Any land-use regime has to be fair, says Bruce Bisset. Photo / File
Any land-use regime has to be fair, says Bruce Bisset. Photo / File
You have to hand it to the farming fraternity: they certainly know how to lobby.
Getting another five years exclusion from the Emissions Trading Scheme so that they can, in essence, do their own thing on emissions reductions and environmental enhancements is a concession no other group could hope toemulate.
To achieve that in the face of a government which, via the Zero Carbon Bill and the contentious new freshwater management proposals, has signalled a harder line on redressing our collective bad behaviour shows how much weight farmers can still hoist.
Mind you, they didn't manage to further damage the already half-toothless Zero Carbon Bill at select committee stage; they're still stuck with a 24 to 47 per cent reduction in biogenic methane by 2050, though the little words "at least" have been deleted from that clause.
Of course that target's nothing to celebrate, given the sixth mass extinction event we've already triggered, but if it takes a few cows off the most exploitative farms then it's a burp in the right direction.
But farmers are being allowed to self-manage their processes and, if they collectively prove their mettle by developing farm environmental management plans (FEMPs) that measure exactly how much of what they emit and show how they're improving, come 2025 they still may not be brought into the ETS.
Given the cost of inclusion is estimated – after a 95 per cent industry discount – at between only 1c and 4c per kilo of product, you'd have to think the sector's reluctance is purely ideological.
And given many have wasted more than two decades avoiding their responsibilities to date, you'd also be forgiven for thinking this is just another fob-off until there's a more "farm-friendly" government.
That said, the proposed freshwater management regime poses a far bigger threat to business as usual. It's the Government's first real attempt to impose blanket land-use regulation countrywide, using water supply and quality as the "excuse" to do so.
It's no coincidence this regime will also be based around FEMPs, and as proposed will limit – in some cases severely – the ability to change the type of stock or crop on any given farm or part thereof, especially if it is deemed to be "intensification".
Now, before you yell "Hoorah", there's a couple of things wrong. Being "blanket" legislation, it's not as case-flexible as required; and it "grandfathers" existing use, so the worst polluters are allowed to continue causing a high level of problems, while those already doing well are effectively penalised by being unduly restricted.
These are the same problems Horizons' One Plan, and for that matter the HBRC's Tukituki PC6 regime, have faced – and still not sorted out properly. You would think if central government was going to adopt those FEMP-based models it would fix and improve them. But apparently not.
As an environmentalist, I have to side with the farmers on this one. You can't allow managed corporate outfits – which most of the "big boys" are – to pollute while penalising family farms for being green-conscious.
Any land-use regime has to be fair. I don't necessarily agree that a catchment-based approach would be better, because any individual farm block should stay within the limits of its sustainable capacity, regardless of type of use – and if it can't, that use has to change.
Bruce Bisset
Grandfathering bad practice is a sure way to ruin the whole scheme. Whether it's in relation to the ETS, the Zero Carbon Bill, or to freshwater management, good farmers know this – and it's in all our interests for agriculture to have the right tools to weed the bad ones out.
