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New Zealand's rivers and streams run for 425,000 kilometres. That's equivalent to a river that runs around the world 10 times. 43% of those waterways flow through farmland. Over time, many of our waterways have been polluted, some by industry, some by cities, and many by agriculture and horticulture. Now the government wants to turn the tide on fresh water quality.
The plan, called Essential Fresh Water, lays out the bottom lines everyone will have to meet. It's going to change the way we manage fresh water in New Zealand. Welcome to Why, a podcast about fresh water. In this series, brought to you by Farmers Weekly, I'll examine two very simple questions in an effort to understand a very complex topic. What is the problem? How will we fix it?
To help answer these questions, I'll talk to policymakers, farmers, scientists and others with a stake in our water resources. And by the end, you'll have a better understanding of the freshwater reforms, how they'll be administered and what help and support there is for the primary sector. In this first episode, I want to take stock of the quality of freshwater in New Zealand. So I spoke to two people who've devoted themselves to studying it.
Professor Russell Death is a freshwater ecologist at Massey University. Dr Rich McDowell from AgResearch leads the Our Land and Water Science Challenge. First, I asked Russell to give his summation of the state of freshwater in New Zealand. I guess it's quite challenging to make a general statement about the waterways in the whole of New Zealand because they vary so much. But really,
Water quality in general and ecological health of those waterways is overall quite low. There are certainly a lot of areas where it's still relatively good, but for a large proportion of the agricultural streams, they're very unhealthy.
And there tends to be more degradation in the lowland areas and or areas with dairy farming. The hill country areas, the sheep and beef areas with the lower intensity haven't had nearly the same impact on the ecological health of their waterways as the
the dairy farmers have. The nitrate levels in many of our waterways seem to be increasing and I guess that's one of the biggest issues we have. The dissolved reactive phosphorus levels in many of our waterways seem to be declining, so that's a good thing, although they're also declining in some of our conservation estate.
The health of the ecological communities again seems to be declining in general, but probably not as dramatically as the increases in things like the nitrates. So far so bad. But Dr Rich McDowell and the team at Our Land and Water have done some modelling, and they say that under the new regulations, only a small number of farmers will have to significantly change the way they use their land.
And he says mitigations that farmers have already undertaken over the past few years have made a big difference. We did a bit of work late last year and released an analysis that we did which looked at if we hadn't changed our practices over the last 20 years, what would water quality as measured by phosphorus and nitrogen look like?
Okay, and so if we're still using the practices of 20 years ago, so that's things like the old two pond system, direct discharge into waterways, for example, not having as much stream fencing, etc.
nitrogen concentrations would be about 48% greater than they are now, and the dissolved reactant phosphorus would be 96% greater. So, you know, unfortunately, of course, all the good... Not necessarily unfortunately, but it's just a matter of fact that land use has also changed over those 20 years, so you don't see that...
it's not a case of well it's going to decrease by 48 because there's more intensive land use in more places yeah so we haven't really uh i guess kept up to speed with that
But there's more that could be done. We've actually got a list of around 40 or so different mitigation actions that correspond to different production systems around. So obviously not all of those are going to be relevant to, say, arable or to dairy or to dry stock, for example. But there's, I guess, a menu of options that you could use there. And again, a bit of modelling that we did, we tried them all out.
Okay, so we said if you did everything that you could possibly do according to your system, how low could you go?
That was the question we were trying to answer. And I guess compared to current systems, current state of play, I should say, you could knock off about another third of both the nitrogen, the phosphorus, and two-thirds actually of the sediment. So as I say, there's quite a bit that could be done. That comes at a very large caveat that everyone's going to do it though and going to do it well and they're going to do it at...
But Russell Death says in the end, it's really up to individual farmers to take care of their own water. If each one does that, the benefits will flow downstream. Well I personally think that we all need to look after our own river. It's all very well for the government and regional councils to set regulations, but I think we all need to be responsible for the environment that we live in.
And so I think, yeah, it's important that local groups take some ownership of the problem if they've created it and try and fix it, or if things are still really good, then to make sure that that's protected and that we have those resources going forward. Yeah, I mean, you know, overall things are not really that good. And I think...
As I said, I think it's up to the individuals, townies as well as farmers, to take a bit of responsibility. I think we often have this tendency to rely on legislation and legislation
the government or whoever to come up with the solutions for us and i think you know we need to take a bit of ownership and and try and come up with the solutions for our own local waterway because it's going to be different in different areas and then you know try the best we can to put that in practice but while the focus needs to be local russell says farmers need clear information on what will help them to make progress i think farmers definitely want to do the right thing um
And one of my big frustrations is that I think they often get misinformation, particularly around the solutions to problems. So I talk to a lot of sheep and beef farmers. And so the solution that's kind of wandering out everywhere is this fence off your stream. And I don't think that that is necessarily the issue or the best solution to the issues. So, you know, maybe if it's phosphorus that is your problem, it might help. But
But if the issue is nitrogen, it's unlikely that riparian fencing and planting is going to help with that. If it's hill country erosion, then putting in a fence isn't necessarily going to help if your whole bank subsides and takes that fence away. So I always talk to farmers and say, you really need to figure out what the issue is with your waterway and then decide what the solution is to that. And I feel that there's a bit of a...
a pressure on farmers to go out and create solutions before they necessarily figure out what the issue is and you know this fencing of waterways seems to be a bit like that um many many people have been led to believe that that's going to be the solution for all of our waterway problems and i don't think it is because you know farming is just so different between the different parts of new zealand
Whether you're farming sheep or dairy cows or alpaca, it's going to have different impacts on the land and you have to farm in different ways. And consequently, the impacts that you have on the waterways are going to be different and your solutions to that will need to be different as well. I don't personally believe that the national policy statement of freshwater management that's come out is going to achieve the things
that the government and more importantly, I think farmers want. I've talked to a lot of farmer groups and they're happy to do all these things and make potential economic sacrifices if it's going to improve water quality. And I think that we have missed some key issues in that national policy statement that means
we still are really tinkering around the edges. We're not addressing the big issues that we need to be. We either need to accept that agriculture is going to have a detrimental impact on our waterways, or we need to be grown up about it, accept that it's caused some issues, and to change the way we farm to make sure that
the state of our waterways improves. And I don't believe that that's necessarily going to be at an economic cost to farmers. It is going to require them to change the way they farm. But farmers in New Zealand have always changed the way they farm. You know, we used to be dominoes.
dominated by sheep. We had goats for a while and deer for a while, and now the dominant industry is the dairy industry. And, you know, farmers are really good at adapting and changing, and that's all that's required. It's not a question of, you know, going out of business. They just simply need to change the way they manage their land, depending on whether they're sheep and beef farmers or dairy farmers. And I really think that we can have nice, clean waterways
and happy healthy stock and happy profitable farmers as well. Rich McDowell says the focus of essential fresh water is to improve the health of the waterways first, then ensure the health of the people, with the economic side of things coming in third.
In that sense, it's really aiming to, I guess, restore the ecosystem health values of the waterway itself, which there are many different measures. I've mentioned fish, I've mentioned MCI, there are other measures as well. Then we've got to look at whether or not that water would make us sick,
Okay, so that's more than just say drinking water. It also applies to swimming. Okay, so primary contact or indeed secondary contact. So and that's where you know things like E. coli as an indicator of other pathogens becomes quite important. And when you when you when you total all that up, you know, there are a lot of health benefits, you know preventing illness
restoring waterways to the point to which when we
I guess when we had an expanded tourism industry, there was a lot more people looking at them. And it worked out. I didn't quite look at the figures too deeply, so take this with a grain of salt, but the officials worked up a net benefit as opposed to a cost, the cost being the, say, changes that had to occur. And it was quite...
it was reasonably substantial potential benefit um but i guess importantly you know it's it benefits everyone okay so not just the the people whose um land through whom a waterway passes either over or underneath every user and not just now but you know future generations
Next time on Why, I'll talk to regional councils about how they're planning to implement the freshwater legislation and how they're communicating that plan to farmers.