When it comes to emissions pricing, DairyNZ says no deal is better than a bad deal - and only a fair and reasonable system will be accepted for farmers.
DairyNZ said the Government's emissions pricing proposal threatened the viability of farms and rural communities and was not acceptable to farmers.
"We just wanted to give farmers clarity about where we stood with this, because there's a lot of misinformation and a lot of misunderstanding around," DairyNZ chair Jim van der Poel told The Country's Jamie Mackay.
"I want to be quite clear. The problem we have, if we agree to something that is suboptimal - we will be stuck with it - and that's not really a tenable position."
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Van der Poel said DairyNZ believed New Zealand would always have a commitment to the Paris Agreement, "regardless of who the government is", and therefore agriculture would always have to be part of the solution.
"It has to be something that is fair and equitable and works, and so we can't agree to anything; unless, in our view, it meets that criteria."
DairyNZ backs the sector's original He Waka Eke Noa proposal that was co-designed in good faith, with the Government sitting at the table.
Initially, it seemed the Government had only made a few changes to the proposal but this turned out not to be the case, Van der Poel said.
"As we've got more and more access to the detail, we've realised how fundamentally different it is.
"Whether that's around governance, around price setting, around sequestration [or] around collectives … when you add them all together - it's fundamentally different."
DairyNZ was shocked by just how different the response was, especially after negotiations in May, he said.
"All the industry partners at the time supported that, and also, as you'll recall, of the 30 members who were part of that process, two of them were government departments, being MPI and Ministry for the Environment - so nothing in there was a surprise.
"It is disappointing - but we just have to continue to work on trying to get back to the right answer."
Farmers have until November 18 to give feedback and, if there was still no agreement after this, van der Poel said DairyNZ would consider walking away from the deal altogether.
"If we didn't agree, one of two things would happen - we'd either leave the legislation as it is and we'd go into the ETS - or the Government would just implement its own version of He Waka Eke Noa without industry support.
"Both of them come with risk but, from our perspective at least, we can't be part of a solution or an answer that we know is suboptimal and so that's I guess where we are today."
He urged farmers to make submissions: "It's always really powerful when farmers actually give their own version around what this means for them and their families and their communities."
