Stopbank cycleway will just be ‘bloody havoc’
A planned new cycleway along the top of a Waimea River stopbank would cause “bloody havoc” local dairy farmers claim.
The Waimea River stopbank runs through the land the O’Connor farm leases for its dairying operations.
Cows can be driven over the stopbank in a mob up to three times a day during the spring calving season.
The stopbanks themselves aren’t leased and are public land.
A cycleway along the top of the bank has long been signalled as part of Tasman District Council’s plans for the river and is now drawing closer after years of discussions that farmer Martin O'Connor said were “not very constructive”.
Putting a cycleway on top of the 5-metre-tall stopbank is a health and safety issue, he said.
“To bring a mob [of cows] all along there and then a cyclist appears above, it just creates bloody havoc.”
The key problem for O’Connor is the height element.
“Someone's up on the skyline, that's where the issue really is.”
Having someone appear suddenly above the cows while they’re being herded in a mob can scare the animals, creating a dangerous environment for farm workers, he said.
“You can get run over. We’ve already had incidents down the bottom with cyclists.”
The situation makes little sense to Glenn Leys, who helps manage the farm.
“There's a road there, it's not like there's not an alternative,” he said, referring to an old road that sits outside of their lease and runs parallel to the river.
The road is currently only accessible by four-wheel drive because it’s badly damaged but fixing it would make the route available to a wider range of people than just cyclists, Leys said.
If the cycleway is installed, they say that they would have to rethink the economic viability of continuing to lease the land on the other side of the stopbank and may scale back their dairy operation or cease working that land in the future.
However, the council’s environmental information manager, Rob Smith, was unperturbed when speaking to the long-running issue during an Environment and Regulatory Committee meeting.
He likened the stopbank crossing to a regular road to which other farmers do not have unrestricted access.
“They bunch them up, they open the gates, they walk them across, and shut the gate. There’s no reason why that cannot be done for these cows on the stopbank,” he said.
“We can’t deny that animals are big, they have an obligation as a farmer to manage those animals.”
He added that kissing gates and signage, installed by the council for a couple thousand dollars, would slow cyclists down.
The old road that traversed the edge of the dairy farm was not able to be remediated easily, Rob said.
“The underlying material is a range from mud to gravel so would need a proper road base to be constructed. We are talking closer to hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands.”
But the concerns caused by the stopbank’s height remains for the O’Connor farm.
“They're just dismissing our concerns totally,” Leys said. “We've been farming it for that long, we know the issues that it’s going to cause.”