Up a creek, with a paddle
Released 20 May 2011
Don Nicolson is Federated Farmers President
It's amazing how a few words can galvanise action such as the ‘Farmy Army'. It just takes two words to tell you this is the rural community helping out those in need. With the Government making a suite of mostly positive announcements on water last week, we've unfortunately seen some less positive use of words.
The Environmental Defence Society's, Gary Taylor, immediately ‘blamed' water pollution on dairy farms and urban centres. Massey's Dr Mike Joy went to the BBC spouting ‘hyperbole', as Business NZ's Phil O'Reilly put it. This is a blame game Federated Farmers won't buy into. We're over a negative ‘them and us' approach to water, which is why we're on the Land and Water Forum, even hosting its Wellington meetings. Yes, agriculture has an impact on water quality, but so does everything we humans do. That includes every car, every dishwasher and every meal we eat, not to mention the impact of introduced aquatic pests like Koi Carp. If a pristine environment is the end game for some, then it means evacuating New Zealand and leaving it to nature. Given that's not very likely, we must instead strike a balance between the environment and economic development.
Water quality is a highly complex thing. ‘Save the Mokihinui' from damming paints a picture of a pristine environment, which it is. This river is free of farm animals and people, but according to the Cawthron Institute, it's an unhealthily ecosystem. Confused? The Cawthron Institute found it worse than the Mataura in my area and even worse than the Waikato, where a quarter of the nation's dairy cattle live. Out of 16 large rivers the ‘pristine' Mokihinui' ranks a lowly 14. This is because many things influence water quality, like shade, shallowness, temperature, water flow and nutrients. Contrary to what Massey's Mike Joy says, it seems that eels do flourish in pastoral streams. According to the Waikato River Independent Scoping Study, the biomass for Long Fin Eels in pastoral streams over forest streams was four times greater and with Short Fin Eels, 30 times greater. The moral here is not too many nutrients, but not too little either. Sterile water cannot support life.
Imagery also tells a story but sometimes it can be opposite to the truth. One television channel uses file footage of dairy wastewater flowing into farm drains before showing it pouring into what resembles a lake. Case closed, ‘dirty dairying' confirmed for some. Except this ‘lake' is a farm oxidation pond and this wastewater is later spray irrigated back to pasture as liquid fertiliser. We've asked for these images to be captioned because it will build awareness that dairy farmers do not pour wastewater into the nearest creek. Even in print, the Waikato Times recently captioned a photograph, "Russel Norman took this photograph of cows with open access to graze riverbanks...." ‘Cows' today is short for dairy but these ‘cows' were a mix of beef cattle with one prominent specimen lacking a cow's essential plumbing. This is not to excuse beef cattle on a riverbank, but it's unfair to reinforce the dirty dairying lie when it's not even a dairy farm.
With the National Policy Statement (NPS) on water being gazetted last Thursday, we hope that the Government will look for innovation, because that's what Federated Farmers members do on the ground. We want to help the Government make this NPS something that will work for farming and the environment. To me, these are flipsides of the same coin.
