“But you’ve got to take your community with you,” she told the Environmental Defence Society’s conference in Auckland where speakers suggested the longer the delay in land use change the harder the transition will be.
“A lot of farmers have taken on their own issues and are getting on with solving them,” Milne said.
“There’s been a huge mindshift.”
Farmers accept some regulation will have to go with good management practice (GMP) and dairy companies are putting more supply credentials in place.
“It can be a slow burn but we are lifting everyone.”
While she is milking 200 cows now she might not be doing that in five or 10 years.
“But I will still have the land,” she said.
Before investing in a Herd Home last year she worked out that if she needs to she can quickly convert it to a horticultural use.
Landcorp environment head Alison Dewes said GMP alone will not achieve the level of environmental improvement some areas need and farmers might be forced to change land use.
“You can’t talk about fiddling around the edges in some sensitive catchments,” she said.
Environment Ministry water director Martin Workman said certainty of direction is required for farmers and work being done needs to be scaled up, such as in erosion where the present initiatives will result in a 300-year process.
“We need to do different things.”
He has sympathy for farmers who were encouraged to develop their farming operations where they shouldn’t have but it is now about shared responsibility and managing a complex future together.
Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Simon Upton said he had hoped to give some information on his investigation into Overseer but his report was likely to be delivered to the Government in November.
There has to be better understanding of nutrient transport through the soil and what models can do as well as improved communication of what is happening.
“Overseer stops at the root zone at a depth of 60 centimetres while nutrients translocate and that may be permanently,” he said.
As well as those gaps there is a variety of data sets and calibrations based on a small number of sites so extrapolations have to be made.
Even then there are big uncertainties with differences only metres apart because of attenuation. An uncertainty analysis of Overseer has never been done.
When it comes to communication of water quality New Zealand had the greatest amount of the least-valuable information and the least information about the most-valuable indicators. And different information interpreted differently means there is uncertainty about what is going on at a particular site.
Waikato Regional Council chief executive Vaughan Payne said the right mind, skill and tool sets need to be applied for freshwater restoration. But it is a complex problem that is developing all the time so collaboration has to be the mantra.
“Science is important but it is a social issue.”
There has to be prioritisation of where the best results can be achieved for the spending involved.
While he is tentatively more positive about the future the council’s Healthy Rivers plan is likely to end up with a change that looks nothing like that agreed to by its Consultative Stakeholder Group.
“Major manufacturers have much more chance of changing their suppliers’ behaviour than regulators.”
His sentiments were echoed by former Fish and Game chief executive Bryce Johnston who said more formal responsibility needs to be taken by industry groups for their suppliers.
And Dame Anne Salmond turned her sights on the forestry industry, which she said is getting away with murder, devastating the environment and not just in Tologa Bay.
“Wake up,” she urged attendees.
