Freshwater; Style over Substance -- June 2020

Much has been written about the Ministry for the Environment’s (MfE) newly released National Policy Statement (NPS) on Freshwater, some groups are cautiously optimistic while others are outraged. Generally when nobody is happy with a decision Government has made it’s an indication they’ve got things pretty much right; I’m not so sure that’s the case this time.

From a farmer’s perspective the NPS could have been much worse; we were faced with the prospect of tearing down thousands of kilometres of fences and putting them back up a couple of metres further away from waterways, and worse, the prospect of a “one size fits all” nitrogen limit for the entire country in spite of its potentially devastating economic consequences for diminishing environmental outcomes.

The majority of freshwater ecologists in the MfE science and technology action group (STAG) were arguing for this blanket nitrogen limit, 1mg of dissolved inorganic nitrogen per litre of water, or 1% DIN. The remainder of the nineteen-strong STAG, the Cautious Five, wanted to use another method  entirely to measure a river’s health, the macroinvertebrate community index (MCI); quite literally counting the creatures in the water to determine how healthy it is.

In the end the Government ignored both of these options and decided to stick with the current measure, nitrogen toxicity, something the majority of the STAG warned against as they see it as a poor basis for nutrient limits and it’s a measure no other country in the world uses.

While the STAG were busy trying to define bottom lines, farming industry bodies were proposing an entirely different system based on nitrogen surpluses; they wanted Regional Councils to set nitrogen leaching limits on a catchment by catchment basis and then farmers would report all their nitrogen inputs and outputs, something that is facilitated by the nutrient budgeting required by the now mandatory Farm Environment Plans. Farmers would then need to reduce their nitrogen surplus until it fell within their catchment’s limits.

This wasn’t implemented either and instead the Government set a limit on the use of synthetic nitrogen on pastoral land. This came out of left field, an option that was never discussed throughout the entire consultation period, and the 190kg/ha/year limit affects almost nobody except dairy farmers in Canterbury where nitrogen use averages around 220kg/ha/year.

Nobody can understand this synthetic nitrogen metric; there’s no difference between synthetic nitrogen and the stuff you find in chicken manure or bought in feed, large swathes of farmland are exempt as they are arable instead of pastoral and fertiliser itself isn’t usually responsible for the nitrogen that leaches in waterways; the culprit is mainly urine patches where highly soluble nitrogen is concentrated in one spot.

It seems to me that the reason for the strange decisions around nitrogen, using toxicity until DIN can be revisited and imposing a synthetic nitrogen fertiliser cap, is simply that the Minister had to be seen to be doing something. The Policy Statement carries some good wins for the environment when it comes to reducing sediment getting into our waterways but little else.

In an election year the Minister needs to be able to point to his constituents and say “I did something”, and when it’s a choice between politics and finding effective solutions, politics will always be the winner.