Clash of cultures as honey factory disturbs the peace

Trish Edwards’ quaint bungalow sits on an incline just outside the small Wairarapa town of Carterton. The view, at least in one direction, is stunning: green, gently sloping fields, running all the way to the jagged Tararua ranges in the distance.

It’s a different story one the other side. In what used to be an empty field comes the clanging of hammers and the scurrying of workmen. There’s a factory being built, and Edwards isn’t happy.

‘‘They started scratching around one morning in April,’’ she recalls, ‘‘and then, without warning, several diggers arrived.’’

She immediately got on the phone and asked the council what was going on. They told her something was being built but wouldn’t confirm just what it was.

It turned out to be a large honey processing factory. She was horrified.

‘‘In the first week of May there was a meeting with the locals and we were shown the plans (for the factory),’’ she says.

Edwards thought the plans were ‘‘horrendous’’.

She immediately sent letters of protest to the Carterton District Council, the Greater Wellington Regional Council and the company behind the factory, Te Awamutubased Manuka Health New Zealand.

To her dismay she learned the factory had already been approved and it was going to be built, with or without her objections.

Adding injury to insult, Edwards says a real estate agent told her the factory would devalue her property between $50,000 to $80,000.

‘‘It’s intrusive, large, noisy, close,’’ she says.

‘‘When I walk out my front door it’s right there in my face. It’s just completely inappropriate,’’ she says.

There’s no doubt that the factory - large and bland, surrounded by the constant grinding of trucks coming and going - has altered the shape and the tempo of this laidback too stretch of Wairarapa countryside. Yet, it’s a change that those at the council and Manuka Health see somewhat differently from Edwards.

Mark Carrington, Manuka Health’s general manager of bee keeping, says they’ve tried to make the factory as unobtrusive as possible. So far, they’ve allocated more than $10,000 to plant trees around the factory’s perimeter in order to keep it from view as much as possible.

‘‘We’re very involvement in says.

‘‘We’ve been on the site going on 10 years now. We’re a pretty important part of the local economy, and at peak season we employ 28 people.’’

A lot of Edwards’ problems proud of our Wairarapa,’’ he also lie with the Carterton District Council who, she says, didn’t give her a say in something that was going to drastically affect her quality of life.

However, the council says that there was little they could do, and that the factory was permitted and even encouraged - under the district plan. A covenant that barred large and disruptive operations on the land wasn’t legally enforceable.

All of this is cold Edwards.

‘‘I came down here with three kids and looked at this as a place to heal, to start a new life,’’ she says.

‘‘It’s what we’ve been doing and it’s been working beautifully. But now I very much feel this has been taken away from us. This is not what we signed up for.’’ comfort to