Friday, March 29, 2024

Water accord results flowing

Avatar photo
Dairy farmers continue to achieve industry-wide targets under the Sustainable Dairying: Water Accord.
Reading Time: 3 minutes

The water accord is a set of national good management practice benchmarks aimed at lifting environmental performance on dairy farms. It includes targets for effluent management, riparian planting and improving water and nutrient efficiency.

Of the 13 targets, four have been achieved, four are on track, two still in progress and three behind schedule.

The audited report highlights included 96% of dairy cattle being fenced off from waterways on farms, significant noncompliance for dairy effluent systems dropping to 5.8% and more than 99% of 42,773 regular stock crossing points on dairy farms having bridges or culverts to protect local water quality.

It was a good look for the industry to achieve these big targets under a voluntary initiative before these actions become regulated, DairyNZ’s strategy and investment leader for sustainability Dr Rick Pridmore said.

Most of the regional council rules coming in around water quality were not pushing the industry much further than farmers were already achieving on their own, he said.

“Dairy farmers deserve credit for doing this without any rules or regulations.

“I’m amazed at where we’ve got to. I’m so proud of our industry. We’re almost where we need to be with regional council rules.”

The industry could not be accused of being in denial, Pridmore said.

There was a general attitude that the industry was part of the problem and should be part of the solution and farmers had made significant progress, he said.

Farmers had made significant financial investment in the last five years, with more than $1 billion being spent on environmental initiatives, 70% of which has been on effluent system upgrades.

“The industry has done an excellent job over the last five years when it’s had the money to make a difference.”

The current downturn in the dairy industry would make it difficult for farmers to continue spending a lot of money on environmental farm changes, however.

“I always judge if you’ve done enough on how much progress you made when you can afford to do it.

“Dairy in my opinion, when it had the money it’s done a lot. When it doesn’t have the money, everybody has to expect that you will do a little bit less.”

Farmers had already done a lot of the big spending, having invested in infrastructure and the focus was now switching to gathering more nutrient information from farmers, which wouldn’t come at a big cost to farmers.

Gathering that information had proved one of the toughest challenges under the water accord.

The accord fell short of the original target to collect nutrient management data from 100% of dairy farms by May 2015.

Only 75% of farmers provided the data, with 8598 nutrient budgets processed last year.

The level of information required and the individual processing through the Overseer model to produce a reliable nitrogen loss estimate for each farm made it difficult to collect the data.

Gaining that data was important to enable farmers to be successful in nutrient management onfarm once regional councils set limits, Pridmore said.

“We want to be compliant for nutrient targets that we set in the regions and getting everybody to move faster on the nutrient management area and for us to provide farmers with more support so they can be successful is the big goal.”

There was a need to streamline the process so farmers would not have to file the same information repeatedly for different parties.

There was work in progress to create a way for farmers to approve the transfer of data so dairy companies, fertiliser companies or regional councils could access it, he said.

Another big challenge for the industry was showcasing the progress made by farmers to the general public.

The government and regional councils understood the work the dairy industry was doing, but it was hard to transfer that knowledge to the public, Pridmore said.

“The general public don’t get it, it’s frustrating. Most people don’t understand what a culvert is or what a nutrient budget is. They don’t know how to value it. So it’s hard to convince people what we are doing.”

Total
0
Shares
People are also reading