The first step was to discuss the imposition of water metering, leading on to a requirement for all dairy farms to have long-term water consents.
It had the first of a series of meetings with a dairy industry liaison group on July 31, when council executives met farmer representatives, DairyNZ, and Fonterra.
But the low-key approach was blown out of the water by Farmers of New Zealand representative Hugh Ross, who released minutes of the meeting and his own “call to action” to all Northland farmers, not just dairy farmers.
“The threat of taxation and regulation of farmers’ use of water needs to be stopped,” he said.
Rose claimed that the NRC was empire-building and eager to find new ways of clipping the farmers’ ticket.
He said that two water meters and the proposed resource consent would cost each farmer about $5000, just to continue using water for livestock and washdowns.
NRC chairman Bill Shepherd, himself a dairy farmer and a former national Federated Farmers office holder, was quick to defend the consultation approach.
He pointed out that the government’s NPS was a directive to regional councils, which had to implement the requirements.
“We haven’t a time frame for setting new regulations, although the government requires them to be in place by 2025, and initially we want to take time to get industry views and hopefully some consensus.
“When we are required to have an allocation scheme we need to know what each farm is using, hence the talk about meters.
“As a dairy farmer myself, I am very conscious of the impact of water consents on farming businesses,” Shepherd said.
Northland was comparatively well-placed among the regions with an abundance of water sources and reasonably reliable rainfall but few Northland dairy farmers had water consents at present, only effluent disposal consents, he said.
There was a permitted use of 10 cumecs/day of diverted surface water in the summer and autumn months, which DairyNZ said was adequate for only about 150 cows.
Most of the 900 dairy farms in the province were already exceeding that take and therefore technically required to apply for consent, but the NRC had not policed that requirement.
Both DairyNZ and NRC have pointed out that multi-million-dollar dairy businesses do not have security over their water supply, potentially at risk from neighbouring development.
To establish an existing use, and therefore prior right, farmers would need water measurements.
The Sustainable Dairying: Water Accord objectives already included a target of 85% of all dairy farms on water meters by 2020.
NRC consents programme manager, water and wastes, Stuart Savill told the liaison group that it was expected one consent would cover both livestock drinking water and dairy use.
Monitoring would promote more efficient water use through minimisation methods and leak detection, he said.
The minimum requirements for a consent application would include details of every water source, what rate of water was taken and when, the number of cows and milking regime, and other relevant factors such as livestock drinking network and farm dairy design.
Savill said the actual water use in dairies and for livestock in Northland was not known, so NRC might have to introduce interim volumes such as 70 litres/cow for in-dairy use and 120 for drinking water.
Then farms would establish their actual use over three years by metering and introducing efficiency measures.
Fonterra was proposing two water meters, one for total water supplied for the farm from all sources and the other on the livestock drinking water system. In-dairy use would then be calculated by the numbers from the first meter minus those from the second.
But farms with multiple water sources and perhaps a mix of surface and ground water might require more meters.
The council would strongly promote the use of dataloggers and telemetry to minimise the work involved in monitoring and record-keeping, and would suggest daily readings initially.
Highly allocated catchments would be handled in a group, probably grandfathering existing water use, so clawback would be very unlikely provided use was efficient and reasonable.
First up would be the Mangere catchment to the west of Whangarei, containing 20 dairy farms, followed by the Mangonui, Ruakaka, or Waitangi catchments, Savill said.
