Drystock and hill country farmers affected by the plan limiting their ability to increase nitrogen losses in the future have been subject to a major Beef + Lamb New Zealand campaign in recent months to increase their awareness of the plan’s implications.
Plan explanation workshops in local halls around the region attracted hundreds of farmers who were told how best to file submissions.
The submissions period for the plan change was run over four months because of its significance. It would close on March 8.
B+LNZ environmental policy manager Cordina Jordan said she expected there would be a flood of last-minute submissions over the coming week.
“Those that have been received include some particularly high-quality ones that we are keen to put up on our website as examples of what farmers have said about the Healthy Rivers Plan.
“We have found that as a group drystock farmers support the plan’s goals of making rivers swimmable and fishable within 80 years.
“However, what they are objecting to are some of the means of achieving that.”
There were three key points of objection coming through in the submissions received to date.
“They are opposed to the nitrogen reference points (NRP), which are effectively grand-parenting rights to pollute based on past levels. They support stock exclusion from waterways but not the extent to which it is intended, particularly around hill country properties,” she said.
It required farmers with land over 25 degrees in slope to fence stock out of waterways.
The third area of objection was the uncertainty that went with the end of the plan’s 10 year tenure.
“Not knowing where it will go after that period makes investment in any of those mitigations for the first 10 years uneconomic.”
Estimates based on an AgFirst survey were the cost for a drystock property to meet the plan’s requirements ranged from $300,000 to $700,000.
Farmers for Positive Change chairman Rick Burke said some areas of the region had been more prevalent than others when it came to lodging submissions, with North Waikato and King Country particularly strong.
His group wanted a more equitable approach in the plan’s conditions that acknowledged drystock farmers’ lower nitrogen losses and provided them with a means to lift productivity of their better country, helping fund their ability to limit sediment and phosphate losses further on steeper country.
“There have been some very successful kitchen-table meetings among farmers within districts and these have been excellent for helping farmers become more confident about submitting,” he said.
Having three main farmer groups including his own that were communicating well with each other had done much to raise the profile of the plan’s implications, alongside the investment B+LNZ had put in behind educating farmers.
Burke was optimistic the council was hearing what farmers were saying about their problems with the NRPs, and might be considering more of a sub-catchment approach to managing nutrient losses, rather than the proposed one-size-fits-all NRP cap.
“We feel they only need to see what the grand-parenting effect has been in Canterbury to try and avoid going down that path.
“While some progress has been made there in biodiversity and sediment, nitrogen levels are still just going up and up.
“For us grand-parenting is the really big rock that needs to be cracked.”
But Jordan was not as optimistic a more flexible approach would be taken on a sub-catchment level at this stage.
“But we would just like the council to put the entire plan on pause until such time as another means is worked out to manage nitrogen losses,” she said.
A council spokesman said it expected in excess of 1000 submissions and possibly near 2000, given the plan’s impact on the catchment’s 96,000 landowners.
A submission from council staff was being discussed this week, including issues on plan clarity, implementability and enforceability.
