The strategy identifies four areas of focus – cleaner water, carbon neutrality, thriving biodiversity and healthy productive soils – with their own specific goals and a detailed implementation plan supported by a series of what are termed foundations.
Initially, there are two foundations that explicitly rely on participation of individual farmers.
The first is helping farmers navigate the myriad of farm environment plans out there so they can identify the one that complies with local regulations and is best suited to help them document their individual on-farm environment plan.
The second foundation will encourage the establishment and facilitation of catchment communities relevant to farmers’ local areas.
The remaining foundations have designated areas of responsibility for B+LNZ to support work by farmers. They include extension programmes, decision support tools, research into evidence-based policy, engagement with central and regional government on policy formation and legislation and enabling farmer leadership.
When B+LNZ developed its farm planning programme it found it was ahead of the game but a recent review has concluded it is no longer cutting edge, having been overtaken by private consultants’ and companies’ farm planning processes.
The intention now is to enable farmers to prepare plans relevant to their own farms by helping them follow a standard process that will vary between farms and catchment regions.
There will not be a one-size-fits-all template but a process standard designed to be regularly updated on the principle of continuous improvement to guide farmers through a series of steps, forming a vision or policy statement, identifying current and potential environmental impacts, assets and opportunities, developing an action plan, identifying how progress will be self or externally audited and monitored then review and repeat the exercise.
An important aspect of the process will be links to other programmes across the primary sector, in particular the Red Meat Profit Partnership’s NZ Farm Assurance Programme and Sustainable and Ethical Farm Assurance Programme but also with the Good Farming Practice Action Plan and other farm planning work that is occurring.
This will ensure the minimum amount of duplication because different companies and consultants can be accredited and deliver farm plans for endorsement by B+LNZ.
B+LNZ is developing the process standard in co-operation with Enviro-Mark Solutions, part of Landcare Research, and will hold five co-design workshops starting this month involving farmers and other stakeholders to develop a pilot by December for roll-out in the first half of 2019.
National data on the preparation of farm plans will be recorded and aggregated to enable measurement of progress towards the goal.
The second critical foundation is the community catchment programme linking individual farmers to others in their region, providing peer support and leading to the development of a shared vision.
While not all farms in an area will have the same issues there will be some that affect all farms in a particular catchment and the group can decide on the issues they can most effectively address together.
Ideally, the country will be divided into catchment areas, each of which will have an umbrella entity such as an incorporated society responsible for co-ordinating individual community catchment groups, making submissions to councils and communicating with other organisations like B+LNZ on behalf of the members.
The process of setting up community groups is still in its early days with one example of how it can work in the King Country rivers and west coast catchment.
The King Country River Group was originally established because the farmers in the area felt they were not sufficiently well represented to deal with the Waikato Regional Council whenever the southern and west coast region of the Waikato comes up for inclusion in a regional plan change.
Anna Nelson, a vet, who, with husband Blair won a past King Country Farmer of the Year, has been appointed as part-time co-ordinator of the group.
There are 580 farmers in the region and she hopes to set up 13 catchment groups though the initial target is seven, of which three have already had meetings.
Her intention is to contact every farmer in the region to encourage them to join a group though, inevitably, there will be some who don’t want to participate.
She says this model might not suit every region but it works well for the group she is co-ordinating. Each group member will be asked to pay an annual subscription to cover the costs of the co-ordinator, meetings and submissions.
B+LNZ’s challenge, if it is to achieve its environment strategy goals, is to encourage, firstly, all farmers to develop their own environment plan and, secondly, join a regional community group providing them with support, guidance and robust data on which to base their conclusions.
