Farmers pledge to improve rivers via Farming Leaders Group

Members of the newly formed Farming Leaders Group front up to media on the Ngaruroro River to talk about their pledge to improve the country's waterways. Photo / Warren Buckland

For the first time in this country, a group of pastoral farming leaders have joined forces and committed to working towards making New Zealand's rivers swimmable for future generations.

Heading organisations such as Dairy NZ, Federated Farmers and Beef + Lamb NZ, the Farming Leaders Group, made up of seven members said to represent 80 per cent of the country's pastoral farmed land, formed in May this year to work on issues of importance to the sector.

One of those issues, and a hot button election topic this year, was water quality, and gathered on the edge of the Ngaruroro River yesterday, the group explained that more needed to be done, and done faster.

Group spokeswoman and Federated Farmers president Katie Milne, a West Coast dairy farmer, said many of the country's rivers were not in the condition everyone wanted them to be.

"We're standing up and saying we haven't always got this right. More work is required and we will play our part.

"There's a lot of good work being done by catchment groups in the regions already who are funding mitigation themselves.

"It's not very clear how big the challenge will be - it's an ongoing journey and about learning new things, but we are committed to do the right thing."

She said there would be farmers fearful of such change, but the tools and science were being developed to enable change, and some farmers had jumped on the bandwagon already and started using them on their individual farming systems.

The finger-pointing at farmers from urban communities was unfair and misleading, she added.

"There is a town/country divide and we are being used as a political football in the water debate. Unfortunately we can't highlight some of the awesome stuff that's happening."

Hawke's Bay sheep and beef farmer Bruce Wills, who was also chairman of Apiculture NZ and on the boards of Horticulture NZ, Ravensdown and the Our Land and Water National Science Challenge, said scientific advances were enabling changes that would not have been foreseen in the past few generations.

Such science also meant it was possible to achieve environmental gains, but not at the expense of the bottom line.

"With good management and good science you can achieve economic profit with minimal impact on the environment.

"We are going to solve the problem, the science around managing nutrient losses is very exciting - it will take a little time but we will get there."

Questions about the appropriateness of land use had been raised during the water debate, and although that would be difficult to change retrospectively, it was not impossible to make change, Ms Milne said.

"If we know we have an area where we can't keep on doing 'x,y,z' we may need to have some mature conversations about the way forward."

The group also acknowledged that times were changing and the future of farming may look very different to the current landscape.

"Two generations ago the biggest export was wool, one generation ago it was red meat, today it's dairy - in another generation it will probably be horticulture - markets change," Mr Wills said.

"I do not know what we will be growing in five years time. We have to be flexible like any business and quick to react to the science," Ms Milne added.

Beef + Lamb NZ chairman James Parsons said there were legitimate concerns about water quality, but from a global perspective New Zealand was not doing too badly.

"New Zealand's water quality is up with some of the best in the world - these are global challenges and this is an opportunity for New Zealand to lead the world and to share our innovations."

Along with Ms Milne, Mr Wills and Mr Parsons, the other group members were Dairy NZ chairman Michael Spaans, Meat Industry Association chairman John Loughlin, Central Hawke's Bay sheep and beef farmer Mike Petersen, and Fonterra chairman John Wilson.