Don Quixote on the river
Released 05 Jan 2011
By Don Nicolson, Federated Farmers President
Imagine if a local institution studied 284 suburbs or towns from Godzone, Australia, the USA and Europe, finding, on the basis of two indicators, that Te Atatu was the worst. A major newspaper labels Te Atatu ‘our suburb of shame' and then television news broadcasts that Te Atatu is among the worst places in the western world. I'm fairly certain people in Te Atatu would be incensed. On digging into the study they would be appalled to learn that half of the suburbs in the study come from New Zealand. What's more, instead of South Central Los Angeles, Brixton or Redfern, Te Atatu was being measured against Parnell, Malibu Beach, Knightsbridge and Sydney's Roseville.
Despite starting back in 2009 with evidence the Cawthron Institute presented, this scenario is actually true and continues to apply to the Manawatu River. Yet the claim that the Manawatu is ‘among the worst in the western world' is a media invention. A major daily picked up the research without understanding it or even asking for the list of rivers the Manawatu was being compared with. Like mud this slur sticks and feeds an assumption we pour effluent directly into the nearest river, stream or lake. It's not helped by the likes of NIWA. When faced by a 40 percent decline in water quality from lakes with ‘dominant native catchment cover', NIWA's response was almost, ‘gosh that's a surprise about native lake catchments, but it's still farming'. As a sheep and beef farmer I have a certain term for the excrement of a bull.
Agriculture doesn't deny having an impact - you can't generate $26 billion in exports each year without one - but it's illogical to pin everything on agriculture. How many gardeners use sheep pellets, horse manure or even zoo doo? Scale that up and farmers, dairy in particular, do the same by recycling livestock waste back to pasture as liquid fertiliser. These effluent systems are amazing and work, but like with riparian plantings it doesn't make for riveting reading or images.
The media needs to delve deeper because with the Manawatu ‘worst' river claim, it seems no one aside from us asked for the list. Half of the 284 river sampling points at the time were local with all 284 sampling points coming from around 123 rivers. Given North America alone has over 250,000 rivers, there were numerous absences like the Mississippi, Murray, Thames and even the Rhine. I've seen some of these rivers and I'd much rather jump into the Manawatu than dive into the heroically polluted Ohio River - also missing. Yet for those with a jaundiced view of farming and the environment, the Cawthron Institute also found that the West Coast's Mokihinui River is among ‘the worst' despite being ‘too precious to dam' according to Forest & Bird. While there's no farm within cooee of it, unlike one of the ‘best', Otago's Taieri River, the Mokihinui was in the bottom third ‘in the western world' for gross productivity and photosynthesis and in the bottom 13 percent for ecosystem respiration. Go figure.
Given many urban beaches are closed to swimming after heavy rain causes human sewage to overflow, I'll leave the last words on the Manawatu River to the report's author from the Cawthron Institute (the Broadcasting Standards Authority notwithstanding), "only a tiny fraction of the world's rivers have been tested using this approach and I'm sure there are plenty of rivers that would have higher measurements if they were tested. I will continue to try and emphasise this point in the media - although this message doesn't make sensational headlines".
