Organisers of the Waikato Regional Council-held event, with the support of DairyNZ, suggest the next incarnation will be covering a broader base, taking in the rivers plan, broader environmental issues, and the relationship between town and country. A correct decision? - only time will tell.
With farmland in the Waikato showing signs of what appears to have been the wettest winter in decades, the 500 or so attendees were on the look out to solutions to deal with farm waste in the immediate, and the longer term.
Around fifty exhibitors were offering solutions from in-ground storage ponds create with a variety of impervious membranes, to more traditional above-ground, steel or concrete options. Once stored, there was then a diverse range of choices to getting effluent out onto the land, with pump powered irrigators for land near storage, to tankers or spreaders for outlying land.
Extremely popular with the attendees were several seminars, looking at topics including what Waikato Regional Council was looking for during compliance inspections, Dairy NZ explaining how to calculate how much storage was required, and a discussion led by Nick Tait of DairyNZ who asked the question “what’s the real value of my effluent”. This topic certainly opened a few eyes when that value was compared to bought-in fertiliser, and appreciating the value the waste had in increasing organic matter in the soil.
Look out for a wider discussion about farm waste in the upcoming Effluent and Water Management Feature in Dairy News No.390, published on Nov 14th.
