Marnie Prickett was shoved into the glare of the contentious water quality debate two years ago when she headed the Choose Clean Water campaign.
While not the first campaign pushing for better water quality around New Zealand it was notable for the way it pitched one heavyweight industry, tourism, against another, the pastoral farming sector.
Funded with a $10,000 grant from the Tourism Export Council Prickett and her associates mounted a heavy-hitting campaign making good use of social media to highlight the impact farming has on individuals’ beloved waterways around the country.
The campaign had aimed for 10,000 signatures on a petition to lift acceptable water standards.
It got 12,000 signatures, prompting a government review of the national policy on acceptable freshwater standards. The Government has since called for improvements to water quality within five years.
“But it is also important to note our petition was part of an enormous push, not only from us but the public and other environmental and recreation groups,” she says.
Prickett is an agricultural science graduate from Massey and has long maintained she is not simply a protester wanting to throw rocks at the farming sector.
She believes she comes as someone looking long term at what jobs the sector will offer if it does not lift its sustainability and acceptance as a valuable part of NZ’s economic and social fabric.
“And I have a sense that I am still young enough to want to put my energy in where people are willing and excited about viewing farming differently.
“Pamu are looking from an environmental perspective rather than the traditional extractive approach NZ has taken for almost 100 years.”
Her thoughts echo those of Pamu’s chief executive Steve Carden who last year acknowledged the industry has a problem, that it has reached peak economic, social and environmental limits on how it farms and badly needs a new strategy for creating wealth from farms and from the land.
Pamu’s environment group was itself a NZ first. It opened the tent to some of the country’s most vocal academic critics of pastoral farming, including freshwater ecologist Mike Joy and environmental farming consultant Dr Alison Dewes.
They were given a direct line to an enterprise that led the country in the scale and intensity of its dairy conversions in the early 2000s and still had the option to further stock up its central North Island operations with thousands of extra cows.
Instead, the group’s first three years have resulted in Pamu destocking dairy farms to lower numbers of cows in the sensitive mid-North Island catchments, ending palm kernel use on all farms, running full environmental impact assessments on all farms and scrutinising animal welfare more closely.
The steps are also reflected closely in the shift from its old Landcorp branding to a consumer focus, emphasising high-value, high-quality protein products through its Pamu brand.
But Prickett’s acceptance of the role with Pamu is also underscored by an almost desperate sense of urgency and belief time is running out to effect realistic and achievable change that will at least check any further ecosystem degradation.
“The feeling I have is that there is still a huge amount of work to do but at Pamu there is also a lot of desire to see that change happen.”
She is cautious about claiming NZ has entered a new stage in the water quality debate, one where the approach is more collaborative and less blame-focused.
“Denial has been the industry’s modus operandi for decades.
“We have, however, had some breakthroughs.
“This year Irrigation NZ acknowledged irrigation has environmental impacts but still failed to go to the next step and apologise to those affected by those impacts.”
She said it was endlessly frustrating to have people accuse her and her group of playing a blame game when they wanted agriculture to take a leadership role.
Prickett notes the need for change is coming faster than ever and the language of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted that.
“We really only have about five years to make significant changes and climate change is linked to water quality and biodiversity, as Sir Peter Gluckman noted in his report earlier this year.
“The mistake we have made in the past is we have looked at issues in isolation. All these issues have to be looked at as a whole.”
