Editorial: 'Dirty dairying' not yet thing of the past

OPINION: For an obvious reason, dairy farmers intensely dislike the term "dirty dairying". It puts them and their industry in a bad light, and they have made considerable efforts to clean up their act.

But it still happens, as shown by two disappointing Golden Bay examples dealt with in the Environment Court this week.

In one case, a farmer was fined $23,000 for discharging effluent into the Onahau River and it emerged that she had a long history of failing to comply with regulations designed to prevent pollution. The second farmer – whose dirty dairying record was also bad – was fined $8000 for an episode that the court accepted was the result of neglect rather than intent.

A generation ago pollution of this type was so common as to generally go unremarked. Times have changed, and these two cases now represent the exception rather than the rule.

The dairy industry as a whole and a high percentage of individual farmers are deserving of compliments for the way in which they have responded to the changing understanding of what is acceptable practice.

Indeed, there are several outstanding clean-up projects in our region and one of them, in Golden Bay's Aorere Valley, has been hailed as a model for other river catchments around the country.

It demonstrates that with the right level of commitment, practices such as improving effluent systems, fencing off streams and building bridges for stock to cross can have a huge effect on water quality.

The improvement goes wider than just the water in streams and rivers adjoining farms. Pollution plumes from rivers can have a devastating effect on marine farms.

Before the Aorere project, the bacterial count caused by the river's plume restricted shellfish harvesting to 28 per cent of the year.

When the project's success was celebrated last July, harvesting could go ahead for 79 per cent of the year.

Meanwhile, the plume from the Motueka River is suspected of having a role in the catastrophic decline of the Tasman Bay scallop fishery.

Across the Tasman district, 89 per cent of farmers were compliant with dairy effluent management requirements when the results of a two-year survey were released last year.

This is well ahead of the national figure, 70 per cent for the 2007-08 year, and is a cause for congratulation. But as the court cases so clearly showed, the message is not getting through to all farmers and, until it does, "dirty dairying" is a phrase that will rightly remain in the national lexicon.

There is a lot at stake, including further erosion of the "clean, green" image that is important to dairying as well as to tourism and the overall image of New Zealand.

Good water quality is easily taken for granted but of huge value for many reasons. It must be guarded.

Dairying is usually considered to be the nation's lifeblood, but the expansion which has seen the number of milking cows nearly double between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s did not happen without a massive environmental cost.

The farmers own their land; the waterways belong to everyone and what happens to them has an effect on us all.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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