Can we avoid an udder disaster?

Almost any Kiwi old enough to remember the ‘80s has fond memories of childhood adventures eel-baiting or tadpole-trapping; of fishing trips, summertime dips in cool rivers or warm geothermal springs, sunny days spent noodling about in boats or water skis on lakes – or even drinking straight from streams on bush walks. But we might be the last generation of Kiwis with memories like these.

This country is famous for its beautiful freshwater, but over the last couple of decades our lakes, rivers and streams have become so polluted that many are now unfit for human use.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), which samples water across the country, says that “despite a comprehensive clean-up of dirty [industrial and urban] discharges in the 1990s, water quality in many of our lakes and rivers is still declining.” And although our water is good by international standards, many waterways “show excessive nutrients, reduced clarity due to suspended sediments, and pollution by faecal bacteria”.

Our lowland rivers are in the worst shape, with 96 per cent of lowland pastoral and urban rivers unsafe to swim in, according to Massey University scientist Dr Mike Joy.

In short, our water situation is bad and getting worse. But why?

Poo, fertiliser and mud

Many things play a part in freshwater water pollution, including industrial discharges, sewage and stormwater, run-off from roads, damming, and even the type of landscape and weather. But according to NIWA, farming is “undoubtedly” the main source of pollution, with dairy farming the worst offender.

Dairying pollutes water in three main ways:

1. Bacteria gets into the water when cows poo directly in it, or when rain washes cow poo off the land. These bacteria make the water unsafe to drink or swim in, and contribute to the tens of thousands of cases of waterborne disease in New Zealand each year.
2. Fertiliser applied to encourage grass growth contains the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorus, which leach into streams and underground reservoirs. This nutrient run-off encourages rampant algal growth that kills and crowds out native plants, fish and animals, and at high levels makes water toxic.
3. As cows trample across streams they collapse the soil at the bank, working it into a fine mud that clouds water, scours native plants off stream beds, harms delicate fish and invertebrates, and clogs estuaries.

These effects have ballooned in recent years, as global demand for dairy products, especially from Asia, has driven a rapid expansion in the industry. New Zealand now has a huge share of the global dairy market – around 35 per cent – and with dairy prices regularly hitting record highs, it has become a very appealing business to be in.

Landowners are not only converting their far-less-polluting beef and sheep farms and forestry blocks into dairy – they’re also squeezing more cows on to the land. The average dairy herd is now 393 animals – more than triple the 1975 average – and there are now more than 4.6 million dairy cows in the country.

It’s this intensification issue that’s at the heart of New Zealand’s freshwater crisis.

Our economic backbone?

So is a certain amount of water pollution just the price we pay for having the most successful dairy industry in the world?

“If you didn’t have dairying, life would be pretty miserable,” says Federated Farmers dairying chairman Willy Leferink.

“We would be at the mercy of mining if we didn’t have dairy. Beef and sheep farming aren’t going to pay the bills.”

According to a report from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, dairying contributes $10.4 billion in annual export earnings – the largest export sector by far – and employs as many as 45,000 people.

Those are impressive numbers. But as Dr Joy points out, that’s only one side of the ledger. “There’s not a single cost there, it’s all about earnings,” he says.

If the dairy industry was required to return the water it used in the same state it found it, those earnings could well be less impressive – instead, it arguably pushes that liability on to society, which picks up the bill in the form of contaminated drinking water and lost fishing, recreational and tourism opportunities.

“If your accountant was doing your books like that, you’d sack him,” says Dr Joy. “We’re told we have to accept the pollution because it’s so important economically, but we wouldn’t accept that for anything else.”

Economic commentator Rod Oram agrees that the figures don’t add up. “Dairying is a very large part of our exports, but it’s a very small portion of GDP. It’s really important to assess dairying in that broader context, rather than set it up on some kind of pedestal.”

Crucially, he says, the industry can’t continue its extraordinary growth rate without destroying the resources on which it is based.

“There’s no way that over the next 20 years the number of cows is going to increase another 78 per cent. So the dairy industry has to generate more value from each litre of milk. And it’s only going to create that extra value if it is utterly robust environmentally.”

In short, the industry needs to focus on quality not just quantity, if it’s to continue to grow – and it can’t do that while destroying our lakes, rivers and streams. As Oram puts it: “good environmental practice is at the heart of economic return to the sector.”

So who is taking responsibility?

Dairying’s link to water pollution is broadly accepted by scientists – and has been emphasised by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in her latest report. However there seem to be varying views within the industry itself on the role that dairying plays.

While John Penno, managing director of Canterbury’s Synlait Milk, describes water pollution as “a key issue for the industry”, others, including Leferink of Federated Farmers, feel dairy’s role has been exaggerated.

“A lot of the story is overplayed by community groups who want to get a benefit from it,” Leferink told Green Ideas.

“I’m not particularly wanting to blame the media, but sometimes readers want to put a group into a category, like how we do with gypsies, with the darker side of the community. We just put them in a group and we blame all the negatives on that group.”

It was against a backdrop of this kind of evasiveness that Fish and Game New Zealand – concerned about the damage being done to their beloved trout fisheries – launched the “dirty dairy” campaign of 2002. They managed to make the issue a national talking point, to which the dairy industry responded in 2003 with the Dairying and Clean Streams Accord – a voluntary scheme formulated by Fonterra and government agencies to encourage farmers to reduce water pollution.

Industry-led approaches

So has the Dairying and Clean Streams Accord worked?

Not really. On the positive side, almost 90 per cent of waterways more than one metre wide are now fenced off from stock, and 99 per cent of regular stock crossings are bridged or culverted, but on the other hand, when the accord expired in 2012, almost half of our dairy farms had no nutrient management plan, over a quarter had non-compliant effluent disposal systems – and our waterways have continued to decline.

However the Dairying and Clean Streams Accord has now been replaced by another industry-led response, the Sustainable Dairy Water Accord, which restates the targets, resets achievement dates, and requires all new dairy farms to be compliant. Under the new accord, responsibility for encouraging compliance falls largely to Fonterra and Synlait, who may not pick up milk from farms with significant failures.

Still, Dr Joy says the plan has major flaws. “The stream size they focus on is wrong,” he says. “Where you would make a difference would be if you said, ‘When a stream is less than one metre wide, you have to fence it off.’ Because those small ones are where most of the problems happen. That’s where the nutrients get into the streams, where most of the bank collapse happens, where most of the stock get in and drop pathogens in the water.

“Think about how streams radiate: there are a hell of a lot more small streams than there are big streams. If you look after the big streams, it’s too late. They’re already polluted.”

Dr Joy also says the accord doesn’t measure water pollution levels, making it impossible to determine its effectiveness.

However Synlait’s John Penno says that criticism is unfair, and that the changes absolutely made a difference. “Through the Clean Streams Accord, the industry nearly doubled in size. On one hand you have farmers doing a better and better job, while at the same time you have the industry growth making things worse. You have those two things working against each other.”

What is the government doing?

In short: not enough. The last government “failed utterly to implement a comprehensive water quality programme in New Zealand,” says Oram, and the current one is trying – “and I’m sceptical they will manage it” – to build a new freshwater policy that will allow local communities and councils to decide the water quality standards they want, and what measures need to be taken.

The government has allocated $50 million to cleaning up iconic water bodies and developing irrigation infrastructure, and their new policy framework is due to be decided in February.

As a lead up to this, a discussion document was released in November by the Ministry for the Environment which was based on recommendations from the Land and Water Forum, a group of industry representatives, iwi, environmental and recreational organisations, and other water stakeholder groups.

The discussion document proposed new “national bottom lines” for freshwater quality, and while these have been welcomed by some, notable freshwater experts have slammed the proposals for not setting direct limits on basic measures of water quality such as nitrogen and phosphate levels.

The proposals also allow central government to overrule local decisions on water quality when they perceive a “significant economic benefit” – which Associate Professor Russell Death, director of the Centre for Freshwater Ecosystem Management and Modelling at Massey University calls a “get-out-of-jail-free card”.

“Any appropriate measure to protect rivers is completely absent,” Dr Death concludes. “In the long to short term this is going to allow greater degradation of our rivers.”

Beyond these proposals, other government measures that might address the issue have also been disheartening: Green Party MP Eugenie Sage points out that the proposed changes to the Resource Management Act, which embed economic considerations against environmental ones, will undermine efforts to address the problem.

“National’s twisting of the Act to promote economic development means that environmental effects like water quality don’t get the attention they deserve,” she says. “We need a stronger regulatory approach; voluntary accords just don’t cut the mustard.”

Under Green policy, she says farmers would be charged a ‘resource rental’ on water used for irrigation, and national standards for stock fencing, nitrate levels in water and overall freshwater standards would be introduced, as well as restrictions on the locations of new dairy farms or conversions.

What about organics?

While all dairy farms produce some water pollution, certified organic farms offer major reductions. A comparative trial at Massey University showed that organic dairying cuts the amount of nitrate pollution getting into groundwater by half.

Brian Clearwater, who co-owns Peelview Farm in Geraldine, and produces the Clearwater Organic Yoghurt brand, says that as well as extensive fencing and riparian planting (which stops excess nutrients getting into waterways) they use fertilisers in their natural, less water-soluble form – rock phosphate as it comes out of the ground – which “requires the soil biology to release nutrients at the right time and place for the plants to absorb it, rather than be leached through the soil.”

And it works economically too: at Peelview, which has been operating for 14 years, they run slightly fewer cows than average – 300 on 114 hectares (or 2.6 cows per hectare compared to the NZ average of 2.8) – but their low-cost system means that, per cow and per hectare, they make the same profit as the top 10 per cent of conventional farms in their region.

“Farmers have always had a licence to pollute groundwater streams and rivers,” says Clearwater. “Our conventional colleagues can run as many cows as they want and put as much artificial fertiliser on those soils as they want. And I would be more profitable if I used that license to pollute and ran the stocking rate and production systems they use.

“Having said that, we’re happy with the profits we make, and we’ll never go back to farming conventionally. We can make a good living farming the way we do, with all the benefits to the wider community.”

Smarter conventional farming

John Penno also believes that high quality, sustainable farming is worth the extra effort. This April, Synlait introduced the Lead With Pride programme, which invites farmers to adopt a rigorous system of best practice, independently audited and certified by AsureQuality, to produce milk for a premium product range.

Penno says around 15-20 per cent of Synlait farmers are working towards achieving the standard. “We firmly believe that there are opportunities in the international market for New Zealand farmers to achieve premium prices, but you can’t just say New Zealand’s clean and green; you have to actually be able to prove you’re doing it.”

Penno also emphasises the need for management tools which not only reduce pollution, but help the farmers’ bottom lines. Agricultural tools like Overseer help farmers budget nutrients down to the last kilogram of fertiliser, reducing costly overuse.

“On one hand we want the economic benefits that come from dairying being a successful industry, but on the other hand, we all want New Zealand to be a place that we enjoy living in,” Penno says.

“We want to be able to swim in the rivers. Or even if we don’t, we want to know that we can.”

Is there a solution?

Despite the fact that many farmers are making a considerable effort to reduce the impact of dairying – and spending considerable amounts of money – the latest report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment concludes that even if these ‘mitigation’ approaches work, the rate at which land is being converted to dairying will see our waterways continue to decline.

That means New Zealand’s best hope of saving its waterways lies in simultaneously tackling both mitigation – by setting strict limits on what can end up in our water – and the issue of how land gets used.

A comprehensive approach like that would need serious commitment at the political level – and that of course depends on the issue striking a chord with voters in both urban and rural communities.

If that seems unlikely given the conflict this issue has kicked up in the past, it’s worth remembering that dairying is something that affects us all – both environmentally and economically – and that within our democratic system we all have the chance to take responsibility for things that affect us.

It’s unlikely he was talking about politics when he made the comment, but something Jon Penno told Green Ideas sums up this situation well:

“Farmers do have an extra responsibility because they have so much land under their stewardship. But we all have an impact on the environment. Keeping New Zealand green and beautiful is actually all of our jobs. So we should each be doing what we can do first.”

On that point, at least, we can all agree.

How can I help?

Buy organic milk and cheese. A bigger market for organic products means more farmers can afford to be more sustainable.

Vote for a party that takes water quality seriously.

Farmers: talk to your neighbours about how you can tackle water issues together.

Sharemilkers: talk to the land owner about investing in fencing and riparian planting.

Take direct action: join a local waterways group and help clean up waterways in your area. See www.projecttwinstreams.com, www.wetlandtrust.org.nz, www.cleanwaterways.org.nz, www.wainz.org.nz, and www.forestandbird.org.nz/freshwaterforlife.

Toxic to babies

Water contamination in parts of rural Canterbury is now so bad that bottle-fed babies are at risk of death, the Canterbury District Health Board medical officer warned in October. Dr Alistair Humphrey’s announcement refers to ‘blue baby syndrome’ – caused by nitrates from fertiliser leaking into bore water which is then used to mix infant formula. Babies that consume excess nitrates struggle to move oxygen from their blood to their cells and can die. Read more at www.tinyurl.com/nynu33h.