• Hedup@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    7 months ago

    If only there wasn’t a reason farmers are not doing more agriculture in the mountainous land of New Zealand.

    • terraborra@lemmy.nz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      7 months ago

      Most of our mountainous land is protected. Even if it’s not, dairy farms aren’t being run on rugged terrain. Cows aren’t exactly known for their adventurism.

      • purrtastic@lemmy.nzOP
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        7 months ago

        I talked to a farmer on hill land about this, and he said they have to buy cows that have grown up on hill land otherwise they can’t handle it and invariably end up a bloated carcass in the local stream. That still does happen sometimes, in which case they just leave it there to decompose and pollute the stream because it’s too much work to remove it. Farmers, eh?

      • Drusas@kbin.run
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        7 months ago

        What, you haven’t seen all of those videos of cows scaling cliffs like a goat?

      • Hedup@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        Interesting. I imagined it’d be similar to how things are run in Switzerland. Cows there are pretty adventurous I suppose.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzM
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          7 months ago

          Isn’t Switzerland the place they keep the cows in a barn and grow the grass separate, then cut and feed the grass to the cows?

          I think they also have much smaller herd sizes than NZ.

          • Hedup@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            7 months ago

            When I visited, I run into cows plenty of times while hiking the mountain trails. I can’t speak with authority, but from what I was told is that there aren’t many big dairy farms, most dairy farmers run small scale farms.