Planning and Practical Constraints Another issue, on which the views of the representative organisations accorded with those of the NRW officers, was planning. The interviewees acknowledged both the challenge for the planning system of potentially having to deal with multiple applications for slurry storage systems all at the same time, and linked to this, the fact that slurry systems “do tend to be a little bit controversial”. In Pembrokeshire, for example, we were told: “Incomers have this idealistic view as to how the countryside should be and not necessarily be a working countryside, which does then cause some problems. So planning authorities do find slurry systems difficult, very time consuming and complicated to deal with because there tends to be some objections to any application”. Bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) Of significance in the context of Pembrokeshire, is the presence of TB associated farm-level movement restrictions in the event of outbreaks, impacts on the amount of stock that are retained on some farms. In many cases, it results in larger herd sizes than may otherwise be optimal for the farm infrastructure to manage. Also, dairy herds are often housed for at least part of the year. This, it was noted, produces a lot of slurry from large dairy sheds, but often without there being an equivalent area of on-farm grassland for it to be spread on. In order to manage this, farmers instead look to export the slurry. However, there is an economic cost involved in doing so, whilst in the case of those farm holdings under TB restriction, tight regulations on slurry movement are maintained: “even if it’s been stored for 5 months that’s still doesn’t get around TB. There is some suggestion that it could be stored for 6 months, but that would require most farms to have two slurry pits”. Alternatives or Additions to NVZs A respondent provided details of a previous NRW project as an illustration of the possibility for designing alternatives to NVZs. The NRW project was with First Milk and focused around waste products from the factory for which there was no capacity for NRW to issue a consent for discharge into the watercourse. Instead, NRW set about advising First Milk on how to reduce their nitrate levels which would allow NRW to issue a discharge consent. A similar approach was then extended as a means of working with the local dairy farmers supplying First Milk. This included advising a local group of farmers on “simple things”,including “recalibrating fertiliser spreaders, looking at clean/dirty water separation, when to put slurry out […] soil testing and other things”, some of which, as this respondent also noted
________________________________________________________________________________________________________ CAWR, Coventry University (2017) – Researching Farmer Perspectives on NVZs in Wales Page 35