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We have said that sustainability

is a key part of our new strategy, right?

That's the heart of what we're gonna be doing.

What's the news angle

you're looking at?

Is it sustainability on farms?

Is it that sustainability on packaging?

Is it sustainability in our factories?

- We're talking about climate change, water quality,

potential longevity for our farmers.

Are those topics that you believe

Fonterra would like to comment on?

We get these requests all the time, Chris.

We've got people here who've got a business to run.

What angle are you taking, how's it gonna work?

- We wanna hear every side of the story, basically.

There aren't sides

to the story. There's only one story.

I'm assuming that's the angle you're taking, 'cause that's

the only angle, that is the truth of the situation.

- Kia ora. I'm Chris.

This is where I'm from,

the rural north of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Surrounded by nature and fortunate to have

the family home next to our local river, Mangatawa.

Growing up, we tried our best

to protect and live with the land.

We grew a lot of our own food

and raised all the animals you'd expect to see on a farm,

chickens, goats, pigs, sheep and cows,

Like most Kiwi kids,

I started the day with milk on my Weet-Bix

and never thought twice about it.

I was already worried about the state of our planet

when I came across this film.

"Cowspiracy" showed how animal agriculture

is the driving force

behind the environmental breakdown that's happening

and how people were too afraid to talk about it.

I was shocked, but I thought that's America, not Aotearoa.

We have grass-fed cows and look after our land.

And then I saw the Environment Aotearoa Report

showing the massive impact

dairy is having on our country.

I made a video about the dairy industry

that got a big response on social media.

Let's hear what Fonterra has to say now.

And I was surprised when Fonterra commented,

inviting me for a coffee and a chat.

But when I tried taking them up

on the offer....

Welcome to Fonterra.

After the tone, please record your message.

After the tone, please record your message.

After the tone, please record your message.

- Why the change of heart?

What did our country's biggest company have to hide?

I wanted to meet with some people

who were speaking out about

the environmental impacts of the

dairy industry and see what they could tell me.

- Industrial dairying is this country's biggest polluter.

It's our biggest climate emitter,

emitting more greenhouse gases

than our entire transport sector.

It's our biggest water polluter.

And it's also a major stressor

for biodiversity and for soil health.

Around the world,

we've seen a massive increase in a thing called

oceanic dead zones.

They're basically areas of the ocean

where there's been so much algal growth,

there's no oxygen, there's no life in there anymore.

That is what we are risking on New Zealand's coastlines.

- We are seeing a collapse of our natural ecosystems.

Most of that collapse is coming about

because of the pressure that we are putting on those systems

from commercial activities like dairy farming.

The consequence for nature has been devastating.

- New Zealand used to be a land covered in forest.

We've bowled down the forest,

we've lost the biggest chunk of wetlands in modern history

in the last 100 years to put more cows on paddocks.

I discovered that in Aotearoa

our dairy industry creates more greenhouse gas emissions

than all cars, trucks, boats, planes, and trains combined.

And although we brag about producing

the most sustainable milk in the world,

the total emissions from our booming dairy industry

has increased 132% in the last 30 years.

A hundred and thirty-two per cent!

It's a global problem too.

The top five meat and dairy companies,

which includes Fonterra,

produce more emissions than the whole of the United Kingdom

and its 66 million people.

That's also more than the oil and gas companies

ExxonMobil, Shell and BP.

One study even showed that in the next decade,

Fonterra will make up more than 100%

of New Zealand's total emissions target.

And yet no one seemed to be talking about this.

Dr. Jane Goodall is one of many well-known scientists

who have been warning about the impacts of climate change

long before it was all over the media.

- If you consider we're on this little ball,

this little beautiful planet of ours,

and we're now surrounding it

with these so-called greenhouse gases,

which is trapping the heat of the sun,

which is leading to the changing weather patterns

that are being so destructive to the environment,

to people and to many, many animals...

And while the worst is yet to come,

the balance of life on the planet is already way out

with farmed animals and humans making up

96% of the biomass of mammals and only 4% is wild mammals.

I also found out Aotearoa has the highest proportion

of threatened native species on Earth.

- No wonder we have a biodiversity crisis.

I'm not angry at the farmers. I'm not blaming the farmers.

They do what they have to do.

And most of them do really care about the environment.

But the system that they're caught up in is totally flawed.

Just sticking to what we are doing now has no future.

The dairy industry

is having a similar impact around the world.

And with the global demand for food doubling by 2050,

how could all this be produced sustainably?

Scientists warn that we'd need at least five Earths by then,

if everyone on the planet eats as much dairy and meat

as countries like the United States.

- It was Mahatma Gandhi who said,

"The planet can produce enough for human need,

but not human greed."

Do we have to keep doing things the same way?

What if we could produce that food

without all the resources and waste?

From what I was discovering,

it looked like there are other ways,

including something the dairy industry

doesn't want us to know about

because it threatens their very existence.

But first I had to understand how this mess all started

and why we're still in it.

Just over 200 years ago,

British settlers introduced

the first dairy cows to Aotearoa,

a land mostly covered in ancient forests

and inhabited by the indigenous population of Māori.

Most of our native forests were cut or burnt down

and almost all our wetlands were destroyed

to make way for farms.

Today, we have over 6 million dairy cows

and we're not doing this to feed ourselves.

95% of our dairy products are exported.

Kiwi farmers used to be known for farming sheep,

but when white gold fever hit, they switched to cows,

increasing the average dairy herd size

from 100 to over 400.

- Over the last 30 years,

we didn't increase the amount of land.

We just got rid of sheep and replaced them with cows

and they have so much bigger output.

- The dairy herd of Aotearoa produces over

150 million liters of nitrogen rich urine every day.

And each cow has the equivalent

effluent footprint of 14 people.

That means the cows in this country

create the same amount of waste as nearly 90 million people.

And with almost no wetlands left to filter that waste,

it's no surprise that our waterways are in trouble.

- New Zealand's like your beautiful friend

that's just gone and got cancer.

And so what's the source of the cancer?

Well, it's primarily the dairy industry.

So there's a particular New Zealand mode

of economic development where we have these bonanzas,

and the bonanzas are based on

cashing in our natural resources.

The dairy industry for the last 20 years

has been a throwback to that

19th-century style of development

where we cash something in.

And what we've cashed in is our fresh water.

- It's simply been impossible for Kiwis to ignore.

You used to be able to swim

in our rivers and lakes in

New Zealand without risk of getting sick.

That just isn't possible,

in bulk because of the impact of industrial dairy.

Every year, we are losing 192 million tonnes of soil.

You know, this is actually our most precious

resource as a country, our top soil,

is simply washing out to sea every single year

because of our land use practices.

- It's all about destroying our natural capital,

which is the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

In Te Ao Māori, the Māori world, water is sacred.

We pushed for our country to be the first in the world

to give a river the same legal status as a person.

It worried me to know how much of an impact

dairy farming was having on our fresh water,

by using it and by polluting it.

Just down the road from my family home

was an alarming example of what could go wrong.

I met with some community leaders

who are trying to protect their lake.

What did it used to be like back in the day

when the lake was healthy?

- Being by the lake, we were able to catch fish.

We just did everything in there.

And now you

can't do any of them?

We can't do any of that. Not even our children.

The kids used to come down here

and they just lived down here, swimming in the water,

but the children had this sickness.

It wasn't until all that algae started over here

that we realized that there was more to it than that.

- I've seen farmers spreading

their manure and it's all blowing into the lake.

- Further up the catchment we found there was a dairy farm

and they had a consent to dump effluent.

And if any nutrients get into the water,

and especially around January,

it's perfect for an incubator

to actually just create an algae bloom.

- You can't have the water for the children to play in.

There's no one coming to the lake.

- We're talking about other things like water storage

for when there's a drought,

and the drought is heading our way right now, as I speak.

And people are gonna want water,

but what they want is better water than this.

- Water is gonna be the next gold.

The water is the life force.

And if we don't look after the water,

then all of us will perish.

- How could Fonterra be claiming to care about communities

and environmental sustainability?

I had to go call them again to see if they'd meet with me.

We got your email about you guys declining

to be part of the documentary.

I just thought if environmental sustainability

is at the heart of what you're doing,

I just think this is a massively missed opportunity

for you guys to share your initiatives

with the New Zealand public. - Yeah.

- Are those topics that you believe

Fonterra would like to comment on?

We can comment on any of them, but I mean,

then you'd end up with a three hour video just on us.

There's already a lot out there.

- Yeah, but you'd probably admit

that it is a bit confusing for consumers,

kind of, the messages that they're getting these days?

Mm-hmm.

Well, we're a big player.

It's a dairy industry thing, if that's what you're looking at?

Then you're better off dealing with DairyNZ.

- Yeah, I mean, Fonterra,

Fonterra is New Zealand's largest company.

Yes.

- So, you know, we thought

it'd be best if the story's

coming directly from you guys rather than anyone else.

Yeah, but I mean, while we're big

we're also part of a big industry.

What angle are you taking? How's it gonna work?

Because New Zealand is pretty simple

in terms of farming practices,

which makes us more carbon efficient,

the most nutritious milk in the world.

So is that the angle you're taking?

- We definitely want to get you on camera

talking about that,

talking about your side of the story in terms of

what milk means to New Zealand.

Well, we don't even need to say it on camera

it's so well documented.

What was going on?

Why were they avoiding an interview?

I was told to go on the DairyNZ website to see their facts.

NZ dairy is 64% more emissions efficient

than the global average.

But I had to wonder where this information came from,

and wasn't reassured when I saw it was from

industry-funded research.

It also doesn't include the huge amount of coal

used to make milk powder, Fonterra's main export product.

I did find someone from the industry

who was willing to talk with me, though,

a rep for the South Island Dairying Development Center.

- So our vision is to be a great place for animals to live,

producing high quality food to feed the world

and having, you know, a sus- not an impact,

a negative impact on the environment around us.

So we're all about transparency at SIDDC.

We try to share all of our data publicly

and that's why I'm here speaking to you today.

Canterbury seems to be quite a very dry region.

Why have we seen such an increase

in dairy farming in Canterbury,

and do you think it's a suitable place for dairy farming?

- Can I pass on that question?

- How is synthetic fertilizer made

and what is it made out of?

- Yeah, I'll pass on that one.

- Do you think we are putting

our future food security at risk?

- I don't wanna answer that. I dunno.

Yeah.

Well, that was confusing.

And what was even more confusing was all the media

about the good things the industry was doing.

Maybe they actually were heading in the right direction

and things were improving?

- You see, our waterways

are a huge part of who we are.

That's why thousands of Kiwis, including dairy farmers,

have been working hard to make a difference.

- The Environment Aotearoa Report in 2019

said that 82% of waterways

are unswimmable in farming catchments.

- I think if we look at water,

and we're doing a lot of investigation at the moment,

the water is not as bad

as perhaps those stats might indicate.

But why was government and industry

saying one thing and the science saying something else?

- What I get really annoyed with

is what I just call the bull

that the dairy industry seems to enjoy.

It's dishonest. It's greenwashing.

The issue I've got is not with farmers.

The issue I've long had,

has been with farming leadership and the lack thereof.

There's a complete level of just non-reality

that pervades the dairy industry.

We have environmental awards

that are sponsored by fertilizer companies.

- The reality is that we're not clean.

We might be green,

but it's just because

there's lots of fertilizer going on the grass,

making it look green.

New Zealanders really care

about the environment.

Even as one of the lowest emission

dairy producers in the world,

we continuing to work on new ways

to reduce our carbon footprint.

Industry greenwashing was everywhere I looked.

This carbon zero milk

is less than 1% of their total milk production,

and it's achieved by buying carbon offsets

instead of actual emission reduction.

Likewise, with their plant-based milk bottles,

a container made from plants, not plastic.

But otherwise, the same old milk.

- What the farming groups tend to hear

is so much propaganda from their own industry

and so little honest reality

that they tend to be shocked when they first hear it,

and they run back to the industry

to get the story that suits.

- So it doesn't create the burning platform for change

that actually the real facts would demand.

- I searched online

and saw that New Zealand's biggest greenhouse gas emitter

is Fonterra, with a huge 22 million tons every year.

But if that seems bad, it gets worse.

I found a report that shows Fonterra

are massively under-reporting their emissions.

Instead of the 22 million tonnes that Fonterra claims

the researchers discovered it was over 44 million tonnes.

That would mean Fonterra alone

produces more than the whole of Sweden,

a country with twice the population of Aotearoa.

I was surprised to find out that almost all dairy emissions

are from the cows themselves.

Methane comes from their digestive system

and nitrous oxide comes from the soil

when effluent and fertilizers are broken down.

- These animals produce gas, that's methane,

and that's a very virulent greenhouse gas.

So CO2, everybody knows about,

everybody knows about the burning of fossil fuel,

but people are not talking about the methane.

- Other countries,

you can see the smokestacks and the pollution pouring out.

We've gotta remember, in New Zealand,

our farms are our factories.

It turns out that grass-fed cows

produce more methane than grain-fed cows.

Methane has a global warming potential

that's 84 times stronger than CO2.

And one dairy cow

produces about 500 kilograms of methane.

I wanted to know what Fonterra's plan was

to reduce these emissions on farms.

I was astounded to find out that the Zero Carbon Bill

created an exemption for methane from farm animals,

with only a 10% reduction required by 2030.

Despite this super low threshold,

Fonterra were forecasting no reduction at all

in emissions from cows.

So much for a climate emergency.

- What do we want? - Climate justice!

- When do we want it? - Now!

Along with the methane produced on farms,

the dairy industry also creates emissions in other ways,

like using fertilizer made with fossil fuels

and coal to dehydrate milk.

There's just so little understanding

of just how much we are dependent on fossil fuels,

not just for everything we do

and how we transport ourselves,

but in our food as well.

- And the fact that Fonterra alone is burning

410,000 tonnes of coal every year to dehydrate milk

gives you a sense of the industrial scale

we've gone down industrial agriculture, big time,

and we've got industrial-sized emissions.

- Climate change is affecting

the world everywhere, it's happening now.

The ice is melting, sea levels are rising,

floods and droughts and hurricanes

are getting worse and more frequent.

What are the measures that will be taken

to address that emergency?

Practical measures, things that will actually happen?

Not things that we just talk about?

We know we have to control emissions.

We know we shouldn't have billions of animals.

Emissions aren't the only major concern.

If water is the new gold,

we're not investing it very wisely.

Every year in Aotearoa,

we're using 4.8 billion cubic meters of water

for the dairy industry.

That's 11 times the water use

of the country's human population.

- Lots of water is used

to change vegetable to animal protein.

Dwindling supplies of fresh water

are important in New Zealand.

- Entire rivers are drying up in summer now

because big, irrigating dairy farms,

are taking too much water from them.

An example of this crazy high use

is one dairy company taking more water

from the Waikato River

than the whole city of all Auckland

with over 1.6 million people.

Regional councils around Aotearoa

are responsible for enforcing regulations,

but it seems they aren't quite doing their job properly.

I heard about someone who was taking on the fight

for better water monitoring,

a former boxer who gave up his job to become a river ranger

after discovering the river he'd swum in as a boy

had been ruined by dairy effluent.

- My uncle and I, we went out to our homestead,

we just couldn't believe how bad the river was.

Full of urine, excrement from cattle,

and the stench, the cattle everywhere.

Yeah, and I started to cry, you know, at the enormity of it.

I understood that day, it's totally unmonitored.

So at that point in time in my life,

I just decided to get myself a boat suitable,

just for rivers, just try and do some reporting.

DairyNZ and Fonterra say, "Oh, we're 97.5% fenced off now."

Ah, but is your fence fit for purpose?

Many farmers raising both sides of their fence,

so they open their gate and put the cattle on the riverbank.

One of the river water quality tests I done

up at the Whangārei Falls up here,

it was 10 times over the safe limit for swimming.

- So this water looks nice, but is that not the case?

- You can't drink it.

You'd have to think twice

about letting your kids swim in it.

Nitrate is huge. You know, huge problem.

We can't see it.

It's penetrating through the ground to the rivers.

Aotearoa has got a problem with water quality. For sure.

After talking with Millan,

I wanted to find out why nitrates seemed to be

one of the biggest issues for water quality.

- In nature, all plants need nitrogen to grow,

but nature will provide it for us if we let it.

Instead, big agribusinesses

like Ravensdown and Agri Balance here in New Zealand,

sell synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.

New Zealand holds the dishonorable title

of having increased synthetic fertilizer use

more than any other OECD nation since 1990.

- All through nature for the 10,000 years

that humans have been doing agriculture,

it's about natural balances.

What we've done now is a one way system

where the way we have so many cows

is we put heaps of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer on

made from fossil fuels.

We're the biggest importer of palm kernel in the world.

So we put all of this stuff on the farm

to have this really high stocking rate.

We could never have that stocking rate

without all these inputs.

And so, the more you pour into a farming system

from the outside, the more leaks out bottom,

and the leaking out the bottom

we're seeing is the impacts on our waterways.

If nitrate turned our rivers red,

you know, we wouldn't have the problem.

It's only 'cause people can't see it,

they don't know it's there.

As you get more nitrate in drinking water,

the chances of getting colorectal cancer,

and a bunch of other things,

but we'll just talk about the colorectal cancer for a start,

really increase.

We've got nitrate levels

just ramping up in drinking water in Canterbury.

- So in Canterbury, where I'm from,

we have the highest stocking rates in the country

and the highest rates of the use of synthetic fertilizer.

We are already seeing drinking wells

showing up levels that are associated

with an increased risk of colorectal cancer.

In rural Canterbury,

pregnant mothers are being advised by health officials

that they need to get their private drinking water tested

for fear that it will cause fatal blue baby syndrome

from increased nitrate contamination.

It's not just dirty rivers that we are talking about here.

We're talking about people's health and well-being.

- I needed to talk with someone at Fonterra

about everything I'd learned so far.

I decided the only option was to just turn up

and see who I could find.

We're working on a documentary.

We're wondering if we could speak to someone from Fonterra

who can represent the New Zealand dairy industry

to have a chat with us? - OK, yeah.

- I'll probably ask Kayley about that.

- OK.

I wanted someone to front up

and answer the questions I had for them

that no one else could answer.

- If you can just pop onto our,

- But instead I was asked to leave another message.

Website or Facebook?

Can't say, I didn't see that coming.

I'd already called the number they gave me a few times

and hadn't heard back from anyone,

but I left one last message anyway.

"Sustainability and social responsibility

are a fundamental part of the way Fonterra operates."

- Dairy's important

for good nutrition, especially in young growing bodies.

Fonterra milk for schools helps make sure

primary school kids in New Zealand

not only get to enjoy our milk,

but also learn about the nutritional power it has.

With all the claims to be producing healthy food

I wanted to know if this was the reality

or just another illusion.

So I contacted some health professionals to find out.

- It's not beneficial, not required,

associated with lots of diseases.

The science is there, it's just,

we need people to catch up with the science.

So industry often talk a lot about calcium.

"You gotta drink milk because it's a good source of calcium,"

but I think they are kind of moving away from that.

- A lot of those old ideas they've cunningly backed off.

Unfortunately, of course, the damage has been done

because that's what a lot of people, I guess,

even my age learned when we were kids.

In fact, what we see is that the countries that eat

the highest amounts of calcium

have the highest rates of hip fractures and osteoporosis.

A New Zealand based study clearly shows

there's no evidence that

increasing calcium from dietary sources prevents fractures.

Yet, that's what most health professionals

are still telling us.

- I think it would be very, very beneficial

for society as a whole

if doctors were trained in nutrition, but they're not.

They get very limited amounts of nutrition training.

So basically what they teach is what's popular opinion.

- The main issue is that

the majority of the world's population

cannot digest the lactose in milk.

Particularly in Southeast Asia.

And there's good evidence that in the Pacific and Māori,

there's higher rates of lactose intolerance,

but also it increases the amount of mucus

and sinus inflammation that people get.

Kids are very vulnerable to it.

If they can cut out the dairy,

they can really respond very quickly.

- We know that there's numerous issues with dairy.

That is one of the things that really

annoys me about the milk in schools.

The implication by having the milk in there

is that this is something that's healthy,

that they should be eating.

There's a very good chance that it's actually hurting them.

- Fonterra milk for schools

is one of the best ways we can look out for our communities,

nurturing the next generation

by sharing the natural goodness of dairy.

We are Fonterra and this is Dairy for life.

- They want you to start off young

and they want to get into the minds of our youth population

so that once you've got that

person hooked on your product,

they're gonna be a customer for life.

In the 300,000 year history of modern humans,

the earliest people drank milk from other animals

was only 10,000 years ago.

Humans are the only species that drinks milk after infancy

and the only ones that take milk from other animals.

Cows were the obvious choice in most places.

But if our aim was to get a milk supply

with similar nutrition to our own,

we could have gone with zebra milk,

or maybe even chimpanzee milk.

But I guess that's not so easy.

What about dog milk for convenience

and an extra boost of protein?

Not sure if Fonterra could sell that idea, though.

And we aren't even meant to consume high amounts of protein.

Human milk is perfectly designed for us

and has the lowest protein amount of any mammal's milk.

Everything that's contained

in any of these dairy products or in any animal product,

with the exception of vitamin B12 of course,

comes from the plants essentially.

And so by having the animals eat them first

and then us eating the animals,

it's a very inefficient way of us getting to that nutrition,

which we could have just got

from the plants in the first place.

We don't need to filter our nutrition through animals.

We'd do a lot better going

straight to the source of nutrition in the first instance.

It makes sense that we can skip the middle cow

like our early ancestors did.

And it turns out we also filter other things through cows

like antibiotics and hormones.

- They're routinely fed antibiotics.

The bacteria build up resistance

and people have already died from a small cut,

which becomes infected,

and there just isn't an antibiotic

strong enough to cure it.

It's one of the big fears in medicine

that we're gradually reducing

the number of antibiotics that can be effective.

Antibiotics are often used for mastitis,

a common and painful inflammation of the udder

that causes white blood cells to leach into milk.

A liter of milk can have up to 400 million of these cells

before it's considered unfit for people to drink.

- Given that it's got these kinds of things in there,

is that really something you wanna be consuming

from another animal?

The processing that they have

is because it's a dirty product, you know?

It's got a lot of stuff in there that can make you sick.

Everyone knows what it smells like after it's been,

you know, left out for a day or two.

It's nasty.

- This is not a food that was ever designed

to be inside a human being.

'Cause you've got these cows, they're pregnant,

they're lactating at the same time

so the female hormones in a dairy cow

are really, really high.

And so you've got things like estrogen,

which is in the milk.

What this also does is it will

grow cells that are abnormal really quickly.

- That's probably one of the reasons why

it is associated with hormone sensitive cancers.

So that's your prostate cancer, breast cancer.

- Definitely a very strong link with prostate cancer,

possibly even stronger than there is

with smoking and lung cancer.

It's full of stuff that blows up a small calf

into a huge cow within, you know, a year or so.

One study found that even

moderate of dairy milk consumption

can increase women's risk of breast cancer up to 80%.

And yet this isn't even mentioned

on our national Breast Cancer Foundation website

who are still promoting dairy products,

saying they're important for bone health,

that same old idea.

- People need to be informed of what they're buying

and the risks of it.

- Why would you promote anything that's been associated

with any kind of cancer?

- These conversations made me think of my own family

and the loved ones I've lost.

Māori men are 70% more likely to die from prostate cancer

than non-Māori.

And if the link between

dairy consumption and prostate cancer was common knowledge,

maybe I could have met my grandfather.

The more I thought about it,

the stranger it seemed that we even consume dairy at all.

Māori have historically been some of the tallest,

strongest, fittest people on the planet

and we didn't have dairy until Europeans showed up.

So we obviously don't need it to be healthy.

Dairy being marketed to us as a health food

ignores our history.

Chronic disease was almost unheard of before colonization,

but now, with one of the highest

dairy consumption rates in the world,

Māori suffer from higher rates of diabetes,

heart disease and cancers.

Hello, Chris speaking.

Chris. Hi.

This is Philippa from Fonterra. How are you?

- Philippa? Hi, yeah, I'm good, thanks.

We are really hoping to get someone

from Fonterra to talk to us.

Does that sound like -- - Mm-hmm.

- something you'd be able to help us with?

New Zealand's dairy industry

is the most sustainable in the world.

And actually the farming practices here

are the least emissions efficient,

sorry, the most emissions efficient

out of any in the world.

- But what we are noticing as well

is what's happening to our waterways.

What's happening to that footprint

of greenhouse gas emissions coming out of the sector.

I was asked to email them again with the same information

and realized that to get some honesty,

I had to find farmers to talk with instead.

I was surprised with what I found out

about life on the farm.

- The family's been farming here for 95-odd years,

and we've always dairy farmed here.

I was born here and yeah, I'll probably die here.

Hopefully. But not too soon!

We work seven days a week.

We're up at 3:30, 4:00 in the morning,

home by six o'clock, maybe at night,

worse in the spring.

Lucky if you get a bit of breakfast

in the morning, some days, you know, it's full on.

And with all the other, you know,

everything coming at you from all sides, nah,

the motivation to be continuing to dairy farm is gone.

If people aren't appreciative of what you're doing,

then that motivation disappears pretty quick.

And then, you don't see a vat full of milk to feed people.

You see a vat full of money.

Now talk about sustainability.

No one considers the sustainability to the farmers,

the sustainability of human,

um, life, because a farmer,

it's not sustainable if farmers are all hanging themselves

left, right and center, or,

or sort of letting your farm go to wrack and ruin because

they just have lost the plot and don't care anymore.

And that's happening.

It's a reality I know is happening

and that's gotta be a crucial part of sustainability.

And that's why I feel

if dairying's getting too much for people,

then perhaps dairying's not the game you should be in.

- Another farmer was willing to talk about his experience

with the bacterial disease, mycoplasma bovis.

The Ministry for Primary Industries

is attempting to eradicate it, at any cost.

- If MPI finds one of your animals

with the disease of mycoplasma bovis,

they kill everything, everything.

I've had 34 years in this industry

and I go during middle of the night to check on my cows

to make sure that the birth process is going all right,

and if there's a calf that's not well

you get it inside and nurture it.

And then all of a sudden

you're being told you have to kill these calves.

And, oh that, I think that particularly afterwards

it was very traumatizing.

And I'm still not over it, actually.

So how many days did this take?

You killing the calves?

Probably 80, 90 days.

How many calves do you

think you were killing per day?

- Some days might be one and some days might be six, seven.

We had another farm as well

affected with mycoplasma bovis and the farm manager there,

he had to kill the calves on the farm there

and he was calving more cows than I was.

Couldn't hack it anymore in the end

and he tried to commit suicide.

And, my son...

My son found him and got him out

and now he's left New Zealand.

He's gone. Twenty-three-year-old.

Fucked his life. For this.

- Email from Fonterra.

"Morning, Chris,

thanks for the opportunity, again, to be part of your video.

We currently have other opportunities

for our sustainability program

and have decided that we won't be participating

in your documentary."

Surely if sustainability is important for Fonterra,

then they can make time

for a short interview with us about sustainability?

I decided to give up trying to get answers from them.

Since they'd refused to talk,

I'd have to keep finding people who would.

There seemed to be

a lot in the media about regenerative agriculture

being the climate change solution everyone's hoping for,

and how healthy soil can actually store carbon.

- Carbon sequestration in the soil

is a really valuable, easy, cheap, you know,

immediate tool that we can start employing

in greenhouse gas emissions.

Farmers are not only on the front lines of change,

but they also represent our best opportunity

to combat things like climate change.

They're the heroes of the story.

- That sounded impressive.

But then I found a major

international report that disagrees.

It shows that any carbon sequestration from grazing cows

is substantially outweighed

by the greenhouse gas emissions they generate.

It turns out that selling that idea

as a climate change solution is just serving up false hope.

- There are too many cows on this planet

and we can't keep farming them,

even if every single one of them is farmed regeneratively.

We cannot be having these land uses

which are all about producing milk,

or all about producing meat.

We have to diversify into plant-based production.

That's what the science is telling us.

- Even plant-based foods transported

from the other side of the world

are more carbon efficient than animal products.

And I was surprised to see that one kilogram of cheese

creates a staggering 21 kilos of emissions,

compared with about one kilo of emissions

from most vegetables and other plant foods.

I also discovered there's a secret ingredient

the industry uses that boosts milk production,

causing even more devastation.

- Fonterra is selling New Zealand's milk as grass fed,

seeming to forget that we're actually importing

two and a half million tonnes of palm kernel

to feed those cows.

Fonterra's key supplier of PKE

is linked to ongoing deforestation

of tropical rainforest

and human rights abuses.

It's massively destroying habitat

for endangered species like the orangutan

We are farming so many cows in New Zealand

that we completely surpassed

any kind of environmental limits here.

We're actually cutting down forest in Indonesia

to feed a bloated dairy herd

that is trashing our environment here,

but also indebting dairy farmers who are holding around,

collectively, $38 billion worth of debt.

This industry is not working for anyone.

It didn't make sense

how farmers could be in so much debt.

Why had this happened?

And was Fonterra also in financial trouble?

- In the last 20 years,

farmers have borrowed over 30 billion extra.

Dairy debt has gone up from,

in 2000 it was about 10 billion.

It's now 40 billion.

That's a 400% increase in debt.

- We now have so many people in New Zealand

struggling under so much debt, irresponsible debt,

that was given out just because

the dairy industry has so much clout,

and they're now in a financial position

that they don't know where to go,

because how do you get out from millions of dollars of debt?

- Definitely, that was a direction

Fonterra went in a few years ago

when they were pushing for volume

that wasn't to everyone's agreement, definitely.

And looking back it's like, "Wow, we were duped."

"How did they pull that one over our bloody eyes," you know?

- We know that it's not economically problematic

for dairy farmers to reduce stocking rates,

but for Fonterra the opposite is true.

They have built a lot of milk dehydrators around the country

that require a large volume of milk.

So what works financially for the fancy Fonterra HQ

in Fanshawe Street, Auckland,

does not necessarily work for New Zealand's dairy farmers.

- When I was working for government,

I got an incredibly detailed insight into Fonterra,

deep down into the bowels of the company.

The Fonterra dream is over. It's long since gone.

The conversation for today is, will Fonterra even survive?

'Cause its numbers are that bad.

If some really smart person in a white coat

comes up with a dairy alternative,

but is a quarter of the cost

and doesn't have the environmental impact,

then I'm sorry dairy, you're toast.

I couldn't believe

that our dairy industry could be that fragile.

Isn't it meant to be

the backbone of our economy?

Could a cheaper and more sustainable dairy alternative

really wipe it out completely?

And I had to wonder why we're still using

so much land for dairy

when we could get more profit from growing plants instead?

A government funded report shows that Aotearoa

has a huge amount of land suitable for growing crops

and potential for $80 billion from plant-based crops

compared with only $28 billion from animal agriculture.

I met with the dairy spokesman for Federated Farmers

to find out what he thought about transitioning.

Do you think there are some dairy farmers

that will stick with dairy no matter what?

- We all just wanna make a dollar.

And if it's a better returns growing some alternative foods,

show us some money.

I think some farmers would be quite happy

to hang up the apron and grow crops

if that was a better return on investment.

I don't mind changing.

If I can provide a better future for my family, I'll change.

I'll stop milking those cows and I'll jump ship.

It's that simple really, innit?

But it might already be too late

for some farmers to take up new opportunities.

One research project looked into using dairy land

to make oat milk, which uses 13 times less water,

11 times less land,

and creates 3.5 times less

carbon emissions than cow's milk.

- It was way more protein per hectare,

way more energy efficient.

Everything that you could measure

was so much more efficient without the cows.

It was a fantastic example of where

you would be much better off not having the animals there

and you could make this really good product.

The thing that you need to make plant-based milk of course,

is nice clean water.

And when they started looking

at the groundwater in the vicinity,

in some of those bores,

there was five or six times the World Health Organization

limit for nitrate in that water.

So you just wouldn't be able to make

the milk out of it. It's just a classic example of

here's a good option of how we could do it better,

but we've already shut the gate on that option

because we've already polluted the water

past limits where you could use it.

- So we have current

farming models that are potentially harming our future?

Yep.

When you pollute the water and you pollute the soil,

it really limits your options for the future.

So if the true costs were being paid,

then we wouldn't be doing dairy in this country.

An example of this cost

is Aotearoa taxpayers giving dairy farmers $130 million

not to farm in the Taupō and Rotorua Lake areas

to reduce the water contamination from nitrates.

If we paid all our dairy farmers to stop polluting water,

that would cost over $20 billion.

- As a businessperson, and you had to pay that,

you would go, "Right, we stop doing it, you know,

because there's no money in this,

it's gonna cost us to do it."

It's only because the cost

is being passed on to the rest of us.

- This is an industry making profits

off of the destruction of our environment,

and it is us, everyday New Zealanders,

who are going to, and are already,

paying the price for that.

And there are very powerful companies

that want to keep it that way,

despite the costs to New Zealand.

I did some more investigating and found out

even the country's nutrition guidelines

are influenced by the dairy industry.

Consultation with key stakeholders

meant that Fonterra had a say,

and three out of the four issues they raised were changed,

including the removal of milk alternatives.

I'd heard some strong reactions to dairy alternatives

from industry representatives and politicians also,

trying to stop any possible threat.

This notion that veganism and almond powder

or something akin to that is gonna replace

genuine red meat, genuine dairy milk,

it needs to be stopped in its tracks.

We should not tolerate.

We should not acquiesce for one inch

of the political journey with these people

who are continuing to

stigmatize and demonize our legacy industry.

- If it's not a milk, if it's a nut juice or something else,

just call it for what it is and create your own brand

and create your own marketing strategy

and leverage off that.

Don't leverage off the dairy industry.

Then, a well-respected magazine

came out with this on the cover.

After reading about all the so-called

benefits of meat and dairy,

I looked online and found that the featured scientists

were from the Riddet Institute,

which has close ties with meat and dairy companies,

including Fonterra.

What's it gonna take to change these organizations?

- Probably one thing is not to be funded by dairy.

A lot of people who put out studies,

and it's been shown very well, get funded by dairy sources,

whether it's overtly or whether you have to dig around.

- So a huge amount of money that comes into universities

is from the industry.

And so you start speaking out against that industry

and your options start to close down really, really quickly.

Who do you believe in an argument,

is you follow the money.

- Especially in New Zealand, the farming industry, you know,

you're seen to be almost unpatriotic

if you're not supporting it by

having lots of dairy, having lots of meat.

- You've got an industry that has been incredibly powerful

for an incredibly long time.

And it's deeply entrenched.

Now, once you realize in New Zealand,

that five million cows

are a lot more important than five million people,

then everything else in New Zealand politics

suddenly makes a lot of sense,

because the cows are more important than we are.

- Some people who are really heavily invested in status quo

and you are threatening their income,

and so they will be very angry if somebody's speaking up

and pointing out harm that you're doing,

you try to shoot them down.

An animal rights group found this out first hand

when they took out an ad in an international newspaper,

highlighting cruelty on New Zealand dairy farms.

- When we placed an ad in "The Guardian,"

we got a lot of abuse.

We got a lot of threats, a lot of death threats.

I've had death threats right throughout my

30 years working for animals, but this was bad.

This was seriously bad.

This industry's power scared me.

And I wasn't alone.

Many people I talked with had been too frightened

to even speak on camera.

I'd already been warned about the backlash against me

after making a film that exposes these issues.

- Death threats happen.

People will make serious threats and allegations against you

because they're seeing their livelihood being threatened.

And so, they see you as a threat.

I want you all to be aware, like,

this is a reality of this.

Like, you guys are going up against the biggest company

and then the biggest industry in the entire country.

That being said, it absolutely needs to be done.

The fear of reprisal can't outweigh

the fear of not acting, right?

Like, not speaking up, not showing this truth,

is the real danger.

They're destroying the planet.

They're killing these animals and people are dying,

and people are literally dying because of this,

and it's all for the sake of making money.

I never considered that

my life could be threatened by exposing this industry.

But I realized that revealing the truth

could also have a powerful impact

and help create the change I want so badly to see.

I decided that I had to continue with the film

no matter what the outcome.

The industry claim that dairy is essential for us

was starting to sound a bit desperate to me,

along with their recent strategy

of targeting the Asian market.

With population growth

and rising incomes in these countries,

it's an obvious business choice.

- People all around the world are actively seeking products

that they know they can trust to feed their families.

And today our world-class dairy products are available

in over 140 countries around the world.

We're dedicated to sharing this goodness with the world.

- People are being told that they need

lots and lots of dairy.

There are a lot of populations around the world

where dairy wasn't a part of their cultural diet.

- If you look at Asia,

which is actually where we're trying to market this stuff,

which is just bizarre because

lactose intolerance rates of almost 100%

in many parts of Asia.

So we're not doing them any favors.

- So exporting dairy to Southeast Asia,

it's a business decision, but at the same time,

you're exporting your diseases offshore in return for money.

- You can already see this happening,

like diabetes rates in India and China

have just gone through the roof

as they start adopting a more Western type of diet,

and dairy is a big part of that.

- Everywhere in the world that this

European diet is forced on people,

people go from the healthiest to then the sickest.

It's easy to push these white lies

and that's all this industry is doing.

It's like, they're pushing just outright racist lies.

- We're excited and we're proud

to be able to make this connection

between the way we at Fonterra create world-class milk

and the products our dairy shows up in

to nourish people around the world.

- It's quite a difficult situation for New Zealand

to turn that sort of spotlight on itself or whatever,

and say, "Actually, maybe what we are producing here

isn't actually very healthy for people.

And maybe we are not doing the right thing by producing this

and marketing it to the rest of the world."

- How far do you go

with justifying what you do because there's a profit in it?

I hear that classic "we're feeding the world" story.

I think the reality is much more

that people would be better off if we didn't provide it.

Just because there's a market for something

doesn't make it right.

To go towards meeting this

increased global demand for dairy,

Fonterra had predicted a 40% increase in milk production

in the 10 year years from 2015 to 2025.

With the environment already struggling,

how could this increase possibly be sustainable?

And what about the cows?

From what I'd seen they were already

being pushed to their limits

having been selectively bred to produce more than

double the amount of milk they would naturally produce.

Dairy cows are usually worn out after about five years,

then sent to the slaughter house to be killed

and turned into hamburger mince.

I was curious to see what the people who produce

ethical dairy products think of this not-so-happy ending.

Your brand is kind of centered around

this compassion for these animals.

- Yeah. - Happy cows.

This seems to be a bit of a obstacle for you

if these cows are gonna be eventually sent to slaughter.

- Mm. - How do you deal with that?

How do you communicate that with the consumer?

- Yeah. Well, I mean, that's true.

And it's animal agriculture.

We should try and extend their life as much as possible

without profit always being the core driver, I suppose.

But then again, she will, she will die.

Mmm. That's what we say.

Like many New Zealanders,

I'd watched the undercover footage of the dairy industry

from Farmwatch, a volunteer organization

showing what goes on away from the public eye.

I join them to see for myself

what happens to the animals in dairy country.

- You never know what you're gonna see, or when,

so you just gotta do the time on the road.

Most people drive past paddocks just like this

and they just see cows eating grass,

and they think that that's all there is to it.

But when you think about the fact

that they're artificially inseminated,

the fact that they are then pregnant

and being milked for nine months,

and then they have a baby

that's taken away from them every year,

I think a lot of people don't know that that happens.

Do you get any negative backlash

from the public or from farmers?

- We're pretty careful.

Like if we get down a road and we feel unsafe

and we see, kind of, any movement, we'll just leave.

We've had too many close calls to take risks like that.

We don't like feeling trapped down dead-end roads.

Are you able just to pull over for a minute,

just... thank you.

- Any cows that are gonna go to slaughter

will be placed in that crate, picked up by a truck,

and then taken to the slaughter house.

- Car in front.

Someone behind us, too.

- Just on the road.

Since you started in 2014,

have things become harder to document?

You drive through today

and you see almost nothing.

It's all hidden, now, it's all off the road.

So it's definitely harder.

Once you've exposed an industry,

they definitely will try and hide it.

- Are youse all right?

Yeah. We're all good.

- Can you please leave.

- OK. - Now.

- Don't come back.

There's a big cow straight ahead of us

- Big cow? - Oh, fuck me!

Oh, fuck!

This particular cow has a calf half out of her,

so she's clearly died giving birth.

And then just been thrown on this pile of dead bodies.

So, I'm pretty sure on the left it's calf skins.

And...

Those are skinned calves.

There's a person there.

OK, we're gonna have to, he's coming towards us.

When we do investigations that require

hidden camera placements and going out at night,

I mean, it's utterly terrifying.

It's work that nobody should have to do.

And the more you look, the more awful shit you see,

and you can't really ever unsee a lot of that stuff.

We've seen just so much death and suffering

out in dairy country.

It always makes me laugh when I see,

"Fonterra for life" or "Dairy for life"

because this industry to me

is just full of death and suffering.

It's an industry based on death.

I was sickened by what I had seen.

My experience with Farmwatch made me realize

how most people have no chance to see what really happens

behind the industry's marketing machine.

- Well, initially,

you believe that you're going to have

all the fields around you, the animals,

you've got all these sort of visions in your head

of what you see on the ads.

But the difference between actually seeing it and doing it

is night and day, night and day.

That's when it really, truly hits you what's going on.

That it's not just lush fields and happy cows.

- We just have to make sure

that what we do is the right thing

and not be trying to hide anything.

- The industry is there to make money as much as possible,

and basically hide truth from people.

They do not want you to know the full picture.

And their job really,

is to sweep that dark side under the rug.

- It is very, very secretive.

If the animal experimentation industry wasn't so well hidden

and people could actually see the research and tests

that cows are used in, they'd know that it's not natural.

If people who go and buy their natural milk

from the supermarkets saw a fistulated cow

that looks more like a Frankenstein animal

than a natural cow running about in a field

like they probably imagine,

it would be pretty clear to them

that there's not a lot natural about the dairy industry.

- And it's ridiculous really

that we have to rely on volunteers to

basically show what's going on on the farms.

And what they show that goes on the farms is just not like

the Fonterra open days on the farm, of course,

where you can have a look and pet a little calf.

No, they actually shows what's going on on the farm.

- Farmers are just trying to get through their day

the best way that they can, and they're exhausted.

And you're also in a place where no one's watching.

So it's rife for abuse.

- Whenever activists put cameras out there,

they record deliberate infliction

of suffering on animals.

- It's much more convenient for them

if they believe that the animals,

just because they're bred for food, they're just things,

and they don't have these emotions.

And of course, it's completely untrue.

- My first morning in the calf pens,

I stood there and there were all these tiny babies,

lots of them still with bloody navels,

some of them still had afterbirth on them

that were calling out for their Mums, basically.

And it hit me like a force field

that this is what it took to get that milk.

- They bellow, and they cry.

They cry for their Mums, Mums cry for their babies.

It became quite clear that you were listening to pain.

And so you can't really forget that once you know that.

And, it then forces you as a farmer, I think to say,

"All right, well, what is the greater good

that that pain's delivering to?"

I don't really wanna get into

the bobby calf thing if that's all right.

- Back in the day they used to pay one bob for them

because they were considered so worthless.

Now we have around two million a year

that are considered bobbies.

We're slaughtering two million newborns over eight weeks.

- If you talk to many dairy farmers,

they will say they will struggle

with this whole bobby calf issue

and taking these calves away from the mothers,

they struggle with that themselves.

- "So, we're really kind to our bobby calves."

Bullshit!

You know, where those calves are going?

- There were a lot of things that I questioned

when I was farming,

and I was just sort of told that's way it has to be.

It has to be this way because of production,

because you know, the industry needs milk,

the people need this, this is our job.

What we are doing is necessary.

It's just generations,

and generations and generations of conditioning.

- You have to desensitize yourself to it.

If you don't, yeah, you may end up a shivering wreck

and unable to continue.

- Just because there's pain and suffering

built into a system doesn't mean

that the system's bad or wrong or evil.

So, I am not afraid as a agricultural storyteller

of talking about things like

institutionalized animal cruelty

because it makes it real.

And you know...

... think about where I'm going with this...

No, I think I will leave it there.

I just couldn't understand

how all this could be happening

for a product that we don't even need.

And why are we're still putting so much

into propping up the industry

instead of transitioning out of it.

Could the power of the dairy industry be the only thing

that's stopping any positive change?

- We know what the problems are

and we're just dancing around the solution.

So rather than cutting it off at the source

and moving away from animal agriculture,

what we are doing is we are trying to reduce

the negative impact on the environment.

It's just a desperate attempt

at trying to keep that industry alive.

- If you are doing something that's stupid

and you then actually apply a silver bullet, you know,

you are trying to continue the stupid.

- All we are gonna do by these techno fixes to dairy,

so, "oh, put them in a barn,"

or "give them methane vaccine," or "change their feed,"

That's just shifting environmental problems around.

- The best way to reduce the number of animals

is for more people to go to a plant-based diet.

What New Zealand and other countries can do

is to reduce our demand on milk and dairy products.

And the farmers of course,

will rise up in arms because it's their livelihood.

And so if you're going to say,

"OK, no more, you can't keep cows anymore,"

there must be an alternative for those farmers

because you've taken away their livelihood.

One of those alternatives

could be growing hemp.

Larrys Gold hemp products are made by a family

who are trying to find their way out of the dairy industry.

So you're a fourth-generation dairy farmer

and you're considering getting out of the business.

Why is that?

- It just seems a bit crazy

growing plant protein to feed animals to produce protein.

So much less protein is produced

per hectare of animal protein so, you know,

we've got a world to feed, and there's so many starving people.

It's just a step in the right direction.

We have to farm at the moment, you know, just for income.

And it's hard just to switch over

with a lot of debt and stuff.

We need some change.

It has to be done the right way and phase it out, I guess?

Potential to grow really good hemp around this area,

I think most of New Zealand, to be honest.

Pretty hardy plant.

And how likely is it for you guys

that that's gonna become something financially viable?

- I think we can do it.

We need to have a better industry set up in New Zealand.

It's pretty hard for guys like us,

'cause there's nothing around here either.

You know, pretty much everything's dairy farming,

so that's all people know, you know?

- The governing body that is responsible

for enabling the hemp industry is somewhat disabling it.

I guess the plant needs to be unlocked.

There seemed to be

other options out there for farmers.

So why wasn't that change happening more?

And why doesn't the hemp industry

have more government support?

- We're really just scratching the surface

of what hemp can do.

Future food uses, future plastic uses, construction uses,

and hemp itself sucks up a hell of a lot of nitrogen.

It grows extremely fast and consumes

four times more CO2 than pine does.

If the government enabled us to use

the carbon credits from hemp

on the emissions trading scheme,

the economics of hemp would be unbelievably good.

But central government

haven't been supportive enough, I don't feel,

for an industry that can solve

so many of the systemic problems

that they're trying to undertake.

I think hemp provides a wonderful

solution to many of those.

Farmers want to make a change.

And that's what we are trying to do hugely is

enable this industry and get it moving off the ground

and make it economically viable.

Once that happens,

then farmers will have a very easy decision to make.

But the global demand for dairy is still rising.

Even with all the plant-based alternatives available

it's clear that most people around the world

are still buying into dairy industry marketing.

Then I discovered that change might happen

in a totally unexpected way.

A major international report from RethinkX

predicts that making real dairy without cows

will wipe out the global dairy industry by 2030.

Once it's cheaper than dairy from cows,

big companies like Nestle could switch

their milk powder supply to the animal-free version.

And our milk powder exports could be doomed.

- RethinkX are saying in the US dairy industry,

something like a 90% reduction

in their cow numbers within a decade.

- How realistic do you think

that report is and how worried should New Zealand farmers be

in terms of them having a sustainable career?

- I think they should be really worried.

I think the last thing the dairy industry

should be worried about

is a 10% greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

I think they've gotta worry about

will they even be around in 2030?

- We're going to see

the most consequential shift in food production systems

that we've ever seen in the past 10,000 years.

Cow as a technology will become redundant.

This new technology is exponentially more efficient

and that means that we are seeing a huge, incredible shift,

the biggest one in humankind

in the way food will be produced.

I went on the RethinkX website

and saw that this animal free dairy

is made by microbes instead of mammary glands.

These microbes are instructed to produce dairy proteins.

They go into a fermentation tank along with feed stock,

and when it's finished fermenting,

the microbes are filtered out,

leaving real dairy protein that's identical

to what's found in cow's milk.

It's also made with 5% of the resources,

1% of the waste, and 0% of the cows.

And because it's real dairy,

it tastes exactly like what we're used to,

but it does come with some of the health risks

that animal proteins are linked with.

As I was looking into this coming agricultural disruption,

COVID took over the world.

In lockdown, I read about the spread of zoonotic diseases.

Those that jump from animals to humans, like COVID-19.

It turns out that many devastating diseases

have come from animals, including Ebola,

SARS, HIV, and measles,

which originally spread from cattle to humans.

I was alarmed to see

that the increased demand for animal protein

is the number one risk factor

for the emergence of zoonotic diseases.

Now seemed like a good time to talk with people

who could tell me more about dairy 2.0.

Milk made without cows.

- As soon as you remove cows from the equation,

the business of dairy becomes much, much easier

and much, much more profitable.

The milk created without cows would completely blow

the traditional industry out of the water.

- Fermentation, the way that you produce beer,

is going to be the way that you produce proteins.

Essentially it's gonna be 10 times cheaper

than animal protein.

Cows cannot possibly compete with this.

And the same fate is going to happen with all livestock.

Pigs, chicken, sheep, first cows,

because they are the most inefficient

food production system on the planet.

The cow produces 96% waste.

Of everything that it consumes, 96% is waste.

So essentially you're building up this cow

for two or three years and you need all this land

and all this energy and all this water,

and 88% of that milk is water with no economic value.

There are companies already making casein and whey

here in Silicon Valley and around the world,

directly with precision fermentation,

and selling it to cheese makers.

I have eaten cheese from a Kiwi company

that is making precision fermentation cheese

here in San Francisco.

- When did you start New Culture and what's it all about?

- So I started New Culture in early 2018.

What New Culture does is we make cow cheese without the cow.

That's animal free, that's sustainable,

and that's indistinguishable

from the dairy cheese everyone loves.

And what's actually very interesting

is that this process of making

an animal protein without the animal is already used

in the dairy cheese industry.

And now over 90% of dairy cheeses today

are made using this animal enzyme

that's made without the animal.

It is tough to be a Kiwi looking to disrupt

the New Zealand economy in this way,

but, with the way the world's going,

we need to change and we need to be proactive about that.

- New Zealand's dairy exports

could be wiped out without a single consumer

changing their behavior from animal proteins

to precision fermentation proteins.

This is all a business-to-business disruption.

When is that going to happen?

The technology cost curve will determine that,

the market will determine that,

but there's no doubt that it's going to happen.

- I realized that this disruption is already happening

with investment in fermentation companies

at the highest level ever.

Over $435 million invested in just the first half of 2020.

Why wasn't everyone talking about the end of the cash cow

instead of saying there's no threat?

Disruptions usually happen quickly

and wipe out the existing system.

Think of a forest fire.

When the forest is tinder ready,

just a little spark and the whole forest goes.

It's what I call market trauma.

If you think your cash flows are going to drop

by 90% over the next 10 years,

then that is going to be reflected in your stock today.

Not in 10 years, but today.

- Do you think New Zealand should be worried

about these disruptive industries?

- We're looking for a premium

and we have to produce better products,

better quality products,

convince consumers that, you know,

they want the best nutrition,

and then we can remain viable as a farming country.

- The old chestnut of,

"Well, there'll always be a market for premium products,"

is just so cemented into the psyche of our leaders.

The dairy industry, no matter how quickly they pivot,

it's more like they're just shuffling the, you know,

the chairs on the Titanic.

We need a new boat. Animal free.

When you have old, largely pale, male, stale leaders,

then to get that new dialogue coming through

it's almost like pushing shit uphill.

- They're trying to slow down change.

And because of that,

they're constantly staying on the wrong side of history.

- What does that mean for dairy companies?

What does that mean for the dairy community?

What does that mean for New Zealand's communities at large?

This is beyond Fonterra. This is our livelihood.

- And those are the sort of questions

that the government really needs to be thinking about.

And I think that's just too scary for them.

It's just way too scary.

- I'm trying to wake New Zealand up to the fact

that there is an urgency.

The scientists get there long before other people get there.

Lots of people have talked about pandemics,

including myself for years,

and everybody ignored us there too.

It's happened with the pandemic.

It's happened with climate change.

- This is not about only destruction.

This is also a massive opportunity.

I mean, I see the precision fermentation industry

as an emerging trillion-dollar industry.

- I don't think we are at all prepared

for a massive change of this type.

And I don't say that to be alarmist, more to be realistic.

I would like to see more of our smarts being packaged up

into intellectual property

rather than selling carcasses

or bags of dehydrated powders.

- New Zealand better prepare for this disruption.

As in now, as in the COVID disruption,

those who were prepared and those who acted decisively,

are the ones who are gonna come out on top more quickly.

- I was blown away

by everything I'd learned.

And the fact that the government

still seems to be in denial about it.

That means we are not preparing

and neither are other countries.

It was clear to me that we're in big trouble

if we don't take this seriously and make urgent changes.

It turns out that Aotearoa, New Zealand, the US and the EU,

account for nearly half of all global dairy production

and these governments are also in the best position

to help farmers transition out of dairy,

saving our economy and our environment.

- We need to support our farming communities to transition.

I think it is unfair for decades to have encouraged them

to go into intensive dairy and then expect them

to somehow tomorrow switch.

- Support people to actually, you know, change.

We are all products

of where we've come from and the life we're born into,

but we don't have to continue this way, you know?

You know, and we wanna live here.

So, clearly, living means not dairy farming

'cause then dairy farming's not really living.

I think we've just stumbled onto this

fantastic crop for our region.

Pumpkins just seem to be a boomer, really.

Absolutely boomer.

We're hoping that pumpkin seeds

will wipe the floor with dairy.

Well, if it beat dairy farming out, return wise,

why would a farmer not do it?

I can't imagine why they would be so bloody-minded

about milking cows forever.

I think I'm coming into a good space now,

and it's been the move away from dairy farming, definitely.

With the future generations

I think the farm will be in good hands.

The land will be in good hands, you know?

I'd heard of a dairy farm near Wellington

that's making a transition to growing organic vegetables.

Cameron Family Farms is owned by filmmaker,

James Cameron and his wife, Suzy.

- We bought our farm in the Wairarapa in 2011.

We had two dairies within the farm

and one of them being a very successful dairy.

Even though I had been in

the environmental sector for decades,

no one had ever mentioned

anything about animal agriculture.

They had talked about dead zones, ocean acidification,

deforestation, biodiversity loss, et cetera, et cetera.

If you put animal agriculture in the middle,

you can put all of those things around the outside

and they all connect.

I didn't know any of this!

And in may of 2012,

we went plant-based and realized that our dream

to have this beautiful organic dairy organization

didn't seem like the right way to go.

So we closed the dairies down.

So now we grow organic veggies.

You need less land, you need less water,

you need less inputs.

It's a much more efficient way of growing food.

And most recently the thing that has come up

that should probably be the number one thing

on our radar right now is pandemics.

So 75 to 80% of all diseases that have been created

have been created because of the exploitation of animals.

- Is this a change that you think

other dairy farmers in the area could also take on?

- One of the things that we noticed very early on

was just how quickly New Zealanders can pivot.

Plant-based food products are the largest-growing sector

within the food sector around the world.

People have to be able to do it in a way

that it's lucrative.

It also has to do with being able to

look at themselves in the mirror at the end of the day,

knowing what it's doing to the land,

knowing what it's doing to people's health,

knowing what it's doing to the animals.

Even if it was healthy to eat animals,

there is no way that we can feed humankind

by eating animals.

No wonder we already have a world hunger issue.

It's partly to do with how we're using the land.

One acre of land can produce

15 times more protein from plants

than the same area of land used for farming animals.

We're also using over three-quarters

of the world's agricultural land

for farmed animals and to grow food to feed them.

- Just imagine more grain today is grown to feed

our farm animals than starving people.

You know, what we're doing now doesn't make sense.

So we need a whole new way of thinking.

In 2019,

world-leading scientists from across the globe

came together to answer this question,

"Can we feed a future population of 10 billion people

a healthy diet within planetary boundaries?"

They discovered that without a global shift

to a plant-based diet,

today's children will inherit a planet

that's been severely degraded

and where much of the population will increasingly suffer

from malnutrition and preventable disease.

From everything I'd learned,

it wasn't just dairy

that we needed to move away from consuming.

It was all animal products.

If everyone ate a plant-based diet

we'd free up land area greater than the size of Africa.

A lot of the world's farmland

could be returned to native species,

an effective way of storing carbon

and increasing biodiversity at the same time.

In New Zealand,

going plant-based would reduce our dietary emissions

by over 40% along with saving the healthcare system

up to $20 billion over our lifetime.

- Every time you put plant-based food on your plate,

you're doing something good for your health,

and for the environment and for the animals.

It will not matter if we have electric cars

or if we have sustainable clothing to wear

if we don't do something about our environment.

And that is a huge piece of it,

to be able to shift away from animal agriculture.

- For me,

dairy was a normal part of life growing up in New Zealand.

So it's been a disturbing journey coming to understand

that milk isn't the wholesome product

we're led to believe it is,

and that animal agriculture

is damaging our future in so many ways.

But I have hope for a different future.

Instead of continuing down this doomed path,

we could grow healthier and more sustainable

plant-based food from less land.

Re-wild the land we gain back

and live ethically with all life on this planet.

Companies like Fonterra will have to decide

which side of history they want to be on,

to keep hiding from the truth

or to work together on solutions.

- We all each have a responsibility

because every day we live,

we make some impact on the planet.

We have a choice as to what sort of impact

we're going to make.

And if billions of people make ethical choices every day,

even small ones,

that's going to lead to change

and eventually the impossible will have become possible

and we'll change the world.