Farmers and Government Working Together -- March 2021

I had a sheep farming friend in Otauau, Southland, who once took me on a tour of his property. It was immaculate, a mixture of flats and gently rolling hills with the steeper areas planted in native bush. As we drove around the farm John outlined his plans for converting the flats to dairy, the value of his land had been swept along with the tide of conversions around him and the banks were very keen to lend him as much as he needed.

John knew exactly where the shed would go, how the paddocks would be subdivided and which areas would remain in sheep to keep his son interested in the farm. When the tour was finished and we were relaxing with a cold beverage, I asked when the conversion was going ahead so I could schedule my move to manage the new dairy block.

“You know Craig”, he said, “the plan makes perfect financial sense but I’m never going to do it, I just hate mud too much.”

I think David Parker, Minister for the Environment, would have liked John. I’m not sure the feeling would have been mutual but they could have bonded over their shared hatred of mud. David Parker hates to see cows in mud, he hates to see muddy paddocks waiting to be resown and most of all he hates to see mud making its way into our rivers.

Parker hates mud going into our rivers so much that, while in Opposition, he started legal proceedings against a couple of Regional Councils for not exercising their powers to stop it happening.

The impacts of poorly managed intensive winter grazing have been well publicised in recent years. Every form of winter grazing requires you to limit the animal’s intake to a level needed to maintain or slightly increase their body weight, but the use of high yielding crops means the area needed to supply that animal’s intake has reduced considerably.

I winter my cows on oats which yield 5 tonne of dry matter per hectare, so each cow needs about 20 square metres per day to eat 10kg of oats. If I were to feed them on fodder beet instead, which can yield 20 tonne per hectare, each cow would only need 5 square metres per day to get their daily intake of fresh feed. This is where the intensive part of winter grazing comes from, a lot of animals in a relatively small area. They’re still being adequately fed but the management has to be top notch, the consequences of an adverse weather event are potentially disastrous for land and animals alike.

Southland winter grazing practices came under intense scrutiny recently with activists flying drones over cattle stuck in mud and cropping still photos to show farming practices in the worst possible light, but way back in 2017 Parker toured the country with pictures of dairy cattle pushing sediment into the Mataura River. Action was inevitable, with or without the drone flying vigilantes. That action came in the form of Damien O’Connor, Minister of Agriculture, appointing a taskforce to investigate the issue and come up with solutions.

As a direct result, intensive winter grazing rules were drawn up and poised to come into effect in May 2021. Unfortunately some of these rules were simply impractical and unworkable, a point the government conceded when they relaxed them a little after some Southland farmers threatened to boycott the proposed regulations.

Unfortunately, some of the data used to set the contentious winter grazing guidelines was shonky at best, the 10-degree slope idea comes from a 25-year old non-peer reviewed USDA paper that itself says the data is inconclusive and conflicting. A Manawatu study showing sediment losses were “five to eleven times higher than pasture grazing the previous winter” was comparing an average year to a drought year. It’s no wonder Southland farmers were up in arms.

Then something interesting happened, instead of getting on their tractors and marching on parliament in futile protest, the Southland Advisory Group swung into action. Comprised of Environment Southland, NZ Beef & Lamb, DairyNZ, Fish & Game, Federated Farmers and iwi, the Group set about reviewing the heavily criticised winter grazing rules which they feared were unworkable and would lead to perverse outcomes.

The Group wanted winter grazing managed through a specific module in each farm’s Farm Environment Plan and set about providing the Government with farmer led solutions that would deliver the same outcomes without the need for regulations. Solutions that would be closely monitored and reported on by the Regional Council.

The Government listened. At a recent DairyNZ stakeholder meeting David Parker announced the Government would take a pragmatic approach and delay the implementation of the grazing rules by a year while the Southland Advisory Group implemented their plans.

This is the sort of constructive action I’ve been wanting to see from farmer advocacy groups for years, and full credit to those people who made it happen. Southland farmers have a single winter to prove they can deliver environmental outcomes without the need for strict regulation, and the outcomes will be very public.

The Green Party aren’t happy, Forest and Bird aren’t happy and Greenpeace are livid, but I think John would be quietly stoked. He was a man who liked to solve his own problems, and boy did he hate mud.