In a strong gale the “talcum powder” of Simon’s Pass topsoil blows straight into Lake Benmore.
Owner Murray Valentine pokes and prods, jabbing at hieracium and pointing out Pukaki boulders deposited over millenia.
Valentine, a Dunedin accountant and investor in Mainland Poultry and other South Island businesses, has been pushing for a dairy and drystock makeover on the property for about 15 years. He estimates the project could cost up to $150 million.
He’s been patient, despite having paid millions on consent, consulting and legal fees. There’s no one to blame for the protracted approvals process, he says.
But even as a stoic member of Otago’s tight, low-key business circle, Valentine twitches at the delays.
He jokes that if you guess he’s in his 50s, you’d be wrong. About 70, he packs a lot of imaginative energy in to a farm tour, deriding hieracium and brimming at the thought of a production surge under modern, intensive pasture and crop.
Valentine has cleared more than 80 consent applications since buying Simon’s Pass in the early 2000s. The scale, soil and power of irrigation to grow grass, silage and crops like lucerne appealed immediately. Without water and other additives, nothing grew for about four months in the frozen winter. Then, when the basin started to bake, there was no way to take advantage.
About half of the 9700ha station is set to be irrigated. His farm map for the Pukaki glacial outwash plain is ringed with future pivot circles. Now, even as parts of the project are still vulnerable to legal challenge, a transformation is underway with pipes and the skeletal shape of dairy pads.
Consents allow up to 15,000 cows in seven dairy sheds, although Valentine had scaled that back to 5500 cows milked through three sheds. Thirty pivot irrigators will grow grass and crops, ensuring everything everything on the farm is grown or raised on-site.
It is, he says, probably the only dairy conversion in the Mackenzie district part of the basin. The dairying south of Twizel is in the upper Waitaki catchment, in Waitaki district.
The renovated Simon’s Pass would have about 10,000 other stock units on top of that: beef cattle, sheep (maybe not Merino) and possibly deer.
Valentine wants a model farm, though he hates talking about anything he hasn’t yet achieved. “When you see the work that’s been done on the environment plans, on the water quality modelling, the animal welfare and all the issues that are important in farming … I will have a high hurdle to jump.”
He says authorities know he’ll “keep gritting it out” to get the job done. “I’m not going to let anyone down.”
He says recent changes to the Resource Management Act should help the cause: it’s no longer possible to grant, say, a five-year irrigation consent and then arbitrarily refuse to renew it after investment in the property.
The RMA and an element of “natural justice” should prevail, he says, given even the most ardent opponents have known about his plans for years. Work is now underway and he can’t imagine it all being rolled back.
A major risk to the project is an Environment Court ruling declaring when new rules for development in the Mackenzie district will come into force. Some groups, including the vocal Environmental Defence Society, see it as a check on intensification at Simon’s Pass. Valentine is taking legal advice on a possible appeal.
Valentine knows the protest and appeals process as well as anyone — and knows he’s accused of sacrificing a glacial moraine to intensive farming.
In March 2014 the Mackenzie Guardians advocacy group wrote:
“This application pits cows against critically endangered birds like the black stilt and the wrybill … the proposed industrial-scale irrigation will add huge pressure to threatened birds and unique flora and fauna. If these native grasslands that have evolved to survive the area’s extreme climate, these unique ecosystems will be lost forever.”
The station is enclosed by the Pukaki and Tekapo Rivers and Lake Pukaki. Part is in Crown pastoral lease and subject to tenure review. Some of the that land, including prominent areas near Lake Pukaki, would be tagged a no-go for development.
The conversion would be nothing like a complete removal of rare Mackenzie flora and fauna, he says. In a concession to opponents, he has set aside 1800ha for de-stocking and control of predators and wilding pines.
In all, about 3500ha of the station would not be farmed and would be freed from weeds and pests.
Because of natural land contour, it would be hard for anyone to recognise the proposed changes on the property from State Highway One, Valentine says.
As for the loss of tussock, for example, he challenged anyone to argue what could be worse than continuing to let hieracium out-compete every other plant and rabbits run amok.
Valentine’s ongoing bugbear on the project is the lack of a single, logical, approval process. He has routinely dealt with Environment Canterbury, Mackenzie District Council and Land Information New Zealand. Some official bodies, like the defunct Waitaki Water Allocation Board, have slipped by the wayside over 15 years of official back and forth.
Sometimes he wins a tick from from one body, like ECan granting a water take, only to be headed off by another agency, like Mackenzie District ruling on the same matter. Broadly, the planning process seems open to endless challenge. Mackenzie District launched its Plan Change 13 for permitted and discretionary land use in 2007 and it is still being contested in court.
Valentine says whereas regulators like Ecan have staff, budget and expertise, it appears the tiny Mackenzie council is overwhelmed and perhaps relieved when its rulings are challenged in court. The whole thing means an authority like Mackenzie can absolve itself of responsibility, he says.
