This fall my wife and I will be traveling to New Zealand to visit our daughter who is studying abroad for a semester at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. In the past year or two I have become interested in New Zealand's agriculture and farm policies, and I hope this trip will be an opportunity to learn more. I will blog about what I learn.
In recent decades New Zealand has become a global dairy powerhouse. (Click here for more info—see the chapter on "World Dairy Production and Trade Trends.") Of course, dairy is big in Vermont, too. How does New Zealand compare to Vermont?
New Zealand is about the size of Colorado, about 11 times the size of Vermont. (New Zealand is 103,738 square miles to 9,620 for Vermont.) The number of dairy cows in New Zealand is 37 times the number of dairy cows in Vermont: 5.2 million vs. 140,000. If Vermont were to have the same density of dairy cows as New Zealand, we could triple the number of cows in Vermont.
But that's not all. New Zealand has nearly as many beef cattle (4.5 million) as dairy cows. Plus 40 million sheep! (Summary NZ statistics.)
New Zealand has 10 sheep for every resident (down from 20 sheep per person in the early 1980s). If Vermont were to have the same number of sheep per resident as New Zealand, that would equate to 6 million sheep. If Vermont were to have the same number of sheep per square mile as New Zealand, that would equate to 3.7 million sheep. At the peak of the sheep era in Vermont in 1840, there were "only" 1.6 million sheep in the state (six per resident). There are now 15,000 sheep in Vermont.
It is useful to think in terms of "animal units," a concept once used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A mature dairy cow is 1.4 animal units, a beef cow is 1.0 animal units, and a sheep is 0.1 animal units. (source p. 5) Vermont has 25 animal units per square mile, while New Zealand has 150. If Vermont were to have the same density of animal units as New Zealand, we could increase the number of dairy cows in Vermont by a factor of seven.
Stay tuned for more posts about New Zealand over the next few months. If any readers of this blog have information to share about New Zealand, please post a comment.
