Just who IS Rachel Stewart? Since my last column, I have watched some in the dairy farming community publicly telling me, and everyone else, who I am.

I have heard about my personal life, my sex life, my partner's sex life, and everything else in between.

The old "someone knows somebody else who knows her" - you know the drill.

I have also received threats online and a handwritten note in my letterbox.

No-one - I repeat - no-one has discussed any issue I raised in my column. At all. It has been a textbook example of attacking the messenger.

Throughout the whole thing there has been an over-arching theme of "Why does she hate us so much?"

In their search for answers to a very misguided question, they have completely missed something huge.

That dairy farming, in its manic quest for growth, has lost a huge chunk of public sympathy.

The reasons are myriad but they are real.

Water quality probably heads the list, followed very closely by irrigation.

However, animal welfare issues, lax health and safety, and climate change denial all do a pretty good job of getting the general public offside too.

In my last column I pointed out that the public relations spin from the likes of Federated Farmers is actually doing more damage than anything I could ever write. In other words, the industry is effectively shooting itself in the foot.

When an elected Feds representative writes that rapists and murderers are treated better in the courts than farmers, I can surely rest my case.

However, none of this solves a very big problem.

How can the gap be bridged between dairy farmers and the general populace?

Trust me when I say it is not a case of, "Oh, they just need a few days working on the farm, getting up at 5am seven days a week, then they'll understand how hard it is". That kind of one-upmanship won't cut it.

It is more a case of farmers truly wanting to understand that the urban concerns are valid and real. Stop the talking down to, "walk a mile in my shoes", rhetoric.

Another sure-fire way of not winning friends and influencing people is to attack any woman expressing her views, by using sexualised, gossipy, gross online chat.

Obviously too, I would have thought, threats of rape or death are a no-no.

Yet, that is the extent to which, in the desire to silence my views, some fool has gone.

It endlessly fascinates me that men are exempt from such sexualised contempt, no matter what or how they say something.

Is it any wonder that women stop speaking when they are turned into objects of pure gender?

Sadly, but not entirely unexpectedly, even women were jumping on the bandwagon - with one suggesting I must be sleeping with my editor.

This is the level some of my detractors are happy to go to.

My columns have a surprisingly good urban following. When I write about the dairy industry - only about 10 per cent of the time - it is because I articulate the concerns many non-rural people have.

I understand the subject matter - not least because of my own family background in dairy and sheep farming, and my four years as a Federated Farmers provincial president representing Whanganui.

To constantly state that I hate dairy farmers is simply another rough attempt to reduce my views to a place of either neurosis or revenge - or both.

That feels better than admitting I might have a point.

The fact remains that Kiwis are becoming increasing intolerant of dairying's manic drive to take from our collective environment for its own short-term gain.

They are also unhappy with the industry's laissez-faire attitude toward health and safety, or any regulation for that matter. Farmers repeatedly assert that they are a "special case" because they live and work on their properties.

As an argument it just does not fly.

Despite my little lash, the world will still keep turning, and Federated Farmers, DairyNZ and Fonterra will keep putting out their shameless spin.

They get a largely unimpeded run in the New Zealand media, while voices like mine are generally confined to the margins.

I am small fry compared with New Zealand's massive agricultural machine.

Which is why I do wonder how my last column hit such a nerve. If I lack all credibility, as some commentators were quick to suggest, why did it turn into an all-out witch hunt?

I am just someone who loves farming, as evidenced by having given years of my life to agri-politics. I only ever want it to be better.

We all have a stake in the dairy industry.

Every last New Zealander, male or female, has a right to talk about what we are all, one way or another, paying for.

Will I keep raising the issues?

You can bet the farm on it.