Big stick for polluting farmers
The Waikato Regional Council will now be seeking court orders to force dairy farmers to get the right infrastructure in place if found to be repeatedly non-compliant in managing their effluent.
The move is part of the council’s new strategy to lift compliance rates after new figures show that 31 per cent (74) of the 239 high risk farms inspected by the council since July were significantly noncompliant.
So far this year, the council has started nine prosecutions and are formally investigating a further 16, investigations manager Patrick Lynch said.
Those prosecutions will include the council seeking court orders from the judge that will force the farm owner to seek an accredited effluent storage designer to design an effluent storage plan that suited the farm, and get it installed.
‘‘We don’t want to leave our involvement with the farm until we know they are in a good place,’’ he said.
Over the last five years, the council took about four or five prosecutions relating to dairy effluent each year.
The remaining 165 farms inspected were still categorised as high risk farms and the council will keep revisiting those farms.
The new monitoring figures show how dire the state of infrastructure is on some of the region’s dairy farms.
The council’s farming services team leader Stuart Stone said the scale of the offending was much greater than what they anticipated.
‘‘The deficiencies that we are finding are pretty significant.
‘‘We are seeing systems that might not necessarily be a bathtub, but are a square or a rectangle.’’
Many of these farms used small sumps to store their effluent. This meant the farmer either had to continuously irrigate their effluent out regardless of the weather or risk the sump overflowing.
As soon as the farmer irrigated in wet weather, that effluent risked flowing off paddocks and into waterways.
This is why farmers were required to have storage capacity to account for those wet periods.
Lynch said some of these systems could barely hold 1000 litres.
Council staff had repeatedly met and interacted with these high risk farmers to see when they would improve their infrastructure.
‘‘Those conversations have literally gone on for years and that’s our concern, that the really poor performers just aren’t changing and seems like the council has been left to make them change.
‘‘In my mind it’s not acceptable. It’s not the council’s responsibility, this is the industry’s responsibility and all of those individual farmers and they need to change their behaviour.’’
Lynch believed there were some dairy industry players who mistakenly believed that effluent management was in a good space and had moved on, but the latest figures showed this was clearly not the case.
‘‘This is graphically demonstrating that we really have got a long way to go.’’
All of the Waikato’s farmers know about the region’s water quality issues. But for whatever reason, there is still a significant proportion of farmers who think the rules do not apply to them, Lynch said.
‘‘This is not about dairy farming. This is about the poor performers.
‘‘We have to recognise those at the positive end of the spectrum but we all need to work together to deal with the poor end of the spectrum.’’