Easy cash dries up
The Government’s announcement that it won’t financially support three irrigation projects is more of a political line in the sand than a big swipe at agribusiness.
Despite cries of a ‘‘kick in the guts’’ to rural New Zealand, or ‘‘victory’’ claims by Forest & Bird, the Hurunui Water Project and Hunter Downs schemes are going ahead, while the third fledgling Flaxbourne proposal was always an unlikely prospect.
But the move reflects the view, even within some farming circles, that taxpayers should no longer support private development schemes while also paying to clean up environmental damage.
The door remains open for funding of other schemes, including Nelson’s proposed Waimea dam and the KurowDuntroon Irrigation scheme.
The environmental effects of existing schemes won’t show up for many years yet. Even the political commissioners appointed under the previous
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Government to Environment Canterbury have acknowledged that consented farms with existing water rights will see the degraded Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere in far worse shape before it improves.
Irrigation NZ chief executive Andrew Curtis can rightly claim that farms nowadays are tied up with environmental farm plans and effluent targets they must work within.
Any change to these regional limits would come from the Government tightening national freshwater targets.
Entire districts have nutrient allocation limits – all the farms in an area must keep their pollution to levels stated in their land use consents. This week ecologists Dr Alison Dewes, Landcorp’s head of environment, and Dr Mike Joy, a senior lecturer at Massey, took ECan councillors to task over these limits in a special meeting.
Dewes said dairy farms were allocated five times the amount of allowable nutrient than sheep and beef farms.
Joy outlined his view of how farm values were based on a ‘‘licence to pollute’’, and the district allocation model meant that if one farmer voluntarily chose tighter environmental targets, the neighbouring farm could take up the slack to the allowable limits.
The role of the market has payed its part in bringing about ‘‘peak cow’’ numbers after Fonterra’s big milk-fat payout three years ago. There has been a decrease nationally of about 100,000 cows. All of which fits with the irrigation lobby’s assertions that more irrigation is promoting agricultural diversity into more cropping and less intensive farming.
Critics say the numbers remain staggering. DairyNZ’s own figures suggest the water consumption of New Zealand dairy farms is equivalent to the residential water use of 60 million people, which is just part of the dairy herd footprint.