His feelings were made quite clear when our phone call was interrupted by the ominous thudding and whirring of a helicopter hovering over his farm and neighbouring properties.

“Christ, is that the bloody Environment Waikato helicopter policing us all again?’ he muttered.

I tried to continue our conversation on other subjects but to no avail. He was distracted and annoyed by that helicopter and it was the end of any other topic for the day.

“We are stringent in our management and disposal of effluent with our effluent irrigator, but you just don’t know where you stand with these bastards, everyone around here is walking on egg shells, money is tight, the season has been hard and we all farm to the best of our abilities but they continue to invade our airspace; and though we are doing nothing wrong, they make you feel as though you are and have you stressing and wondering whether you missed anything,” he said.

“I’d like to rip one of those office workers out of their cushy job where they justify their existence with this crap and put them out doing real work for a month here on the farm and see how they cope.”

Well after much venting, we ended our phone call, deciding that I would call back the next day.

The following phone call resulted in a much more elated mood from the bothered farmer.

“I needn’t have worried yesterday, it was actually the cops, there was a raid on a P lab and they found illegal handguns and all sorts with some mongrels in a rental property up the road,” he said.

Therefore, gathering from that, our hard working Kiwi farmers now prefer to have P busts up the road from them than the council – whom they pay thousands of dollars in rates to – coming anywhere near their daily lives. Go figure.