Water is a necessity of life for both the human race and for the many different forms of farming.
The average farmer knows this and as any good business operator they know that they need to protect and maintain a supply of freshwater to ensure continuity of their business.
They know that farming in all its forms has an effect on waterways and to ensure the continuity as stated above they take precautions to mitigate those effects on their water supply through the use of best practicable options in their farming practices.
Yet they are constantly being portrayed as the destroyers of our environment by many so called environmentalists and other commentators.
So let’s take a look at some of the facts around effects on the freshwater supply in NZ.
What are the things that have an effect on water quality in our NZ environment? In no particular order they include the following:
Water quality in New Zealand is managed under:
National Environmental Standards for Freshwater
The Resource Management (National Environmental Standards for Freshwater) Regulations 2020 (Freshwater NES) regulates activities that pose risks to the health of freshwater and freshwater ecosystems.
What the Freshwater NES does:
The Freshwater NES sets the requirements for carrying out certain activities that pose risks to freshwater and freshwater ecosystems. Anyone carrying out these activities will need to comply with the standards.
The standards are designed to:
With all of the above NES requirements being related to farming, how are the other effects causing activities being managed or controlled?
Most other effects causing activities are managed under the requirements of the Resource Management Act 1991 with the two main exceptions being recreational use and pest fishes.
In relation to recreational use it seems that if a waterway is navigable then we are allowed to do so as of right with the only restrictions being on the speed of passage and on areas surrounding hydro-electric dams.
In relation to pest fishes particularly Koi Carp (considered by many as the Possum of the waterways), there are rules in place to limit what can be done in relation to fishing or transferring species to different waterways, but there is very little actually physically being done about the control or eradication of them.
It almost seems that body responsible for pest fish control (DOC) don’t know what to do, don’t know how or who is going to fund actions to control them and therefore they are happy to ignore the problem and just hope that it will go away.
But unfortunately that is not the case and in actual fact the problem is growing exponentially every day due to the lack of any natural predatory control on the pest fishes and their highly successful breeding rates.
We will never succeed in improving water quality in our waterways as long as the pest fishes are allowed to carry on breeding and spreading through the environment without any controls being enacted, no matter what restrictions we place on the farming community.
In fact aside from the physical water quality issues, we are in danger of losing a significant amount of our indigenous biodiversity through the lowering of the natural water quality levels from the effects of the pest fishes, and we are also seeing very significant levels of erosion of the waterway margins due to the feeding effects of the pest fishes.
In relation to uptake from waterways:
The Resource management Act states that water is not to be taken, used, dammed or diverted for any reason unless:
In fact it is acknowledged that many of New Zealand’s waterways are already over allocated in relation to uptakes other than for personal use or for stock watering. All uptakes are managed through Resource Consents issued under the Resource management Act 1991.
In relation to discharges to waterways all discharges are managed through Resource Consents issued under the Resource Management Act 1991 and controlled according to the conditions imposed by the consent issuing authorities.
It is a fact that the most polluted waterways in New Zealand are in fact in the urban areas and this mostly relates to the effects of the urban discharges to the waterways of stormwater, treated sewage and industrial discharges yet the focus currently is to put the blame for poor water quality solely onto the farming industries.
A classic example of how the current commentaries ignore some of the facts has to be shown in the situation where we regularly have warnings given in our largest urban area (Auckland Region) advising that there are beaches where the public should not swim due to e-coli contamination.
This is a recurring problem that comes from contamination of the stormwater system by raw sewage every time there is a heavy rainfall event. The sewer system cannot cope with the extended loading and is designed to send any excess above a certain level into the stormwater system which then discharges to the sea thereby creating the contamination of the beaches around the discharge points.
Yet there is hardly a word printed in the news media regards this contamination problem especially when compared to the amount of commentary that is printed in regard to the effects from farming.
This whole situation just serves to highlight the inequitable treatment of the farming industries when it comes to issues around water quality in our waterways. Farming is portrayed as being the main problem with water quality when in fact it is just a part of the problem and in fact has already taken some very large steps to mitigate its effects and the other problem areas are actually being ignored as they may have a great cost that nobody wants to have to pay.