Southland landowners offered catchment funding boost
Environment Southland's catchment improvement funding is once again available for innovative landowners in need of a boost to get their project going.
Southland farmers are being praised for maintaining high environmental compliance during the 2020-21 monitoring year.
The 2020-21 compliance monitoring report, presented this month to Environment Southland summarised compliance monitoring, enforcement and technical teams’ activities.
Environment Southland general manager integrated catchment management Paul Hulse said that once again Covid restrictions led to significant disruption of the inspection programme, and therefore, inspection numbers.
“It has been another challenging year, however, the compliance team has managed the programme extremely well.”
There were 960 on-site and aerial dairy shed effluent discharge consent inspections completed during the 2020/21 season.
Of these, 747 were fully compliant, 200 were graded low risk or moderate non-compliance, while 13 were graded significant non-compliance – equating to about 1.3% significant non-compliant inspections.
The 2020-21 year saw a slight drop in the number of incidents reported to the compliance division on the previous year.
There were 888 reported incidents in 2020/2021 compared to 964 reported incidents in the 2019/2020 year.
“When a farm is graded as significantly non-compliant there is a range of follow-up actions available. Not all of these actions result in enforcement. Other actions can include re-inspection, diversion, letters of direction and warnings, infringement notices or abatement notices,” Hulse said.
The vast majority of consent holders across dairying, industry, territorial authorities and other organisations performed well in their environmental monitoring and reporting, he said.
Regulatory Committee chairman Neville Cook said it was pleasing to see the dairy industry with low significant non-compliance, but that the compliance monitoring report also reported on compliance relating to commercial enterprises.
Academic Dr Mike Joy and his employer, Victoria University of Wellington have apologised for his comments suggesting that dairy industry CEOs should be hanged for contributing towards nitrate poisoning of waterways.
Environment Southland's catchment improvement funding is once again available for innovative landowners in need of a boost to get their project going.
The team meeting at the Culverden Hotel was relaxed and open, despite being in the middle of calving when stress levels are at peak levels, especially in bitterly cold and wet conditions like today.
A comment by outspoken academic Dr Mike Joy suggesting that dairy industry leaders should be hanged for nitrate contamination of drinking/groundwater has enraged farmers.
OPINION: The phasing out of copper network from communications is understandable.
Driven by a lifelong passion for animals, Amy Toughey's journey from juggling three jobs with full-time study to working on cutting-edge dairy research trials shows what happens when hard work meets opportunity - and she's only just getting started.