The region’s dairy farmers might also be required to build new effluent storage systems adequate for 150 days.
Northland Regional Council’s proposed combined regional plan, three years in the making, was open for submissions till November 15.
The plan replaced separate water, air and soil plans that were more than 10 years old and was only one-quarter of the size of those it replaced, chairman Bill Shepherd said.
"It's not an understatement to label it one of, if not the most important documents the council has consulted on for many years."
The council had worked hard to make the new plan simpler, more streamlined and easier to use than its predecessors.
Last year Federated Farmers said the draft plan was pragmatic and the thrust of policy-making was appropriate for the region’s livestock farmers.
After the publication of the latest version, provincial president John Blackwell, a Dargaville sheep and beef farmer, said he was pleased to see the council had made changes.
Regarding fresh water quality, the plan concentrated on sediment loss from highly erodible land in sensitive catchments rather than the nitrate leaching emphasis in other regions.
Blackwell believed the council had good relationships with landowners and farmers’ input to the priority catchment consultations had been positive and rewarding.
The proposed plan did not make many changes to existing permitted activities.
Discharges to land of treated farm dairy effluent remained a permitted activity, with the normal safeguards provided dairy farms had sufficient contingency storage for 150 days over winter.
The sizeable storage was required because effluent irrigation might not be possible for weeks on end in wet winters.
DairyNZ said many of Northland’s 900 dairy farms might have to build new storage and Federated Farmers believed the average cost would be $200,000.
Discharges to water continued to remain a discretionary, consented activity for 75% of dairy farms.
Both Fonterra and DairyNZ now discouraged the practice and many Northland dairy farmers had resolved never to use that consent.
Northland also had a high level of significant non-compliance by a five-year average of 14% of consented farms and 25% of unconsented. Unintentional discharges to water were the main breaches.
Better waste water management, storm water diversions and the new storage requirement should improve the non-compliance record, the council said.
Taking water from surface and underground sources would be a permitted activity for personal or animal needs. Up to 20 cubic metres a day could be taken unless rivers were at or below minimum flow.
That would be enough for a herd of about 300 cows, so larger herds might have to seek consents.
Dairy farmers were known to be concerned about the lack of any prioritising policy by the council when rivers and streams neared their minimum flows.
For example, temporary loss of water supply might not spell the end of horticulture crops but a dairy farm forced to dry cows off had lost income for the rest of the season.
The council left livestock access to waterways a permitted activity subject to beef cattle exclusion in lowland zones by 2025 but no exclusion would be required in hill country areas.
Access was not permitted to outstanding freshwater bodies or significant wetlands.
In general, the federation agreed with the concept of stock exclusion rather than prescriptive fencing rules to allow farmers to adopt whole-farm policies using management, natural barriers and riparian grazing when needed.
It argued for the use of farm management plans rather than universal rules to preserve appropriate flexibility and farmer co-operation.
Northland had many high-flow, short-run streams and rivers with erodible banks in which the main issue was sediment loss not nitrates from fertiliser and livestock.
Therefore, new rules in the five priority catchments required erosion control plans for high sediment-yielding land and immediate dairy cattle exclusion from water courses one metre wide and 30cm deep in the Mangere and Whangarei Harbour catchments.
In practice that had already been done, such that Mangere received a national award for water quality improvement.
“Stakeholder groups within each of these communities have developed catchment plans to address freshwater-related issues of particular concern to them,” the council said.
The water supplies in some catchments, such as Kaihu and Ruakaka, had been fully allocated and that might prevent further high land use changes from drystock to dairying or dairying to horticulture.
New allocations would be available only if some were surrendered.
