Editorial

Change will not come cheaply

SUCH was the pace with which dairying expanded from 1990, especially in Canterbury and Southland, that environmental regulations have struggled to keep up.

Now, caught between a Government and public demanding improved water quality, Environment Southland and Environment Canterbury are imposing challenging new nutrient loss limits, including halving nitrogen and phosphorus losses in some catchments.

As our special report outlines this week, meeting these new water quality limits can be achieved for most by changes to farm management.

But this does not come cheaply.

But just as important for councils is getting farmer buy-in, which requires an understanding and appreciation of the cost and commitment they are seeking from land users.

It would appear that buy-in or support from farmers in Canterbury and Southland is not uniform, with many considering some of the new water quality targets impractical.

While Environment Southland is still to finalise its targets it has caused confusion and consternation by publishing three different nutrient reduction models that might be required to achieve healthy water quality standards.

Farming is Southland’s largest industry and meeting nutrient loss limits will be challenging, but consultants warn that if these targets are too extreme, sheep and beef farming, let alone dairying, will not be possible.

For both economic and farmerconfidence reasons, councils have to tread a fine line and establish nutrient loss standards that are practical and which farmers can continue to operate, albeit with some management tweaks.

Environment Minister David Parker expects regional councils and the Ministry for the Environment to improve water quality, resulting in sharp increases in staff numbers for both entities, creating pressure on sector leaders and councils’ staff.

The hope is that it doesn’t result in unworkable targets that will create dissent, frustration and non-compliance.

Neal Wallace

LETTERS Clear and present danger to farmland

I ENJOYED the editor’s comments criticising the Emissions Trading Scheme and in particular the line “the right place for a pine right now is everywhere”. That is if we consider nothing but economics. I have written and spoken frequently on the unintended consequence of carbon farming in New Zealand over many years and now sadly those consequences are becoming reality.

Currently, I have a debtfree cropping farm with a valuation on it at $6.7 million. It’s 153 hectares of extremely good land, with a low turnover relative to its value at roughly $400,000. If making money was my only driver, I would sell that farm and buy as much hill land as possible. Let’s say 1000ha growing sheep and pockets of native bush and convert the whole lot to pine. At 30 tonnes a hectare of carbon locked up, times by $80 per tonne, an accountant with nothing but bottom right hand line in mind would see an annual turnover of $2.4m and the cost of the planting negated in just a few years. Easy money.

This is inevitably going to create a massive tide of green desert crawling up our hills like cancer. Our magnificent back country is now the wet dream of a corporate raider. Our native flora and fauna is under a clear and present danger, the threat of extinction even. The ETS is a single-fix solution to a multi-faceted problem that is completely wrong for this country. And it will destroy so much more than it cures. NZ stands on the brink of selling its soul for money.

I don’t always agree with Alan Emerson but when he said (February 7) about banning polyester clothing and synthetic carpets and subsidising our woolproducing sheep so that it can see off the true reality of the ETS, then I am totally with him.

Andrew Luddington

Christchurch

Recovering energy from waste

IT IS well known in the Government that we cannot stop the thermal generation for electricity. The truth being that without thermal generation, we will have massive ongoing power cuts every time the water levels drop in our hydro lakes and the wind doesn’t blow.

This will require more thermal generation, not less, and under the current system this means even greater amounts of coal being imported.

So what are the alternatives?

The first thing that gets mentioned is the excess electricity that will become available when the aluminium smelter at Bluff shuts down. Many say that this will provide a great buffer until sustainable generation is available in

More letters page 36

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