Thursday, March 28, 2024

ALTERNATIVE VIEW: Dumping on farmers is baseless

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The front page headline on a Monday newspaper read Farmers’ Dirty Secret. I wondered what farmers had done this time.
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Had they gathered up all the rubbish on their properties including dead animals and dumped them on the Beehive steps?

Had they recovered all the sewerage from the Auckland beaches and distributed it down Queen Street?

Did they scoop up all the sewerage from the Nelson beaches and spread it around the cathedral?

Had they collected all the litter strewn around suburban Auckland and deposited it in Aotea Square?

Another possibility could have been to have collected the raw sewerage the Queenstown council had discharged into the Kawerau River and spread it on the piste at the Remarkables.

There were endless possibilities including a newspaper just being anti-farmer.

The article itself was about onfarm rubbish and contained, in my view, baseless speculation from local government bureaucrats.

I also can’t imagine the independently owned local paper putting a similar article on its front page and certainly not under such a baseless and inflammatory headline.

The comment by local government people provided me with ample reason for a drastic reform of the sector.

Shaun Andrewartha of Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) said “farm refuse dumps is a topic that is high on my agenda”.

My reading on that is both Andrewartha and GWRC don’t have enough to do and that the rural sector is an easy target.

Further, they wouldn’t have a clue if there was a problem and if so what it was.

“We don’t have the resources to have a monitoring regime” tells me they don’t have a clue what’s actually going on but that doesn’t stop them casting aspersions on the rural sector in the media.

GWRC is on the case because it’s investigated dumps and offal pits on a total of nine farms since 2014 and hasn’t issued any warnings or infringements.

So its staff investigated fewer than two dumps a year for five years and didn’t find any problems yet farm refuse dumps is a topic that is high on the agenda.

As I’ve said, they’re wearing their anti-farmer bias on their sleeves and they don’t have enough to do.

Locally, Masterton District Council (MDC) hasn’t covered itself with glory either. It told us it had closed two dumps over the past few years because of a lack of volume. It suggested that lack of volume meant the vast majority of waste was being dumped onfarm.

I’m sure Einstein’s thought processes wouldn’t have jumped so many hurdles in such a short space of time.

If he had I’m convinced the theory of relativity would never have been discovered.

The MDC assets and operations manager David Hopman told us that “many farmers were not willing to pay to use a dump when they could dispose of rubbish on their farms for nothing”.

How can he possibly know?

For the record, I use the local MDC dump and most of the people I see there are farmers. The local dump is a good place to catch up with what’s going on in the district and, yes, I’ve seen many farmers pay.

Hopman then admitted the estimate of how much rubbish was being dumped nationwide was “just a stab in the dark” yet he is more than willing to be party to slagging off farmers as rampant polluters with a “dirty secret”.

Iniquitously buried on page three of the Monday paper was an article under the measured headline, No escape from the regions toxic list, which told me there were 2263 contaminated sites in the Wellington area.

Putting it in perspective there are more contaminated sites in Wellington than there are farms in Wairarapa.

Farcically, what does Masterton do with its rubbish? It sends it to Rangitikei so it can be put in a landfill.

Can someone tell me the difference between a council dumping rubbish in a hole in the ground and a farmer doing the same thing?

One could respectfully suggest it would be more efficient for farmers to dump rubbish on their property than take it to the tip, have the council take it 50km to the Masterton tip then have it trucked 150km to Rangitikei. 

Farmers would be infinitely more environmentally responsible with a lower carbon footprint by burying rubbish on their farms.

Unlike GWRC the Canterbury Regional Council (ECan) is working with farmers to clean up rubbish. 

ECan is looking for solutions, saying farmers want to do the right thing.

It added farmers are prepared to pay.

So there is a massive difference between the attitudes of bureaucrats in the Wellington and Canterbury areas.

Wellington petulantly wants to wave a stick. Conversely, Canterbury wants to work with farmers to create a lasting solution.

No wonder Canterbury beat the crap out of Wellington in rugby’s Mitre 10 Cup.

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