An avalanche of compliance paperwork
An avalanche of paperwork needs to be completed to comply with new climate and environmental rules that often don' t lead to benefits, a new study shows. Waikato dairy farmer greg oliver said new rules kept coming and keeping up to compliance was time-consuming.
“It feels like anything we do now we can get in trouble for. Am I allowed to do this or not? Am I doing this right? Could someone come and smack me with a big stick for doing stuff you've done for years? I don't know anymore. whether there' s some new rule that you break.”
Oliver said compliance often did not lead to much behaviour change. “We're literally just recording what we've always done. Like keeping cows out of waterways, I'd say 90% of people were doing it anyway.”
A study by Bakerag, commissioned by Beef+lamb, said in the past six years farmers had faced more than 20 new regulations. The study looked at the cost of compliance on four farms.
Beef+lamb's whole farm data lead,
Ben Hancock, said compliance created excessive admin, had unintended consequences, created opportunity loss andcostalot.
“There’s also going to be 16 regional councils interpreting all of these different regulations in different ways.”
A farmer on one of the farms studied spent up to 70% of their time on industrygood activities related to legislation, such as catchment groups.
Despite the proactive involvement on environmental issues, it was still difficult for them to understand regulations because the admin was too much and complex.
Another farm in the study invested $1 million in irrigation infrastructure, but could not recoup costs because a water consent was denied.
Without irrigation, the development of pastures and new fencing was not financially justifiable, so the development was stopped, and the area was now prone to wilding pines, a problem that would not exist if it had been developed, Hancock said.
To calculate compliance cost and impact on individual farms, the study used the average profit before tax for farms of similar production systems in specific regions, he said.
It showed that, to be compliant, a western North Island finishing farm faced one-off costs of $75,000 and annual costs of about $88,000, all of which were direct costs to be compliant.
The average profit before tax for farms in this region was $174,800, for the 2022-23 financial year.
The three other farms in the study, in different regions, faced annual compliance costs of between $16,000 and $30,000. This excluded possible opportunity cost losses.
Oliver said he came off lightly as he milked only 150 cows.
He supplied milk to Open Country, which helped him be compliant and saved him thousands of dollars a year.
“Everything has to be recorded. Every bit of fertiliser. What is it and how much went on. Anything that goes on or in a cow [also]. Whether it’s medicine or whatever. When we get it and when it’s applied.
“It causes stress as it's another job to do that's probably unnecessary.”
A new effluent system that he believed was unnecessary cost him $35,000, he said.
The system would ensure he would be able to hold 90 days of effluent in case the ground was too wet to spread the effluent on, and there would be runoff into waterways. this problem had never a risen in the past, Oliver said.
He recently asked a consultant to calculate his effluent requirements – it cost him $1000 for half a day.
But compliance was not all bad.
The report said Freshwater Farm Plans had the potential to be a practical way to navigate policies, but the plans needed to be practical and outcomes-based.
Other farmers said despite compliance headaches there were also positives.
Waikato dairy farmer Pete Morgan said as an export country, what markets thought about food was important.
“It’s why we get a premium. Compliance goes in hand in hand with that. there is no better way to out-compete other countries and to keep surprising our markets by showing how good we are.”
Southland sheep and beef farmer Matt Tayler said, “sitting down with shepherds and drawing a farm map, looking at what critical source areas were, deciding how grazing would work, was beneficial from a planning point of view”.
Fencing off waterways meant fewer stock deaths and the knowledge that stock drank from clean drinking troughs.