It claimed the farmer-owned co-ops are responsible for polluting rivers.
The billboards said “Ravensdown and Ballance Pollute Rivers” and to the left in smaller letters, “#TooManyCows”, which the authority determined to be advocacy advertising and therefore in breach of the Code of Ethics of Advocacy Principles.
Advocacy advertisers must clearly distinguished between fact and opinion, take care not to infringe on people’s rights, not breach the spirit of the code and the advertiser’s identity should be clear.
But Greenpeace campaigner Gen Toop said the ruling will have a chilling effect on environmental and social advocacy and is an attack on free speech.
“Civil society must be able to hold individual companies to account, especially when they are responsible for environmental destruction, like Ravensdown and Ballance,” she said.
One of the three complainants, Farmers Weekly columnist Alan Emerson, said the grounds for appeal are very narrow, confined to a point of law, that the authority decision is wrong or that there is some new information.
“I can’t see where they are coming from but they are welcome to try.”
Emerson likened the billboard’s message to claiming car makers are responsible for the 379 road deaths last year, which is untrue and unacceptable.
“They obviously have no control of what their vehicles do when they are sold and neither does Ballance or Ravensdown with their fertilisers.”
The three complaints said the billboards are facially wrong and pollution from fertiliser run off is scant to non-existent with the main cause nitrogen from cow urine and fertiliser is not a pollutant but a plant food.
The prime minister’s former science adviser Sir Peter Gluckman gave evidence some waterways are in a good state but others have been compromised by agricultural intensification, urban expansion, industrial pollution, hydro-electric development and the effects of drought.
The complainants also claim the #TooManyCows tag is Greenpeace opinion and ignores the fact only 15% of waterways run through dairy farming areas.
Greenpeace countered that intensive dairy farming and the use of synthetic fertiliser damage waterways.
A minority of the board believed the advertisement was not misleading, accepting Greenpeace’s submission the use of fertiliser enables greater use of the land and leads to more cows and more pollution.
