Dairy conversions surge but no return to the heady days
Environment Canterbury has confirmed a surge in interest in new dairy conversions, with four effluent discharge permits for conversions granted since the start of the year.
About 3800 farmers have spent $50 million over the past four years on water metering to be fully compliant.
IrrigationNZ chief executive Andrew Curtis says farmers are to be congratulated. Given public concerns shown earlier this year, this is a huge achievement by the primary sector in a short time and comes at considerable cost to farmers, he says.
“Farmers have invested $50m over the past four years in the capital costs associated with water metering.”
This includes alterations to headworks and telemetry and the water meters themselves. Another $2-$3m per year is being spent on third party costs, managing and sending the data to ECan and another $1m on the monitoring costs charged by the regional council.
“This investment shows how committed the farming community is to managing its resource responsibly. This is huge, given that most town water supplies in NZ do not individually meter their water,” says Curtis.
ECan chief executive Bill Bayfield says measuring and managing water use is a critical step to improve the health of Canterbury’s waterways and to ensuring the sustainability of the agriculture industry.
“The water meter programme has been hugely successful… has been world-leading in terms of the number of [Canterbury farmer] installations and a sophisticated service industry that has developed alongside.
“Around 3800 farmers have gone above and beyond the national requirements for water measurement and have installed systems that provide daily data which enables efficient water use; that number is steadily climbing.
“We appreciate this has taken a lot of time and effort and we congratulate the majority of water users who have played their part and are now enjoying the benefits.”
Receiving accurate water data on farms is an important step in ensuring water is managed efficiently to meet the community’s environmental, economic and cultural expectations.
ECan says it takes non-compliance of consented takes very seriously, and is now publishing abatement notices (that have not been complied with) and infringement notices online. This is in response to the public’s desire for more transparency in water measurement.
