But recently my home playground and my place as New Zealand’s foremost animal representative in the cyber world have been threatened by a troubling young upstart.

Rosie.

Rosie the Cow is the New Zealand dairy industry’s “Cowbassador”, chosen by DairyNZ to spread the message to children everywhere about how moo-velous our dairy industry is here in New Zealand. This ruminant pied piper has been travelling all over the country, blogging on her website about the magic of how grass becomes milk.

Rosie, like me, is looking forward to the summer holidays and has been encouraging children to send in pictures of themselves doing typical Kiwi kid summer activities like catching their first fish or even doing some bombs into the river.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell Rosie that for many Kiwi kids, fishing and swimming in their local river is no longer an option.  The swimming holes have gone because too much water has been taken to grow the grass Rosie eats. The fish have all but disappeared and signs like the one below are popping up at rivers all over the country. A major culprit for this sad state of affairs is Rosie herself.

Rosie’s website doesn’t mention the fact that she and her dairy cow mates produce 14 times the amount of faeces as a human. Rosie conveniently ignores the fact that  her urine patches  leach nitrate into groundwater and spring fed streams and nutrient runoff from the paddocks she grazes help cause the algal blooms that leave me and my fishy friends struggling for oxygen.

But even worse, dairy cows like Rosie sometimes use rivers and streams as their own personal toilet. We’re talking about my home here! Rosie bowls on into the stream, churns up the banks with her great big hooves, destroys the eggs of my endangered friend the inanga (or whitebait), and then leaves a nice steaming present for us to deal with.

Now it’s not always the case that Rosie has such freedom to roam. Many responsible dairy farmers out there have been making good progress in keeping Rosie away from my home, by following recommendations set out in the voluntary Clean Streams Accord. But with lots of small streams where tadpoles like to hang out not meeting the Accord’s definition of stream, Rosie often gets free reign here with no fences or riparian planting in sight.

None of this is mentioned on Rosie’s website, of course.  Rosie the “ cowbassador” conveniently ignores the hard truths. She is more concerned with trying to convince kids that milk and the dairy industry are more important than the health of our streams, lakes and ponds – homes for Frog, fish and tuna (eels) and once the summer playground for many.

While Northland kids may welcome Rosie’s milk, Frog, Fish and Tuna can’t drink milk. We wouldn’t survive too well in  bottled water either.

Frog looks forward to Rosie blogging about places like the Mackenzie Basin which she’ll leave to us Frogs and our fishy friends.

Murray made some very good points regarding the snail-like pace at which improved water management is happening. After many years of what he describes as the “gentle approach” of education and persuasion which has failed to improve water quality, Murray paints a picture of Canterbury as a “no-mans land” of water governance.  This situation is brought about by the lack of unequivocal commitment from both farmers and the central Government to do what is necessary to clean up the region. Sadly, this story is echoed in other parts of New Zealand where intensive agriculture has been left to expand without adequate regulation.

Murray’s speech can be read here:

Murray’s speech covers many of the points made by the Green Party in our plan to clean up New Zealand’s lakes and rivers to make them swimmable once more, including a levy on the use of water by irrigators. You can read our Clean Rivers plan here

Environment Southland Chairwoman Ali Timms said it was at high risk of irreversible damage because of intensification of land use in the surrounding catchment, and that steps might be taken by the regional council to try to halt further development in Waituna catchment.

Waituna is a popular brown-trout fishing destination, drawing over 2,000 angling visits per year. The lagoon is part of the Waituna Wetlands which was one of the first sites in the world to be named “a wetland of international significance” under the RAMSAR Convention, an intergovernmental treaty that was signed in Ramsar, Iran in 1971. The area is an important habitat for birds, being home to seventy six species including international migratory waders. It is also home to some very unusual plants, such as the cushion plant Donatia which normally grows in sub-alpine areas. Increased nutrient levels from intensive dairy farming are now threatening to “flip” the lagoon from an ecosystem with clear water featuring aquatic plants and fish species to one with murky, turbid water dominated by algae.

When water quality scientist Kirsten Meijer visited the lagoon with the Southland Times this month, she pointed out black mud on the edges of a tributary to the lagoon.

“There’s a lot of sediment going into the lagoon and the mud goes black (instead of being brown). It smells like sulphur, no oxygen, nothing can live in it,” she said. This in a stream that flows into an area of international significance!

One of the ideas being put forward by Environment Southland to combat this pressing problem is to not allow any more dairy farms in the area in the interim. In response to this, Federated Farmers Southland dairy chairman Vaughan Templeton has stated  ”We would rather see people who are (farming) there do so under certain conditions that don’t have runoff. We have to put things in place to try to minimise it.”

But just what will be put in place? Several agencies, including the Waituna Landcare Group, have been working to try to improve land management practices in the Waituna Catchment but their efforts have not been enough to halt and reverse the decline in water quality. Environment Southland is under immense pressure from Federated Farmers and the dairying industry to allow continuation of dairy development in the region.

What is needed here is clear guidance from the government and clean water rules NOW. It just so happens that Environment Minister Nick Smith is sitting on a Draft National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management that would provide this much needed guidance to regional and district councils on protecting our waterways, but he won’t sign it as it may just upset the polluting industries. Russel Norman will be in the region in April rafting the Oreti River as part of his Dirty and Threatened Rivers Tour and will speak with local people about the issues, drawing attention to the threats posed by the dairy industry in Southland.

http://www.greens.org.nz/dirtyrivers

I asked Kennedy to describe that time of his life and give us an insider’s view of what happens diplomatically when a small country on the edge of the world declares it’s independence from the world’s largest superpowers.

You can listen to the podcast here [MP3].