One Plan change gets the tick
Hundreds of farmers and vegetable growers who have operated without resource consents for years may finally have away to go legal, with a proposed fix for broken environmental rules given the tick by commissioners.
But councils wanting clarity on the impact the changes may have on multimillion-dollar wastewater projects will likely be disappointed. Horizons Regional Council will meet on Tuesday to accept or reject recommendations on changing the One Plan, its rulebook for environmental management.
The plan governs how Horizons manages natural resources in Manawatu¯, Horowhenua, Tararua, Ruapehu, Whanganui and Rangitı¯kei, and has mostly worked since it came into force in 2014. But the section around nitrate management has been a bugbear almost since the plan was put in place.
A range of legal issues and challenges led to a court ruling that left many farmers without a way to get resource consent.
Those farmers have continued to operate while horizons worked on changing the One Plan.
Horizons previously said 178 farmers, mostly vegetable growers in Horowhenua and dairy farmers in Tararua, were unable to get consents.
But information in the plan change recommendations, published online in the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, put the number at 245, including all but one of the 50 vegetable growers in the region.
Not making changes would result in those farms closing, taking millions of dollars out of the economy and the loss of hundreds of jobs.
The recommendations were largely in line with what Horizons wanted to do: change figures in the plan to line up with updates to nitrate modelling software and give farmers the chance to apply for consents if they cannot meet nitrate leaching limits. Nitrate is bad for waterways, increasing algae growth, and taking oxygen away from native plants and fish.
The changes would not allow farmers to increase their nitrate leaching and those not able to hit targets would have to demonstrate they were reducing their environmental impact.
Vegetable growers gained a big win out of the process, with the change proposing to give them their own specific way to get consents.
Growers throughout the plan change process said their land use, especially rotational cropping, meant they had to be judged differently than other farming operations.
However, those consents could only last for 10 years.
The plan change also impacts city and district councils, with some questioning if they would be able to discharge treated wastewater to land if rules changed.
The commissioners said wastewater discharges to land would be considered an intensive farming land use – intensive dairy farming falls into the same category – but the plan change focused on creating away for existing farms to apply for consents.
But all the changes proposed would only be an interim fix anyway.
Horizons has to change the One Plan anyway, so it complies with the latest freshwater management policy out of Government.
Those changes have to be notified by the council by the end of 2024.
Many interested parties contacted by Stuff yesterday were either unaware the 267-page-long recommendations were online, had not fully digested them yet, or did not want to comment before Horizons’ meeting on Tuesday.