Water requires attention — Editorial

Contamination from pastoral farming and urbanisation is impacting our water quality; farmers are part of the problem, but by no means the whole problem.

The report confirms there are no easy, quick fixes to New Zealand’s water quality challenges and that in water degradation all sectors are culpable. The publicly campaigning greenies and the ‘Mike Joys’ must accept this.

Farmers have in recent years made significant improvements in land management, proving they can continue to produce food and agricultural exports while reducing their environmental footprint. Phosphate and ammonia levels are improving, reflecting the results of farmers’ investments in good management practice over the last decade.

Dairy farmers alone have spent at least $1 billion dollars in the last five years on environmental improvements onfarm.

Federated Farmers is right: all sectors, including urban communities with sewage and stormwater challenges, need to be given time to implement changes that are sensible, practical and affordable.

Gluckman’s report says water monitoring in NZ is imperfect, with sampling site distribution not fully representative of the environmental variation that occurs, sub-optimal site density in places, and variable quality of sampling and analysis protocols. Despite these challenges, the data clearly shows that water quality and quantity is being adversely affected primarily by changes in land use and the diffuse contamination arising from pastoral farming and urbanisation.

While the public understandably might hope for rapid restoration of water quality in all rivers and lakes, this is unrealistic and scientifically impossible.

In some cases we are dealing with contamination that occurred decades ago, and the legacy effects may take a similar time to flush from the system. Moreover there are no silver bullets in water restoration: all sorts of actions are needed, requiring partnerships between central and local authorities, iwi, citizens and businesses including farmers.

To point the finger solely at dairy farmers and cows isn’t the way to go. Farmers are not sitting on their laurels.

The Government’s new Clean Water policy sets out the ongoing programme of water reform. The new stock exclusion requirements for dairy cattle is a strong endorsement of the hard work dairy farmers have done on their farms to protect waterways.