New plan to heal Waikato rivers
A wide-sweeping policy requiring thousands of environmental plans from Waikato farmers is one step closer to reality.
Waikato Regional Council notified the decisions version of its Plan Change 1: Healthy Rivers/Wai Ora policy on April 22.
Submitters can now lodge appeals with the Environment Court, which could mean the policy is still some time away from becoming operative.
Plan Change 1 aims to improve water quality in the Waikato and Waipa¯ rivers by bringing in a number of environmental requirements for farmers within the catchments.
Regional council land management and advisory services team leader Mark Gasquoine said all farmers of 20 hectares will be required to submit a farm environmental plan, identifying environmental risk at their property.
That’s about 6000 plans the council will be expecting to receive in due course, all electronically.
How detailed plans need to be depends on the intensity, size and nature of the farm.
Plans could be prescriptive (including sets of tick boxes or yes or no answers) or tailored, where farmers would be required to explain what the environmental risks are, and how they will reduce the risks.
‘‘These plans might say something like, by this date, I will have implemented x, y, or z to reduce the contaminant loss from this area.
‘‘It’s taking an approach where farmers get to decide how they want to reduce their risk, and not wait for someone like the council to tell them how they are going to do it,’’ Gasquoine said.
But the plans must be reviewed, possibly by agricultural consultants, before being submitted.
Council will be putting faith in industry bodies, like Federated Farmers and DairyNZ, as well as agricultural consultants and local communities, to encourage farmers to choose the right plan, Gasquoine said.
‘‘We’ve seen all of those groups at times be very effective of getting messaging out to farmers.’’
Once submitted, if farmers don’t comply with their own plans, they will receive warnings or enforcement measures like prosecution or fines.
But there’s no hard nitrogen limits that farmers must comply with. Instead, farmers must calculate their nitrogen leaching loss rate.
‘‘It’s about targeting those farms at a greater risk of nitrogen loss and ensuring they have the correct constraints around them.
‘‘If you’re a high leacher there’s some expectation of what you need to do and that is to reduce, if you’re a moderate leacher, it doesn’t ask you to explicitly reduce but it says, show us how you might reduce over time.’’
Farmers must also show how stock will be prevented from accessing waterways.
‘‘There’s two things that we can do: we could tell farmers what to do, but that’s the last thing a farmer wants to happen, let’s be honest about that.
‘‘If we give farmers and those working within those catchments time to learn and adjust and help their decision-making where they need it, farmers generally do make a pretty good decision.’’
Former Waikato Federated Farmers President Andrew McGiven said farm environment plans will likely become the most important documents for farmers over the coming years. ‘‘They will have to make sure they get accurate information which is not only going to be relevant for water quality on their farms, but also in the future, green-house gases and climate change.’’ McGiven said there was currently a staged approach to introducing farm environment plans, to give farmers time to understand what’s involved.
‘‘That’s mainly because the capacity to complete those plans in the rural sector is not quite there yet.
‘‘At the end of the day, the final audit of these plans will be done by someone, like a professional rural consultant, on behalf of the regional council.’’
McGiven ended his three-year term as president in April and said Plan Change 1 was one of the biggest challenges Federated Farmers had to tackle.
‘‘It’s been tough dealing with all of the legislation that’s been thrown at us but I think we’ll be properly represented when the new legislation is put through.’’