Confusion reigns over grazing advice
Farmers are confused about Government advice this week on how to prepare for winter grazing to avoid controversial scenes of cows in mud.
Beef and Lamb North Island general manager Corina Jordan said the guidance from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) came too late and replicated work done by industry bodies to proactively plan and manage winter grazing practices.
Winter grazing must be included in farmers’ plans, and comes a month after the Government announced a pause in the implementation of new winter grazing rules until May next year.
The pause came after farmers expressed concern about the time given to put rules into practice, and that some of the rules were impractical and unworkable.
Intensive winter grazing is when stock are fed on fodder crops. If done badly, it can lead to animals standing in mud with potentially serious effects on animal welfare and the environment.
Jordan said farmers were getting too much information from all sides, leading to confusion about what they should be doing and by when.
The advice produced by the ministry was unnecessary because the industry had been working with farmers to ensure farm plans were identifying all the risks and planning for them, she said.
The advice had also come through quite late. Farmers had already put winter crops in the ground, she said.
Federated Farmers Southland vice-president Bernadette Hunt said farmers were well prepared. A recent monitoring flight by Environment Southland had identified just six properties in the region that needed attention.
The new guidance from MPI was not compulsory but it was expected to be reflected in whatever form of farm plan farmers used, she said.
‘‘Farmers can choose to use the industry templates or another template that they’ve already got from catchment groups, or they can use the MPI one. As long as it lays out some bottom lines and it’s clear to farmers what they have to do,’’ she said.
MPI’s advice was taken from the industry’s reports, including recommendations from the Southland Advisory Forum and was more practical than the original Government rules, she said.
Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor said he was aware of the work being done by farmers to improve practices and the advice was intended to help inform that work and any future planning.
The information provided stated that it was guidance only and acknowledged that crops were already in the ground.
Jordan said the delay in implementing the new rules gave farmers an opportunity to show that they were already taking the issue seriously.
Beef and Lamb had written a forage cropping chapter for farm plans and wanted the identification of areas vulnerable to runoff near waterways to be part of the regulations. These had been missed in the current rules, Jordan said.
The Southland Advisory Group, with which Jordan was involved, had recommended that unworkable standards such as pugging depths were deleted and replaced with these new ones, she said.
Hunt said farmers were still feeling apprehensive.
There was a concern that no matter how well farmers performed there would always be people out to find a ‘‘bad photo’’.