A Ministry for the Environment (MfE) webinar this week focusing on farm practice, was light on detail and revealed officials are reviewing how to apply the rule limiting stock crossing an individual waterway to twice a month.
Officials have previously announced reviews into the accuracy of the low-slope map which determines stock exclusion rules, as well as its application to extensive or lightly stock farms.
A week after releasing the policy the Government reversed pugging restrictions in gateways and around stock water troughs on intensively grazed paddocks after accepting they were impractical.
The ministry’s chief adviser Bryan Smith told the webinar a resolution to the mapping issues could be five months away.
Work is also under way to develop a system so farmers can determine if a paddock has a mean 10-degree slope, a rule which permits intensive winter grazing.
During the 45-minute presentation, the policies were summarised and some questions, mostly from regional councils, were answered.
Asked what should be included in farm environment plans, Smith says they need to identify farming practices that are a risk to freshwater or freshwater ecology and include actions that mitigate, manage or reduce that risk.
They also need to include regional council requirements.
Smith says farmers need to have documentation detailing when existing stock exclusion fences were built if they are closer than three metres from a waterway.
If built since stock exclusion rules were introduced, they may have to be moved.
Farm scale maps cannot be used to determine slopes as part of stock exclusion rules, with Smith saying the low-slope maps were created to simplify the decision-making process.
Ministry analyst Henrietta Ansell says the rules requiring winter-grazed paddocks to be resown by a set date provide regulatory certainty and send a message that paddocks should not be left without vegetative cover which can lead to soil and nutrient runoff.
Rules limit pugging to a depth of 20cm and not covering more than 50% of a paddock.
She says farmers can determine if they breach the rules by taking a random measurement of pugging depth and then establish the portion of the paddock that is pugged.
The ministry is about to launch more detailed guidelines for the policy.
The policy is based on three obligations: to stop further degradation which means limits to land use and stem the loss of wetlands and streams; show material water quality improvement within five years; and reverse past damage within a generation.
As part of that, new ways of measuring water quality have been included in the National Policy Statement and regional councils are being held to account for four values: ecosystem health, human contact, thriving species and food availability.
Meantime, MfE is standing by its fencing cost estimates despite Fencing Contractors NZ saying those prices are about half the actual cost.
In its regulatory impact assessment document, the ministry estimated average fencing costs of $5/metre for dairy, $14/m for sheep and beef and $20/m for deer farms on rolling land as part of the stock exclusion provision in the new freshwater regulations.
In response to questions from the Farmers Weekly, MfE says those costs were based on the 2016 National Stock Exclusion Study and had input from fencing contractors, regional councils, the Department of Conservation, Landcare Research, AgResearch, the Waihora Ellesmere Trust, QEII National Trust and the Landcare Trust.
In a statement MfE says it has not seen the methodology used by the fencing industry to support their claims the costs were too light.
Association board member Shane Beets told the Farmers Weekly that while fencing costs vary according to region, terrain, materials and individual businesses, the MfE costs are not realistic.
“The figures quoted I would say are certainly unrepresentative of the reality in the industry.
“It looks me that based on average figures, they would be at least half what the reality is.”
MfE’s essential freshwater document released last month estimates 32,000km of waterways will have to be fenced under the new stock exclusion rules at an estimated cost of $773 million.
The association also questioned where the material and staff would come from to erect the 32,000km of fencing required by the policy by 2025.
