If you can, put yourself in the hooves of a cattle beast. In fact, put yourself in the hooves of two types of cattle beast.

The first type is the kind we’re all generally familiar with. The one we see in paddocks up and down the country. The one that gets to eat as much grass as it wants day-in, day out.

The one that certainly gets rained on and snowed on, in certain parts of the country anyway. But the one who also gets to bask in the sun, the one who gets fresh air through those big nostrils and is only held back by a fence or two.

It’s not always a long gig. Because, as we know, cattle beasts on farms are generally on a one-way trip to the supermarket, the butcher’s shop or your barbeque.

But I think we can all agree - meatlover, vegetarian or whatever - that if you had to be a cattle beast, this is how you’d want to spend your days.

It’s also how we, as a country, have liked or wanted the rest of the world to think of us when it comes to agriculture.

Grass, lucerne, sunshine, fresh air. 100 percent New Zealand Pure. All the cliches.

So that’s the first type of cattle beast that I want you to imagine being. Not a bad life.

The second type that I want you to put yourself in the hooves of is the cattle beast destined to live out its days (and nights) in a massive shed with hundreds of other animals.

All-year round, you eat and drink and sleep - you do all the things that cattle beasts do - except you’re not out in a paddock in the sunshine and the rain and fresh air. You’re stuck under a roof, never really seeing the light of day.

A type of set-up that you’ll never see on an Air New Zealand advert for our 100 percent pure country. But it is the type of set-up that one farm company wants to build on Banks Peninsula.

The company’s called Wongan Hills and it’s got big plans for a site near Lake Ellesmere, which has a lot of the locals in the area upset because they can’t imagine how something like this couldn’t be anything but bad for the environment.

Incredibly, last year the Christchurch City Council gave consent for these massive sheds to be built. But the outfit wanting to build them and house a couple of thousand cattle inside 24/7 also needs resource consent from Environment Canterbury.

And ECAN has decided that, in light of the public interest, it’s going to notify the application and let people have their say. Which has delighted the group set-up to oppose it.

Its spokesperson is saying in the news today that it’s a good thing that it’s being publicly notified because ECAN needs to consider more than just its own intel and modelling to determine whether the thing should get resource consent.

The community group, known as the Little River Eco Collective, says it’s vital that ECAN hears what the locals have to say and hear what other scientists and experts have to say.

Which is the technical end of things. The “hows” and “why” of what impact such a massive development could have on the local environment - with Lake Ellesmere being a particular concern.

Just as an aside, ECAN has put in a truckload of work over the years working with iwi to try and restore Lake Ellesmere because it’s been in an appalling condition.

And that’s what the locals opposed to the development are saying. That sticking these sheds or “feedlots” as they’re known just over three kilometres from Lake Ellesmere won't do the lake any favours.

Which is the technical side of things that all sides will get their experts fighting over when ECAN does public notify the farm’s consent application.

For me, I think it would be appalling having hundreds and hundreds of cattle beasts stuck in massive sheds day and night, all year ‘round.

As you’ll know full well, if you go to the supermarket today, chances are you might struggle to find any eggs. That’s because battery farms aren’t allowed anymore.

So what’s the difference between hens cooped up in a battery farm and these cattle cooped up in a complex nearly the size of the Convention Centre, in Christchurch? That’s how big this thing will be if it gets the go-ahead.

Without doubt, it would be a monstrosity to look at. And I have no doubt that it would have, at least some, negative impacts on the local environment.

And it would definitely, definitely fly completely in the face of what farming in New Zealand is all about. And what farmers in New Zealand have told us they’re all about.