Chris Lewis: Working together to deal with effluent

Working together has resulted in 100 per cent of dairy farmers applying for water consent to wash effluent out of their cowsheds.

I have to say that when I entered farming politics, I never expected a significant chunk of the conversations I would be having would be about the stuff that comes out of the back end of a cow.

The polite term is "effluent" of course, but what is not polite is the significant impacts and costs involved with managing it.

Part of Waikato Federated Farmers role is to hold our regional council to account when warranted -- and effluent has been a major bone of contention.

However, they are there to do a job and sometimes it is just as important to celebrate them.

Just as farmers feel we are always being criticised in the media, I imagine councils do too and as we well know this can result in an ill-informed perspective being held by the public.

In the last six months, the Waikato Regional Council has set up an Effluent Working Group that has worked with stakeholders such as councillors, council staff, dairy industry leaders and myself, to help navigate a better model of management going forward.

The region will be all the better because of this model, which should be made available in the next six months, and I thank everyone for their participation in this group.

No one is going to forget the Okororie issue, with the prosecution of Hold the Gold Ltd, any time soon, but to the council's credit it has acknowledged the problem and is acting on it. It organised a meeting with local leaders recently, including the CEO, to discuss some actions to go forward on this issue. It was a positive and constructive meeting where everyone hung around to socialise afterwards.

This is where community leadership builds positive relationships and trust. When council's engage and listen it makes them stronger going forward.

A recent example of this was with their Variation 6 rule, where everyone with cowsheds had to get water consent to wash out their effluent.

Amy King, Variation 6 Farm Water Project Manager, and her staff led a group that resulted in, with industry support, 100 per cent of dairy farmers applying for one. This engaging and inclusive approach received a lot of respect from people outside of the council.

The mecca for effluent discussion came up with Environmental Farming Systems' Effluent Expo Day at Mystery Creek, this week. This is a great initiative, which saw 600 farmers attend last year. This year's event attracted more than 50 exhibitors. If that's not an indication of the amount of dollars spent by farmers on effluent and their ever increasing focus on the environment, I don't know what is.

Speaking of financial investment in the environment, Federated Farmers was at the event surveying farmers on this very question -- just how much have farmers invested in environmental initiatives and infrastructure? Information like this is invaluable and DairyNZ agrees, having partnered with us to run this survey nationally. In the last 12 months my family farm has spent well over $250,000 on improving our effluent system and native planting. These projects have not just been successful, but have taught me a few lessons along the way. It pays to have a look at a lot of systems and think where your farm will be in 10 years' time, which means going to days such as the Effluent Expo Day, so you know what is right for you and your farm.

It is important to get it right the first time, a few of my past projects, where we have over engineered the build and have resulted in being only big enough a few years later, have taught me not to build it too small otherwise you might have to build it bigger later. After all, even when a council is trying their level best, the consenting process isn't exactly fun or cheap -- not something you want to repeat unnecessarily.

Chris Lewis is Federated Farmers Waikato provincial president