by Russel Norman
There are a lot of farmers doing the right thing fencing off streams and planting the margins. But there is still a long way to go. This vid was shot in the northern Wairarapa:
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Russel Norman on Fri, February 29th, 2008
Tags: dairy, Pollution, river, Russel Norman, stream, Wairarapa, water
More posts by Russel Norman | more about Russel Norman
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Now I KNOW that beats the Owen Glenn story-thingy. A few visuals will do that I guess!
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Check out this trademe listing from Opotiki. We have kids swimming just a few hundred metres from these cows.
http://www.trademe.co.nz/Sports/Fishing/Fresh-water/Other/auction-142421697.htm
Our Council actual owns the land that is leased to the farmer. But “can’t do anything about it.”
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You don’t have to look hard around the country to find evidence of poor practices around waterways. I suggest you take the camera with you whenever you are driving in the countryside and you will commonly see similar examples.
The Selwyn River increases massively in ecoli at Coes Ford, which is directly attributable to a few farm drains which enter the river. These drains and the reduced river flow (due to abstraction) mean that this once frequented swimming destination is now little more than a sespool. Algal mats and slime cover the river bed. Stock are left to roam around the edges of Lake Ellesmere, inlcuding on DOC land. I was down at the lower Selwyn Huts recently, and saw cows in the confluence of the Lake and Selwyn River.
I have been on intensive dairy farms, and there are sometimes literally ditches of shit flowing alongside some of the farm tracks etc. And the smell on these sorts of farms is…
I suggest that if you drill down into the scientific detail of the clean streams accord, it is not all it is cracked up to be.
I applaude the recent decision to require water metering, this is a MASSIVE step forward. I hope there is more support for those who have to implement this than previously NES’s.
Water Quality issues desperatley need assistance from central government and I suspect that the only way to do this, is to ultimately limit herd density and cap the total herd numbers in any given catchment. In Canterbury, water allocation limits could be considered to be fulfilling this function in a way, by which total dairy herd size is controlled due to the Canterbury maxium “no water=no dairy”. Fontera could perhaps control this by limiting the volume of milk it will collect from catchments, and the herd density issue by limiting collection from farms of a certain area.
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russel..what has happened to that post you did..(early on)..extolling the ‘good news’ about bio-fuels..?
you may remember..?
i did a ‘vigorous’ denunncuiation of the arguments you made..
a riposte..that with the passage of time..was reasonably ‘on the money’..
the whole post seems to have ‘disappeared’..
has it been ‘sanitised’..?
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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As a farmer this kind of thing makes me angry to the extreme. For years now we’ve been told to fence off our waterways and most off us have, not just to placate the greens and foreign markets but because many of us do care about the environment. Only for us to be let down by this kind of lazy idiot.
Thankfully you do give us some credit in your post but please don’t tar us all with the same brush.
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Well I would say they’re obviously attacking farmers who DON’T fence off streams, so you don’t have anything to worry about? Or do you? Presumably if the Greens get their way there will be some of regulation-punishable-by-fines in place, is that a worry at all?
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