P.C.1. Fencing Farmers off Their Land
Under the fencing rules contained in the Waikato Regional Councils proposed Plan Change 1 farmers will be forced off their land by the costs of fencing and water reticulation.
This is without taking into account the reduction in income from the loss of the land that will have to be taken out of their total grazing area by the fencing requirements.
By the nature of the ground, some hill country farmers will lose up to forty percent of their total grazing area due to the fencing requirements and when this is taken into account along with the costs of the fencing requirements and the reticulation of water for stock, this will result in farmers being unable to make a living from their land and having to walk off the land.
The proposed Plan Change 1 is spoken of as an eighty year plan to return the water quality in our rivers and streams in the Waikato Region back to what it was at the time of the European settlement.
But in actual fact it is only a ten year plan for the hill country farmers who will be required to carry out the fencing off of all waterways on all land with slopes up to 25° in the first ten years of the Plan becoming active.
The National Policy Statement on Fresh Water Management requires the exclusion of stock (deer, cattle, horses and pigs) from all land with slopes up to 15 degrees.
The proposed Waikato Regional Council plan change (PC1) requires exclusion on slopes up to 25 degrees.
“Stock exclusion up to 25 degree slopes and mitigation of every tiny creek on steeper slopes is an extreme measure, well beyond the NPS requirements.
It is noted that within PC1 the current Section 32 analysis, estimated Nitrogen losses from non-dairy pastoral land use have increased by only 4% over the forty year period 1972 to 2012.
Lower capital values for this non-dairy pastoral land reflect the lower per hectare profitability of less intensively managed property. A consequence of less intensive land use is that the fencing requirements (or other measures) that may be readily amortised by intensive farming are beyond the means of most hill country farmers.
The costs for stock exclusion on non-dairying hill country land have been estimated to add another forty per cent to the average hill country farmer’s debt loadings.
There is a very real possibility that banks will refuse to lend further money (to fund this stock exclusion work) due to this increase in debt loading making farms an uneconomic proposition from a lending perspective.
The result will be hill country farmers being driven off their land through, increased debt loading, the loss in capital values of their land and the consequent unsustainable costs for compliance which these stock exclusion requirements bring.
There is also another issue that needs to be taken into account for those farmers on hill country land and that is the possibility that they may be required to surrender some of their land for re-afforestation purposes and if this is the case then why would they want to spend large amounts of capital in fencing and reticulating hill country areas only to see them turned over to afforestation.
This current government has stated that they want to see a billion trees planted to offset the effects of climate change and the only way to do that will be to retire some land that is currently used for pastoral farming.
Yet there is no mention anywhere in the Plan Change documents about taking into account climate change obligations.
Surely any sensible person would want to see this type of decision making (PC1) taking into account all factors that have an effect on the outcomes from that decision and to that end it would be prudent for the central government to ensure that these types of decisions do not have a detrimental effect nationally and that they comply with all present and foreseeable requirements around climate change.
If we have to retire land for either purpose (i.e. improving water quality or climate change obligations) then the freehold owners of that land must be offered adequate commercial compensation for giving up their lawful rights to use that land.
The Waikato Regional Council has already set the precedent for compensation with the payments that were made under the Taupo Variation 5 agreements.
Under the Taupo / Variation 5 it was acknowledged that farming was not “just a business.” For many farmers, changing farming practices meant changing lifestyles. For some, that meant challenging what it meant to “be a farmer”.
The same things will apply with PC1. Many farmers will be put into highly stressful situations as a result of PC1 and the changes required by it and there will need to be strategies put in place to manage the effects of that stress on the farmers.
Andy Loader
Co-Chairman P.L.U.G.
(Primary Land Users Group)