Councils need eyeballing

What those rules look like and how much they will cost farmers and the community to implement also needs close scrutiny. Take a couple of examples from Canterbury.

Overseer: like it or hate it. Canterbury farmers are required to record an estimate of their nitrogen losses using Overseer. Personally I don’t have an issue with that. But I do have a problem with the rules which require farmers to redo their Overseer assessment every year, whether or not they have made significant changes on the farm.

Then you keep that filed away in case the council ever wants to see it.

Sounds like a dolly, until you start looking at the cost. I’ve been given estimates for annual Overseer assessments (from certified practitioners) ranging from $1000-$1500 for a simple farming operation to $5000-$10,000 for more complex arable and mixed farming systems.

So assuming the 7000-odd farmers in Canterbury were all ‘simple’ Overseer assessments, that rule is costing $7m-$10.5m per annum, but probably a lot more.

Call me a pragmatic greenie, but I would much rather money was spent on doing something constructive on the ground, and keeping the Overseer assessments for when they’re needed.

Some catchment plans require all farms to have a farm environment plan (FEP). Now don’t get me wrong, I happen to think farm plans are a useful tool, and there are some excellent industry programmes.

My beef is that the rules require all farmers to have an audited FEP irrespective of whether there are any potential issues with water quality.

North Canterbury Federated Farmers raised this matter in a recent hearing in Canterbury and the rules in that catchment plan were revised as a result.

My favourite example has to be a water plan in Canterbury which requires all farmers to enter into some sort of binding collective by 2017 or get resource consent to keep farming.

• Lynda Murchison is North Canterbury Federated Farmers provincial president.