Govt water plan will curb dairy farming intensification
Jamie Morton
Environment Minister David Parker has signalled tough new measures that could halt further dairy farming intensification.
Parker yesterday confirmed on TVNZ1’s Q+A programme that a new national plan would remove farming intensity — blamed for driving pollution in rural waterways — as a “permitted activity”, while setting new nutrient levels.
Both would be included in a reformed National Policy Statement (NPS) on Freshwater Management — a set of bottom-line rules that regional councils must use when setting their own policy.
The measures also included an NPS that was recommended by former Environment Court judge David Sheppard, and on which Labour had based its own 12-point freshwater plan that it took to the election.
Parker said while cow numbers had “already peaked” and were going down, in some areas, the number of cows per hectare was higher than the environment could sustain.
“That won’t be done through a raw cap on cow numbers; it will be done on nutrient limits, the amount of nutrient that can be lost from a farm to a waterway, because it’s not just a dairy cow issue.”
Parker also ruled out direct sub- sidies for land-use change — instead, that could be enabled through new technologies that the Government was “willing to subsidise to bring forward”.
When asked what the economic impact for some — particularly dairying regions — would be, he said an analysis of the potential economic effects hadn’t yet been done.
“But it’s very, very difficult to model, because second-best from the farmer perspective may still be very close to the same outcome profitwise.”
Parker said one of the solutions could be a shift, as seen in south Canterbury, toward more cropping and horticulture.
Federated Farmers water spokesman Chris Allen called for a more “nuanced” approach than what Parker had suggested.
“When he talked about potentially limiting cow numbers, if that’s what it takes, yeah, in some places it might be — but there’s much more that goes on in a catchment-by-catchment process where you’ve got to understand what the soils, climate and rainfall are.”
Allen said there was also a need for more science and for urban areas to address their own water pollution woes as well.
National’s economic development spokesman, Paul Goldsmith, criticised Parker’s comments as “wishful thinking on a grand scale”.
“Real economic development is about more than flinging around loose ideas to make up for stopping significant parts of the economy,” Goldsmith said.
Meanwhile, Parker said people could expect big changes next year to the Resource Management Act.
Parker said two stand-out issues were councils taking too long to change a plan, and not enough guidance on areas that should be standardised across the country.