Friday, March 29, 2024

Farmers to oppose Waikato water plan

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Waikato farmers affected by the proposed Healthy Rivers Wai Ora Plan are being urged to join a group to challenge it.
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The plan, to be released in early September, aimed to reduce sediment, bacteria and nutrients in the Waikato and Waipa rivers in a joint iwi-Waikato Regional Council project.

Though full details were still to be revealed, sheep and beef farmers were already expressing increasing unease at a “nitrogen reference point” setting the upper limit on a farm’s nitrogen losses.

Group chairman and Ballance Farm Environment Award winner Rick Burke said it was simply another term for grandparenting, enshrining the right to continue to release nitrogen into waterways.

“And we do not believe grandparenting is a viable, sustainable means of genuinely reducing nitrogen losses into waterways.

“It penalises low-emitting sheep and beef operators who may be neighbours to dairy units often losing more nitrogen per hectare and allowed to continue to do so under these provisions.”

Burke farmed in the Western Bay of Plenty but decided to join the group because he believed there was a better approach to protecting the catchments than a top-down, regulated one.

Both Burke and fellow campaigner Rob Macnab are former Beef + Lamb farmers’ council chairmen and Macnab was still on the farmers’ council. He was also director of Total Ag farm consultants.

They are canvassing for Waikato farmers, both dairy and drystock, to join the Farmers for Positive Change group. The group intended to help farmers submit on the plan when it was released.

With 60% of Waikato in sheep and beef production, the men believed the river initiative was likely to set the scene for dry stock operators in other catchment plans nationally.

While a separate entity, the group had the blessing of B+LNZ. It was calling on the levy group’s resources in what looked likely to have the drystock sector pushing back hard, challenging the new rules.

Indications were all sheep and beef operators would have to fence all water systems and be unable to graze stock on certain slopes.

But Burke and Macnab wanted a “natural capital” approach to farm environment management rather than top-down, regulated controls.

Burke said his own award-winning property provided a good example of how a farm could be run by identifying land management units in it. Land use could be optimised by matching a management unit’s limitations to particular uses.

“We picked up on this concept a few years ago now. It meant we identified those parts of the farm that we should not have stock on and retired them while aiming to run the parts we could stock better.

“The result is we have managed to lift ourselves from being average performers profit-wise to about the top 10%, without any increase in our nitrogen losses.”

Overall he had retired 70ha of his farm’s 350ha from grazing.

Macnab had implemented land environment plans on more than 200 Waikato properties. No two plans were the same but were determined by an individual farm’s topography, soil, stock and the farmer’s ability.

“But they all have the same overall goal of protecting the environment, leveraging off their individual features and the IP of the farmer running them.

“The farmers we have introduced LEPs to love the idea that they own the plan. They are achieving the vision of the Healthy Rivers plan, which I think is sound in itself, but each is doing it in a way that fits with their farm, not through a standardised, regulated approach.”

Neither Macnab nor Burke wanted a self-regulated, soft approach to environmental management.

Macnab said every farm could be audited for its LEP’s effectiveness and regulators could then hit those who failed.

“This approach could be adopted across the entire pastoral sector, with all farm types capable of reducing nitrogen losses, rather than this business-as-usual approach being taken.”

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