R Stewart (The Weekend Sun, May 8) makes wild comments that it takes 800 litres of water for a farmer to produce a litre of milk to a bottle.

Let me use my personal situation which would apply to more than 90 per cent of NZ dairy farmers.

We have 104 hectares in Tirau, milking 380 cows, producing approximately 1.94 million litres of milk per year.

We have one water pump on the farm pumping 4700 litres of water per hour (113,000 litres per day) as well as supplying three houses and farm dairy (if it was made to run 24 hrs a day).

And no other source of water needed.

That equates to my farm consuming on a daily average 21 litres of water for every litre of milk we produced in the last 12 months. Note that is from paddock to the milk tanker collecting that milk.

So if we were to use Stewarts figure that would leave the processing bottling plant needing to use 780 litres of water to process that litre of milk. Sorry - not possible.

This is why NZ dairy farmers are the most efficient producers of grass to milk in the world. Where there is intense irrigation, greater volumes of water will be used but the highest percentage of milk produced in NZ is from non-irrigated land. I suspect all non-irrigated farmers would mirror my experience above. In the arid farmland of the USA or Middle East it would no doubt be a different equation.

Farmers do not need sympathy, they just need to be recognised for the long hours they put into producing that litre of milk and the export receipts they generate to get the country through the current mess. Agriculture will be our saviour!

Geoff Mathis, Mt Maunganui