Court takes action over illegal discharge

 Both farms were deemed to have inadequate systems in place due to their lack of contingency measures according to judge Melanie Harland.

Joe MacFarlane's farm near Te Kauwhata, received a fine of $55,800 after council staff inspecting the property in July last year, discovered an effluent hose placed next to a wetland.

The farmer had placed the hose there and had discharged all of the effluent from the farm's dairy shed into the wetland over the previous 19-days.

The farm's usual practice was to irrigate effluent directly to land as it was being produced. However, there were no contingencies to deal with effluent in the event of stormy weather or mechanical failure. In this case the irrigator had recently broken down and the effluent, estimated to be about 150,000 litres, was discharged directly to the environment instead.

"With all of the attention and profile around water quality nationally it is very disappointing to find such an inadequate system and, even worse, to find someone who made the conscious decision to dispose of effluent into a wetland for a prolonged period," says council investigations manager Patrick Lynch.

In a separate incident Orion Haulage Ltd has been fined $32,400 for illegally discharging into a stream.

The charge initially rose from a complaint about contamination in a Walton waterway in October 2013.

Council staff tracked the contamination back to a nearby dairy farm where they found a combination of dairy farm effluent and whey permeate discharging from an effluent pond directly on to the banks of the stream.

While Orion Haulage held resource consent to spread the dairy by-products on to the farm subject to certain conditions, poor management of the pond levels had allowed it to overflow.

"This case highlights the fact that even when a farm has good infrastructure in place, there is still a great need for that system to be managed at all times to prevent these types of discharges to the environment," says Lynch.