Farmers criticise water deal
A water deal between a corporate dairy farmer and owners of a new milk plant has been criticised as effectively putting a price on water.
New O¯ torohanga-based dairy business Happy Valley Nutrition ( formerly called Happy Valley Milk) was granted a groundwater consent on September 20 from the Waikato Regional Council after its surface water consent went through earlier this year.
But to obtain that surface water consent, HVN entered into an agreement with South Waikato dairy corporate Wairakei Pastoral.
WP held a resource consent to take water from the Waikato catchment and its consent was written in a way which allowed it to have a user group where different individual users were able to take its water.
WP successfully applied to add HVN to its user group. It did that by changing its consent so the water they were authorised to take could also be taken from a different location, Waikato Regional Council industry and Infrastructure resource use manager Brent Sinclair said.
‘‘Wairakei Pastoral has sought lawfully and obtained such a consent and their consent gives them the ability for them to come along to say, ‘hey, can I take advantage of some of the water you have allocated as part of your user group’.
‘‘There’s no consent here for HVN, simply WP amended its consent to allow it to take water allocated to WP within the Waikato Catchment from a different location.’’
Federated Farmers dairy chairman Chris Lewis who farms nearby at Pukeatua, said farmers had contacted him asking how HVN was able to get its water consent in a catchment where the Waipa¯ river was already under pressure.
‘‘How can they get a water consent from the Taupo¯ area which is not representative of the Waipa/Otorohanga catchment?’’
He said farmers were concerned council had effectively put a price on water.
‘‘These people [HVN] had done a commercial deal at O¯ torohanga and a commercial deal at Taupo¯ , which is a couple of hundred kilometres apart and now they have bought some water.
‘‘How does water allocation from one catchment jump across to another?’’
Sinclair conceded it did look ‘‘odd’’ on the surface.
While HVN and Reporoa-based WP were technically in the same catchment, they were in different sub-catchments. When processing the application the council analysed its impact on the catchment as a whole and of the Waipa catchment.
‘‘In both situations, the effects were not adverse,’’ he said.
Under the regional plan, there were allocation limits for the Waikato River at Karapiro, Huka Falls and at the river mouth near Port Waikato. The limit at the mouth of the river was 10 per cent of the low flow of the catchment and at that location, it included water that had flowed from the Waipa and Waikato rivers.
‘‘In this particular situation, WP had an allocation already which was in that 10 per cent of the mouth. So long as WP’s allocation doesn’t change, it doesn’t impact on allocation at the mouth because they already have their allocation.
‘‘WP lawfully changed their consent in a way that was not going to cause effects which challenged any policy or any environmental effects, which enabled WP to take water from another location,’’ Sinclair said.
HVN general manager Greg Wood said the consent was a ‘‘commercial matter’’ between itself and WP.
‘‘Ultimately we want to use only bore water, but it’s whether we have enough to sustain our water balance at this point of time and we’ll reassess that during the design phase over the next six to 12 months.’’
Wood said they were not in a position yet to be able to comment on exactly how much water the factory would be taking. He said HVN was looking to ‘‘change the game’’ in terms of the water use consumed to minimise the factory’s wastewater discharge as much as possible.
This would reduce the amount of ground and surface water taken, he said.