere, I face the consequences. I am charged, I am convicted, and I now carry a criminal record. You can bet your life that I won’t be invited to drop off a letter at the Prime Minister’s Office asking him to rewrite the law so my conviction disappears.

But when Fonterra, Z Energy, or Federated Farmers are taken to court on the evidence and the facts, they get to slip a preferred draft of a law under the right ministerial door, and watch Parliament hand it back to them as legislation.

When we break the rules to save the planet, we get a criminal record. When they break the planet, they get to rewrite the rules.

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The current New Zealand government is setting a dangerous precedent - becoming a shield for climate polluters, protecting them from the courts, from the voters, and from reality.

I did not want to be a radical. I wanted the submissions to work. But when the state becomes the personal security detail for the entities destroying our future, abiding by the rules is no longer a moral virtue. It is compliance in our own destruction.

If they can rewrite the laws to erase our democratic victories, then active resistance is the only response we have left.

History shows us that when the rules are rigged, real people standing together and resisting is what moves the world forward. We kicked deep-sea oil out of Aotearoa, and we can win our democracy back again.

Where are you resisting? Where should we channel our collective energy next?

Let me know in the comments.

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The latest dispatch from New Zealand’s agricultural research sector is that their much-hyped attempt to breed bulls that pass methane-slashing traits down to their milking daughters has hit a “disappointing” setback.

Disappointing? Please. It is exhausting, which is by design. It’s an exercise in predatory delay.

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The carbon capture of the paddock

Techno-fixes are not serious ecological solutions. They are strategic, highly funded distractions designed to keep the toxic status quo humming along while the biosphere burns.

This is a longstanding grift. For three decades, the fossil fuel industry has dangled Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) in front of us as a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. Keep drilling, keep burning, the magic vacuum cleaner will save us! Yet, thirty years into this charade, there are still no CCS projects operating at a scale that meaningfully alters our trajectory.

It was never about engineering a solution. This was always about weaponising a promise to fend off regulation. If a silver bullet is perpetually “just a few years away,” why bother making the hard choices today?

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Big Ag has simply copy-pasted Exxon’s playbook. Methane vaccines, seaweed supplements, bespoke bovine genetics — these are the industry’s chosen instruments to stall the inevitable. They sell us the fantasy of a future where we don’t have to change a single, profitable thing about the industrial farming machine.

The “it’s too expensive” bait and switch

And what happens when the techno-miracle actually materialises? The mask drops.

Take Bovaer, a feed additive that demonstrably reduces methane. It exists. It is here. But the moment it became a viable option, the industry’s goalposts were frantically uprooted and wheeled away. Beef and Lamb NZ suddenly declared it too expensive, essentially telling the government that if they wanted farmers to actually use it, the taxpayer had to foot the bill.

They are laying the exact same groundwork for the methane vaccines they have spent years touting as our salvation. Now that the rubber is nearing the road, they claim public money is required for implementation.

Do you see the game? They want the solution to stay perpetually five years away. And if it accidentally arrives, they threaten to boycott it unless the public subsidises it. Privatise the profits, socialise the pollution, and charge the taxpayer for the hypothetical cure. Either way, the public money keeps flowing and the methane keeps pumping.

Treating the burps and ignoring the rot

Let us indulge their delusion for a moment. Imagine a perfectly free, 100% effective methane vaccine available to every farmer tomorrow morning.

We are still driving headlong off a cliff.

By shrinking our ecological crisis down to the single metric of methane, we blind ourselves to the systemic rot of industrial dairying. A low-emitting bull does nothing to stop the relentless leaching of nitrate into our drinking water. A magic feed additive does not alleviate the sheer, grinding misery of intensive factory farming. Methane vaccines will not resurrect the exhausted soils or the annihilated pollinators wiped out by endless, chemical-soaked monoculture.

The techno-fix demands we look exclusively at the burp, and ignore the dying patient suffering from multiple organ failure.

Stigamatising common sense

Why do we swallow this rubbish? Because it is exactly what we want to hear. In Aotearoa and across the Western world, we are pathologically addicted to the idea that we can consume our way out of the crisis our consumption created. We want salvation by gadget, not by sacrifice.

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I remember suggesting to a man, years ago, that hanging clothes on a line instead of using the dryer was a simple, zero-carbon solution. He actually sneered at me. “If you want me to cut pollution, you’ll have to invent me a dryer that doesn’t pollute,” he said. “Because I’m not putting my clothes on the line.”

Later, a family friend told me, “Oh my goodness, Amanda. We’re literally not allowed to hang our washing outside in this housing community.”

We have constructed a culture—and literal gated communities—that stigmatises common sense. We have been conditioned to view ecological sanity as a backward step, and technological hubris as progress. Big Ag preys on this profound psychological weakness. They promise us a “cleaner machine” so we don’t have to face the terrifying prospect of doing things differently, even when the real solutions are available right now and bring a cascade of environmental co-benefits.

Enough.

I am so incredibly tired of this charade. We are going to keep getting fed this same line. They will continue to find “disappointing setbacks” in their labs, and they will continue to demand more time and more of our money for their next “breakthrough.”

We do not have more time.

It is time to stop waiting for a mythical bull to descend from the heavens and save us. We need hard, unyielding regulation on pollution. We must end the subsidies for their delay tactics and redirect that money to support the farmers who are willing to actually transition—away from intensive, high-input factory fields, and toward ecological, diversified systems. We need smaller herds. We need farming that respects the living world rather than attempting to violently hack it.

The industry’s predatory delay only works if we keep falling for it.

So, how do we break this collective addiction to the techno-fix? How do we flip the narrative so that systemic changes—like smaller herds and diverse landscapes—are finally seen as the massive leaps forward they actually are, rather than a retreat?

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Between reporting on the State acting as a bodyguard for polluters and watching Big Ag capitalise on global conflict, I’ve gotten tired of feeling hopeless. There are plenty of things happening around us—while the villains flood the zone—that we can feel joyful about.

And, let’s be real, the bad news is relentless. Just this week, we learned that commodity traders are betting billions on food prices going up. By treating essential crops as financial assets, hedge fund speculation turns global food insecurity into a source of investor profit. It’s the same old story of disaster capitalism—the wealthy find a way to harvest their dividends from scarcity.

But even as the bad news keeps rolling in, we all need a second to come up for air.

Take a break with me. Let’s imagine something different. A dignified food system isn’t just a dream—it’s already happening, and the ideas are ready for others to take them and run.

Planting the future while we feed the present

I’ve written before about how our survival depends on a pivot to ecological farming. I’ve been thrilled to see the comments section filling up with your own stories of how that transition is already taking root in your communities.

But I also know that the ecological transition can feel like a distant project. It doesn’t necessarily help the person standing in the grocery aisle or market today, staring at a price tag they can’t afford and wondering how they’re going to feed their kids.

We need a bridge between the crisis of today and the resilience of tomorrow. Here are the models that are already feeding people and supporting local farmers—the “bright spots” that give me hope.

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The “Public Kitchen” is a real thing

In Brazil, the Restaurante Popular program provides high-quality, state-funded meals to anyone for about $1 USD. No questions asked, no stigma—just a nutritious, locally sourced meal as a shared public service.

The power of a neighborhood

Here in Aotearoa, the Pātaka Kai movement (open street pantries) has shown that when we provide the infrastructure to “share what you have,” communities step up. It is a “no-questions-asked” safety net that bypasses corporate gatekeepers, and it’s a model that could be scaled rapidly with local council support.

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The right to grow

Hull City Council recently became the first local authority in the UK to pass a “Right to Grow” policy, unlocking unused council land for community food patches. Their logic is simple: if the land is idle and people are hungry, let them plant.

Public supermarkets

In Chicago, the city is moving toward municipal-run grocery stores in neighborhoods where private chains have fled. It proves that nutrition doesn’t have to depend on a shareholder’s profit margin; cities can provide essentials at near-cost, prioritising public health over dividends.

Public procurement

This one really excites me. Copenhagen successfully transitioned nearly all of its public kitchens—schools, hospitals, and nursing homes—to 90% organic and local food. They did this without increasing their budget by reducing meat and food waste. When we scale models like this, we create a “guaranteed market” that gives farmers the financial confidence to shift to organic practices.

The choice before us

The current food price shocks are a warning shot. Our governments can choose to double down on an extractive model that depletes the foundations of life while transferring wealth from the poor to the already-rich. Or, they can look at Copenhagen, Brazil, Hull, and New Zealand’s Pātaka Kai and realise that the tools for a better world are already on the table.

Here in Aotearoa, we have an election coming up. It remains baffling to me that no major party is front-footing a vision for the future of food. The war in the Middle East, contaminated drinking water and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis have shown us exactly how broken our current model is. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’m putting these ideas out there because I want to make space in this overwhelming swirl of bad news for what is actually working. We need to remember that we aren’t just fighting against a broken system; we are fighting for a flourishing one that is already being born.

What is happening in your corner of the world that gives you hope? Is there a local initiative, a community garden, or a small-scale farmer near you doing things differently? Let’s gather the evidence for a better future in the comments.

I’m looking forward to reading them.

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I’m beyond astonished. After nearly three years of this extremist government, we can no longer pretend we’re watching them struggle with complex policy “trade-offs”. We are watching the systematic dismantling of the public interest. And while I’m writing this from New Zealand, make no mistake, this is a global phenomenon from the Far Right. We are witnessing the rise of the Corporate Bodyguard State — a system where the government’s primary function is no longer to protect its citizens, but to shield corporations from the consequences of their own actions.

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They’ve created an evidence-free zone

In the lexicon of this government, there is no such thing as “evidence-based policy.” That phrase implies a respect for reality — for the data showing our oceans are warming, our bills are skyrocketing, and our infrastructure is crumbling under “once-in-a-century” storms that now seem to make headlines yearly.

Instead, they’ve replaced evidence with an ideology of extraction. Locally, the reversal has been breathless. In less than three years, they’ve gutted policies that worked for both the climate and the average person’s wallet. They slashed public and active transport funding, axed clean car discounts, and scrapped energy security schemes to double down on fossil gas. They’re even stripping away freshwater protections to allow further industrial dairy expansion, polluting rural people’s drinking water in the process.

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Mike Smith vs. the giants

Everyone that has fought for climate justice has been told we need to play by the rules. So we write submissions. We call our MPs. We spend hundreds of hours building evidence-based arguments. And what happens? They get ignored. This anti-nature government has received a mountain of public feedback pleading for nature, has ignored it, and then proceeded with destruction.

When the democratic process is captured by lobbyists, the people turn to the last line of defense — the courts.

This is where the New Zealand story became a global headline.

In 2024, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that sent shockwaves through the international legal community. It involved a case brought by Mike Smith. Mike is a personal friend of mine — a fierce climate justice warrior, and a man who has spent decades standing in the gap between corporate greed and the climate.

The case, Smith v Fonterra, wasn’t just a local New Zealand legal battle. It was reported by Yale Law School. For the first time, it put industrial agriculture and dairy giants in the same dock as Big Oil. It recognised that these companies could be held accountable for the “public nuisance” of climate destruction. It was a beacon of hope, signaling that no matter how much political clout an industry has, they are still subject to the law.

But now, there is a legal gag order

This week, the Corporate Bodyguard State struck back.

In a move labeled a “shocking abuse of power,” the New Zealand government announced it will change the law specifically to block Mike’s case and any others like it. They are passing legislation to prevent courts from finding companies liable for climate damage.

Think about the scale of that. When a citizen used their democratic right to take a grievance to the highest court in the land — and won the right to proceed — the government stepped in to move the goalposts mid-game. They are interfering in an active court case to ensure corporate polluters remain untouchable.

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They tell us to follow the rules, then they change the rules the moment we start to win. But there is something this government has forgotten — if the courts are no longer a recourse, the only recourse left is resistance.

The people of Aotearoa have a long memory and a proven track record. Mike Smith was instrumental in the movement that kicked the oil companies out of these waters. For years, the government tried to welcome international oil giants with sweet deals. But the people — led by Māori — fought them off one by one.

Petrobras. Equinor. Shell. These names are gone from New Zealand’s shores because of relentless, boots-on-the-ground resistance. Those companies didn’t leave willingly; they were forced out after a fierce fight from local people, intent on protecting their oceans and beaches. And they aren’t coming back, no matter how much this government tries to sweeten the deal.

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Resistance is the only way now

Our politics has a corruption problem. Big companies are using their money and political access to jump the queue, to throw fairness to the side, making sure the rules work for them while our power bills soar and the environment our grandkids depend on collapses. This is robber barron-ism.

We need anti-corruption laws to stop big money from buying our legislation. We need to put the power back in the hands of the people who actually live here. And while we fight for that big picture change, we shouldn’t forget the lesson of the deep sea oil campaign — we still have power. We can stop polluters through our active resistance.

What do you think we need to do to win back our democracy? Tell me in the comments.

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The war the US and Israel have waged in the Middle East is horrific. It’s illegal, senseless, and rapidly making the world worse. So of course, in this vacuum of instability, the cynical corporate machinery is already getting to work.

I report from the front lines of Greenpeace, and I’ve spent enough time doing this to know that for multinational corporations, global crises are treated as an opportunity to be exploited.

With the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, fertiliser prices have skyrocketed. While families across the world are anxious about the cost of the next grocery bill, the lobbying machine is already whirring into motion from Washington to Brussels. We are witnessing a masterclass in how to parlay ‘food security’ fears into corporate welfare and the systematic gutting of our environmental protections.

We’re about to witness the weaponisation of food security

We can expect the term “food security” to be hollowed out and weaponised in the coming months and years. Large-scale industrial players are already positioning themselves as the only thing standing between the public and empty pantry shelves.

The irony is, it is this exact, consolidated, chemical-dependent model of industrial farming that made our global food system so brittle in the first place.

Their narrative is that they want us to believe the world is working against them, so governments must remove the “burden” of regulations. They are using this supply chain shock to attempt a permanent dismantling of hard-won standards that keep our water clean and our communities’ food standards at safe levels.

Naturally, there will be more demands for deregulation

Under the guise of “unshackling” their production, I’m already seeing lobbyists pushing for:

• Suspending rules to allow the spreading of animal manure, which effectively sacrifices groundwater safety and community health.

• Stalling pesticide reduction laws with false claims that they threaten food security, despite scientists proving that long-term security is impossible without healthy soil and pollinators.

• Forcing legal bypasses to destroy millions of hectares of land previously set aside for bees, birds and soil recovery.

I’ve seen this before, sadly. During the 2022 supply chain crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, lobbyists leveraged that instability to wrangle massive concessions from the European Commission. It’s depressing to see it happening again. We seem unable to learn from the past. It’s rolling out in the UK, the US, and beyond as we speak.

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Agribusiness’ calls for deregulation sound rational to the average person, and that’s the risk. They conveniently obscure the fact that our food system has moved from locally-owned, resilient family businesses to industrial factory operations run by a handful of the world’s wealthiest corporations. This model is grossly fragile. When one gear in the global supply chain snaps, the entire machine breaks.

The solution isn’t to prop up a system that only benefits a handful of investors. The solution is to support farmers in reclaiming independent, local

production that works in harmony with nature.

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The great wealth transfer

It infuriates me that agribusiness has mastered a system where they socialise the risk and privatise the profit. When prices are low, they dominate the market. When input prices rise, they demand bridge payments and subsidies from our tax dollars. When they pollute the water, we pay for the cleanup through our utility rates.

Just look at the numbers from 2022. While farmers struggled to break even, fertiliser giants like Nutrien and The Mosaic Company posted record profits. Cargill reported $165 billion in revenue — a 23% jump during a global food crisis. That is extraction. They are extracting wealth from the communities they purport to feed.

Let’s learn from the mistakes

Real food security is grown from the ground up through healthy soil and community resilience. By moving toward ecological farming — fixing nitrogen naturally in the soil rather than buying it in a bag — we achieve four things at once:

1. Lower costs, because farmers cut input expenses.

2. Cleaner water, because we won’t have toxic runoff in our rivers.

3. Thriving biodiversity, because we’ll restore space for the pollinators that actually grow our food; and

4. Climate action, because we’ll cut the massive emissions of the industrial system.

The agribusiness lobby is using this crisis as a mandate for deregulation. We have two choices. a.) We can keep bailing out the corporate middleman, or b.) we can fund the transition to a model that serves our communities and our planet.

Tell me what you think

What are you seeing in your local grocery store or community? Are you feeling the impact of these price spikes on the ground?

Leave a comment – we can talk about the alternatives together.

Imagine you were given a plot of land to grow your own food. It has good sun, lots of nearby water, and plenty of insect life for pollination. The only catch — you need this garden to feed your family and the surrounding community.

Do you:

a.) Cover it in grass, import synthetic fertiliser to keep that grass growing, and fill the plot with dairy cows. Sell the milk powder overseas, hoping to make enough money to buy the actual food your community needs — polluting your drinking water and degrading the soil in the process;

or…

b.) Grow a mix of fruit, vegetables, and proteins that feed your community abundantly, look after the soil, water and pollinators for future generations, and provide enough excess to sell for a profit?

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I probably don’t need to tell you which option New Zealand chose. In fact, no other country on Earth has tied itself so needlessly to dairy exports the way NZ has. Milk powder, butter, and cheese make up around 30% of New Zealand’s exports — and a perfect example of why the entire global food system is completely at the mercy of geopolitical conflict.

It’s easy for us to look at a war and think the economic fallout will stop at the energy market — fuel prices will be painful but life will go on. But actually, our modern food system is needlessly built entirely on the overuse of fossil fuels. While we watch the war waged on Iran and Lebanon, the shipping disruptions created are being priced into every block of butter or head of lettuce we buy.

I often hear that global industrial agriculture is highly efficient. But when a conflict half a world away can spike the cost of local groceries, that “efficiency” turns out to be total foolishness — it’s actually a failure to plan.

The crux of the issue is pretty simple. Our food system is addicted to synthetic fertilisers. There are a few reasons we’re going to start seeing this hit NZ grocery bills pretty hard:

1. The Strait of Hormuz is a chokepoint for more than just oil

While the world rightly focuses on the strait as the jugular vein for fuel, it is also the central nervous system for agriculture industries. The reality is that around a third of the world’s seaborne fertiliser trade passes through it. Since the US and Israel waged their war, ships carrying urea, ammonia, and phosphate have been halted or diverted, leading to major price spikes in fertiliser.

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2. Fertiliser price gets passed on to consumers

Half of our global food production depends on synthetic nitrogen for growth. Because farmers import so much of it for their crops and grass, their fertiliser bill has gone up exponentially. Farmers are often in heavy debt — so they pass that cost on to us consumers.

What many don’t understand is that synthetic nitrogen isn’t natural — it is manufactured using massive amounts of fossil gas. This tethers the price of meat, milk, bread, and vegetables directly to the volatility of global fossil fuel markets. When oil prices spike or supply chains break, the entire “industrial machine” of farming grinds to a halt.

3. It’s also terrible timing

The timing of this closure couldn’t be worse for those in the Northern Hemisphere. Farmers were in the “peak application” window just as the crisis hit.

Some crops could see a reduction in harvest. Less food on the global market means higher prices for everyone, everywhere. The UN has already warned that these price shocks hit the world’s poorest countries the hardest, driving millions more into acute food insecurity.

But no matter where you live in the world, you should be concerned about what this means for the upcoming seasons.

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The failure to plan is “Big Ag’s” plan

The big agribusiness lobby wants you to believe that the only solution to this crisis is to give them more subsidies and lessen environmental protection rules. But you can’t fix a broken system by doubling down on the one that is already destructive and precarious.

The real solution — the one that will feed us and our children for generations to come — is ecological farming and food sovereignty. We need to move away from a highly consolidated, “profit-at-any-cost” corporate model that relies on volatile, fossil-fuel-dependent global chemicals.

By working with nature to fix nutrients naturally in the soil, we create a system that is war-proof — you can’t “blockade” a farmer who grows their own soil fertility from the ground up. This would also slash the massive emissions caused by fertiliser production and industrial farming. Perhaps most persuasively, it’ll break the cycle of “chemical debt” that keeps farmers struggling while multi-national fertiliser companies and food processors earn record profits. I encourage a cursory look into their earnings reports.

We will never be able to have real food security within a volatile global chemical market. It has to be grown from the ground up, through healthy soil and local community resilience. It’s time to stop propping up a fragile, corporate-led model and start funding the transition to a farming system that serves our communities — not billionaires.

Do you think our food security should be tied to global oil prices? Let me know in the comments.

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The New Zealand and Irish governments have unveiled a multi-million dollar “research partnership” aimed at agricultural emissions. On the surface, it’s framed as a noble quest for practical solutions and science-based tools. But look closer, and you’ll see the familiar silhouette of greenwash and predatory delay. This isn’t about cutting emissions; it’s about being seen to be serious about climate change while ensuring the livestock industry can carry on polluting as usual.

What’s really happening?

The announcement marks the launch of the second phase of the Ireland-New Zealand Joint Research Initiative (JRI). I’ve seen this script before, and it’s a masterclass in stalling for time. Here is how this “partnership” is being used to keep the status quo alive.

1. The “measurement” distraction

The primary tactic here is to pivot from reduction to refinement. By funneling millions into “improving methane estimates,” these governments are essentially saying that they can’t stop the fire until they’ve spent a few more years measuring the exact temperature of the flames.

It’s a classic stalling tactic. We don’t need a more precise calculator to tell us that industrial livestock farming is the single biggest driver of emissions in both our countries; we need a plan to reduce the herd size. They are spending millions to count the problem more accurately, rather than spending that money to solve it.

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2. The “efficiency” myth

Expect to hear the phrase “world-leading efficiency” on repeat from both of these massive meat and dairy exporters. The narrative is calculated: they argue that because Kiwi and Irish farmers are supposedly “efficient” at producing meat and dairy, any local reduction would simply cause “emissions leakage” (production moving elsewhere).

It’s a convenient logic, but it’s grounded in myth, not scientific fact. And it’s built on a fragile, chemical-dependent model that prioritises export volume for a few massive corporations over the health of our local drinking water and the global climate.

3. Socialising the risk, privatising the delay

Let’s be clear about what this partnership is: a public-to-private wealth transfer.

The public pays: Taxpayers fund the research into techno-fixes - methane vaccines, feed additives - that are always “just five years away.”

The industry profits: Big Ag gets to keep its current production levels - and its profits - without paying a cent for its pollution. They aren’t just stalling regulation; they are being subsidised by the public to keep the delay going.

4. Creative accounting, but call it “science”

This is the most dangerous part. Instead of focusing on reducing methane, both governments are shifting the goalposts toward “stabilising” it under the guise of “temperature neutrality.”

I’ve written about this many times before and even made a silly video to try and break it down. I can’t tell whether my metaphor was any good. What do you think?

By rebranding “staying the same” as a climate win, they are attempting to bypass the laws of physics. They treat methane as a short-lived pass, ignoring the fact that it is 80 times more potent than CO2 in the short term. It’s not a cooling strategy; it’s a mandate to keep the status quo while the planet burns.

The alternative: actual resilience

We cannot allow promises of more “scientific research” and “silver bullet breakthroughs” to become a mandate for inaction. We have a clear path forward that doesn’t involve accounting tricks:

• Diversification over monoculture: We must move away from the high-input, high-emissions model and toward ecological systems that restore soil health and protect farmers from the volatile price of chemical fertilisers.

• Genuine leadership: New Zealand and Ireland should stop pretending to be the “most efficient” polluters and get ambitious about becoming global leaders in ecological farming.

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The bottom line

We cannot allow our farming leaders and politicians to hoodwink us with more research papers and diplomatic photo-ops. It is time to price agricultural emissions fairly and reinvest that revenue directly into helping farmers transition to practices that work in harmony with nature - not against it.

I want to hear from you: Is this “research partnership” a genuine scientific pursuit to help farmers, or is it a high-priced delay tactic designed to protect the dairy giants?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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I remember first learning about climate change in my middle school science class - age thirteen. Since that day, I’ve dedicated my life and my career to doing something about it. I spent years in the trenches of the energy transition, campaigning to end offshore oil and gas exploration in Aotearoa New Zealand and mapping out a renewable future built on community-owned wind and solar.

But as much as I believe in the power of clean energy, it is the transformation of our food system that gives me the most hope.

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When my daughter was born, my urgency increased. I looked at the way we produce food - the industrial machine that treats land like a factory floor, rivers like a sewer for agri-chemicals, and nature as an obstacle to be cleared - and I realised we are at a breaking point.

The global industrial food model is breaching almost every planetary boundary. It’s an extractive nightmare. But I have seen the alternative firsthand. I have watched friends take a depleted, tired dairy farm and, within just a few years, turn it into a thriving food forest by planting diverse species and letting nature do the work.

That is the vision I am fighting for. If we want a future that actually sustains us, we have to move from industrial extraction to biological stewardship. Here is how I see us getting there.

1. Putting soil biology before chemicals

In my years of studying these systems, the change we need to make is clear - the last century’s paradigm was the “chemical input” (fertilisers, pesticides). The new paradigm - and where I believe the real wealth lies - is soil biology.

We have to stop fighting nature and start mimicking it.

A “soil-first” approach means:

• Keeping the ground covered: We need to stop the constant tilling that kills the microbial networks. Nature doesn’t like bare soil, and neither should we.

• Replacing chemicals with biodiversity: By integrating diverse plant life, we fix nutrients naturally and create habitats for the natural predators that keep “pests” in check.

• Ditching monoculture: Monocultures are fragile. They break under the pressure of volatile markets and climate shocks. What we need is integrated systems - combining diverse crops with some livestock - which act as an insurance policy against the next drought or flood.

2. Redefining what success looks like

Currently, farmers are paid to produce volume, regardless of the environmental cost. A “successful farm” is measured by yield per hectare, and we ignore the externalities of degraded topsoil, polluted waterways and superheating methane emissions.

In my view, we need a complete flip in incentives:

• Public funds for restoration: We must move government money away from propping up industrial giants and toward ecological farming and the restoration of nature.

• The “Guaranteed Market”: Governments are often some of the biggest buyers of food. If we mandated that schools, hospitals, and institutions source at least 50% of their food from small-scale ecological farms, we would anchor local economies quickly. It gives farmers the stability they need to prioritise soil health over industrial export volume.

3. Decentralising our food supply

The current industrial model favors “just-in-time” global delivery - a system that has proved terrifyingly fragile during recent shocks. I want to see a “local-global” hybrid.

We need to rebuild the infrastructure that was gutted by corporate consolidation over the last three decades: regional food hubs and localised processing. When farmers can sell directly to their neighbors, we reduce the energy intensity of food transport and keep wealth within our rural communities.

4. Moving from feed to food

It is difficult to justify our current land use when a sizable proportion of the world’s crop calories are fed to livestock. In a resource-constrained future, we have to prioritise grains and pulses for direct human consumption.

I am not saying we end all livestock, but we must end industrial livestock and seriously reduce the number of farmed animals. We need to stop using prime arable land to grow soy and maize for feedlots. Or, as is the case where I live, palm kernel from deforested rainforests for intensive monoculture dairying. Livestock should be integrated into farming systems on natural grasslands or fed on agricultural byproducts. And that is entirely possible if high- and middle-income people shift to healthier, more plant-rich diets. To do that, we need policies that nudge this shift, like schools, hospitals and government institutions making plant-based meals the default option.

5. Honoring Indigenous stewardship

We cannot discuss the future of farming without acknowledging that the “new” methods we are rediscovering are actually ancient. Indigenous cultures have practiced regenerative stewardship for millennia.

If we are serious about a sustainable future, we must stop the expansion of industrial agriculture into new “frontiers,” return land to Indigenous stewardship, and center traditional ecological knowledge in our food production.

This transition won’t be easy. The incumbents - the chemical giants and industrial processors - profit immensely from the status quo, and they hold deep sway over our political systems. I’ve seen firsthand how fiercely they fight to protect their bottom line and how unwilling political leaders of all persuasions have been to stand up to them.

But I refuse to be discouraged. I feel heartened every time I meet or learn about a farmer who has chosen to walk away from the industrial treadmill to work with nature instead of against it. They are proving that a better way is possible, even when the deck is stacked against them. If they can achieve so much with almost zero support, imagine what we could scale if our policy incentives finally followed suit. We have the roadmap; we just need to shift our focus, our funding, and our faith away from industrial monoculture and toward the local, plant-based, and regenerative future that actually sustains us.

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