No way to run a country

Twenty years ago I joined a protest march over the Manawatū River. Fonterra and local farmers were using the river as a sewer, making it one of the most polluted in the western world, and people were sick of it. The march was a success: the state of the river became a serious issue in subsequent local body elections, and Horizons, the regional council was forced to act. They began a series of public consultations on cleaning up the river, and in 2010 they introduced the One Plan, which set limits for pollution, particularly nitrogen.

Basically, farmers wouldn't be allowed to shit in the river anymore, and they hated it. So they engaged in their usual tactic of predatory delay, dragging the plan through the courts on any excuse in an effort to prevent its implementation. But their appeals backfired, with the Environment Court strengthening the plan and the High Court upholding that. Even then, Horizons tried to rubberstamp pollution, until the courts stopped that as well, and made them actually enforce the law. But the Council's reliance on a tool called Overseer to calculate nitrogen loads caused further litigation, which eventually resulted in a change to the plan.

Which brings us to "Plan Change 2". It updates the nitrogen limits in the One Plan to account for Overseer's software change, and sets out pathways by which farmers who currently exceed them can get temporary consents. Like the One Plan itself, its the result of a careful process of consultation and consensus-building, and has been approved by the Environment Court. It should be becoming active any time soon. But it won't - because the regime has decide to simply overturn it by legislative fiat to protect its donors and cronies and let them keep on shitting in the river. Twenty years of democratic action and tens of millions of dollars in planning costs and legal fees gone, because one man - Andrew Hoggard - never liked the outcome, and decided to abuse his ministerial position to put his thumb on the scale, outside the normal process.

It's not just the One Plan - Hoggard will also be over-ruling Waikato Regional Council's similarly long-consulted rules to protect the Waikato, outraging Tainui (who view it as undermining their Treaty settlement). Its not just rivers - they're also stomping all over local councils who, after consulting their communities in accordance with the law, decided to use the RMA to regulate inshore fishing to mitigate its destructive effects. And it continues a trend displayed on climate change, transport, Māori representation, of the Beehive arbitrarily overturning court decisions and/or well-consulted local government decisions to impose their own views from above, without consultation or evidence, usually at the behest of some deep-pocketed industry lobby and tens of thousands of dollars in "donations". That's just how this regime operates. Its an affront to democracy, the rule of law, and local decision-making. Instead, we have arrogance, dictatorship and corruption.

This is no way to run a country. Local decision-making should mean exactly that. We can't have our lives micromanaged by Wellington, intruding into our lives and vetoing our decisions at the behest of lobbyists or their own weirdo freak ideology.

We need to overthrow this regime. Vote it out in November, prosecute those responsible for their corrupt practices and ban them from office, and reform the system so that it cannot happen again.

Maybe there's a connection?

What is going on with the price of butter?, RNZ, 19 march 2025:

If you have bought butter recently you might have noticed something - it is a lot more expensive.

Stats NZ said last week that the price of butter was up 60 percent in February compared to the same time last year.

It recorded an average of $7.32 per 500g block, up from just under $4.50 at the start of last year and just under $5.20 four years ago.

At supermarkets this week, Woolworths' cheapest butter was $7.19, in New World's North Island stores it was also $7.19, while in its South Island stores it was $7.79 and Pak n Save's was $6.89.

Fonterra lifts first-half profit, raises dividend, New Zealand Herald, 20 March 2025:

Fonterra has reported an 8% lift in first-half net profit to $729 million, increased its interim dividend and narrowed its milk price forecast for this season.

The co-op’s operating profit rose by 16% to $1.1 billion.

Fonterra announced a 22 cents per share dividend, compared with 15c in the previous comparable period.

Hmmm. Maybe there's a connection there?

And this once again shows what a shit deal Aotearoa is getting from farmers. They're allowed to steal our water, shit in our rivers, destroy our climate, and poison our drinking water, and we don't even get cheap food out of it. Which should make you wonder why we let any of that happen.

The good news is that we can regulate all of those things. And its really looking like we should. Because there seems to be no reason to let this parasitic, anti-social industry get away with its crimes and give nothing back to society.

Climate Change: Farmers hoist by their own petard

Farmers are New Zealand's worst polluters. As Newsroom pointed out this week, they're responsible for 50% of emissions, while only generating 5.5% of GDP for it (making them inefficient as well as dirty). But while the government has been slack about ending subsidies and forcing them to reduce their pollution, the market is beginning to come to the rescue, with Nestlé forcing Fonterra to set a serious emissions reduction target. And now banks are getting into it to, setting targets to reduce their financed emissions. The response of those polluting farmers? First, threats to switch banks. Then, when they realise that no-one wants to do business with them anymore, whining about anticompetitive behaviour.

...except its not anticompetitive. Reducing lending to polluters isn't just socially responsible - its also good business sense. Because in the modern world - as opposed to the 1950's when these polluting farmers still think they live - every polluter you lend to is a risk to a bank's brand, and to the extent they resist cleanup, a bad business risk as well (in that Fonterra will likely stop taking their milk). And the louder they whine, the bigger those risks are.

The irony is that if farmers had accepted a carbon tax back in 2003, or being part of the ETS in 2012 or 2020, they'd be well on the way to meeting those targets, and wouldn't have nearly so much to worry about. But their own intransigence has boxed them into a corner, leaving them with high emissions and a need for much steeper cuts. But that's what you get for being a short-sighted, Ranger-driving knuckle-dragger. And the quicker they get debanked and go bankrupt, the better.

Dirty dairy corrupts our democracy

The planning process under the RMA is meant to be one of public consultation: the council prepares a plan, and we all get to have a say on it. But it turns out that in Otago, the dirty dairying industry has been trying to rewrite the new land and water plan before the public even gets to look at it [paywalled]:

DairyNZ is lobbying the Otago Regional Council to alter its upcoming environmental rules to be more friendly to farmers.

The council’s land and water plan will be notified in June [2024 - I/S], but before then, it is working with DairyNZ and other interest groups on proposed good management practices (GMPs) for farming.

[...]

DairyNZ correspondence, released to the Otago Daily Times under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act, showed the industry body has already expressed concern about many of the proposed measures and wants several changes before they go out for public comment.

It also pushed back against any suggested implementation of region-wide regulations above that of GMPs, because of the nature of the activities and the sometimes-high cost to farmers associated with them.

Like most lobbying, this is simply a corruption of the democratic process in favour of rich and powerful established interests. And its not something we should put up with. Dirty farmers will have a chance to make their case during the regular submissions process. Before then, they should stay out of it, rather than trying to tilt the rules in their favour and cut the public out.

We need to ban environmental criminals

Stuff today reports on the annual stats on dirty dairying prosecutions, and finds that most environmental crime is committed by repeat offenders:

Repeat offenders dominate the annual tally of environmental offending by dairy farms spewing cow effluent onto land and waterways.

Of the six prosecutions by regional councils that concluded in the 2022/23 year, half involved individuals and companies that had been convicted of similar offending in the past.

The details on these past offences show that the current penalty regime is clearly not deterring these persistent criminals from repeatedly defiling the environment. Which means that we need another solution. Fortunately, there's one ready to hand. People who violate the Animal Welfare Act - for example, by being persistently cruel to animals - can be banned from owning or exercising control over animals for any period the court thinks fit, and it is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment, to violate such an order. The regime was created precisely to stop persistent offenders from repeatedly violating the rights of animals.

We should do the same with dirty dairying. If a farmer repeatedly violates their resource consents and continually pollutes the environment, the court should be able to ban them from farming. That threat should focus their minds on ensuring they run a clean operation, rather than just pouring their cowshit everywhere.

Climate Change: Why farmers should pay their way

Newsroom's Marc Daalder has a look today at agricultural emissions, and concludes that pricing livestock pollution is reasonable, rooted in science and will see global greenhouse emissions fall. But that bit that really gets me is right at the front:

Just 1.16 percent of the population are farmers, but they're behind 5.5 percent of gross domestic product, 48 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and more than 70 percent of the global warming New Zealand is currently responsible for.

So the average farmer emits more than 40 times as much as the average kiwi, and has created sixty times as much warming. And yet, they feel they should be getting a free ride. It's rural entitlement, pure and simple.

Pricing agricultural emissions will lead to reductions in farm output, as dirty producers shut down. Good, because they need to. 5.5% of the economy producing 48% of the emissions is inefficient and unsustainable, and we are better off without it (and no, it won't lead to "leakage"; this is just more scaremongering from a dirty industry trying to deter and delay action).

The 85% of us who live in cities pay for every gram of carbon we produce. We are sick of subsidising dirty, inefficient rurals to destroy the planet. It is long past time farmers stood on their own feet without the support of subsidised emissions. Its time they paid their way.

Farmers need to earn their social licence

Last week, Labour grovelled to the sacred cow, releasing an agricultural emissions plan which was basicly a plan to subsidise their emissions (and so keep them emitting) for a century. But even that was too much for farmers, and so today they sent their tractors into our cities again in protest.

The protests are driven by a sense of entitlement amongst farmers, a belief that they're so important to the economy that they ought to be treated as special and exempt from the environmental and social principles that apply to the rest of us. In 1913 and 1951, they had the numbers and the power to enforce that. In 2022, when 85% of us live in cities, they're just a tiny rural elite, clinging to outdated and toxic privileges.

Of course, they had friends. In Wellington, it was anti-vax rioters Voices For Freedom and the antivax DemocracyNZ party. In Christchurch, it was Nazi Kyle Chapman. Most kiwis find these groups absolutely repugnant. By aligning themselves with such groups, farmers are going to end up joining them at the bottom of the shitlist.

Not that they were doing great on that front anyway. The social licence of farmers depends on two things: their environmental impact, and providing cheap food to the rest of us. On the first front, they're a disaster, polluting the soil, atmosphere, and water with nitrogen, methane, and disease. From a climate perspective, they're the dirtiest, least efficient part of our economy, producing the fewest dollars per ton of emissions. And as for "cheap food", they export 95% of what they produce, and our domestic prices are set by what they can get overseas - meaning that while we pay the full environmental costs of their business, we get no real benefit for that. We could shut them all down tomorrow, import all our food, and it would make no economic difference to consumers, while making us all better off from the reduced pollution. I don't think we should actually do that, but it does illustrate how the costs and benefits stack up for the rest of Aotearoa, and how parasitic this dirty industry is. It also illustrates that we could make quite radical cuts to farm production without affecting our food supply in the slightest (and if farmers would rather export than feed us, that's what export controls are for).

If farmers want to continue to farm, they need to earn their social licence. They can do that by accepting regulation, cleaning up their act, and behaving like responsible members of society. But if they'd rather behave like a spoiled, entitled, elite, then we should just regulate them harder. And if they don't like it, they will have only themselves to blame.

Climate Change: The Netherlands cuts cows

The way kiwi farmers complain, you'd think their situation of being a country's largest polluters was unique and special. But its not. The Netherlands also has a problem with too many polluting farm animals. But unlike New Zealand, they're actually doing something about it:

The Dutch government has unveiled a €25bn (£21bn) plan to radically reduce the number of livestock in the country as it struggles to contain an overload of animal manure.

A deal to buy out farmers to try to reduce levels of nitrogen pollution in the country had been mooted for some time, and was finally confirmed after the agreement of a new coalition government in the Netherlands earlier this week.

But the plan, the first of its kind in the world, faces a huge backlash from farmers who have staged big street protests in recent years over the prospect of tough regulation and farmer buyouts. They fear permanent damage to food production in the country if too many farmers are forced to quit.

“We don’t want the system to collapse,” said Utrecht dairy farmer Marije Klever, from the Dutch young farmers’ union. She said farmers would oppose any nonvoluntary measures.

“I am a land owner, so a critical question is whether the government are allowed to push farmers out of the land. It can’t be The Hague telling farmers they must go, you need an agreement.”

While being lauded internationally as the “tiny country that feeds the world” and the continent’s biggest meat exporter, the Netherlands has been struggling at home with a pollution crisis caused by an excess of farm animals.

Which all sounds very familiar. The difference is a court order saying they actually need to cut pollution nationwide and a government finally willing to act on it by paying farmers to fuck off or de-intensify. While initially voluntary, there's the threat of legislation if not enough farmers are willing to stop polluting.

New Zealand's dirty farmers also pretend to be a "tiny country that feeds the world". But as Dutch MP Tjeerd de Groot says, "We can’t be the tiny country that feeds the world if we shit ourselves". We need to clean up our pollution, both nitrogen and methane, before we drown in it. And we can only do that by cutting cows.

Farmers are killing us

A society is offered a choice: they can have prosperity (for some), but 40 people a year will be sacrificed to please the cow-god. No, its not a bad fantasy story - its what farmers are actually doing to us:

Up to 100 cases of bowel cancer, and 41 deaths, may be caused by nitrate-contaminated drinking water each year - with around 800,000 Kiwis exposed to levels that international studies deem a risk, new research finds.

The risk of nitrate contamination in the country's drinking water supplies has come under the spotlight over recent years, with some researchers suggesting the current maximum level of 11.3 milligrams of nitrate-nitrogen per litre (mg/l) is set far too high.

Nitrate leaching – much of which stems from urine patches in dairy farms - has increased substantially since 1990 and many groundwater sites continue to degrade.

This is a significant public health hazard, and one we were never offered a choice on. Its also easy to eliminate, by limiting stock numbers and banning the application of nitrogen-based fertilisers. Doing so would save up to 40 lives a year, as well as millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions. So, are we going to keep killing people to please the cow-god, or finally say "no"?

Have they considered not polluting?

DairyNZ has released a survey of farmers, and apparently calling them on their pollution is bad for their mental health:

More than half of those surveyed said they or someone on their farm had experienced a mental health issue in the last year.

The most mentioned reasons were government regulations, perception of dairying within the public and media and financial concerns. Labour shortages on-farm were another issue raised by farmers, with 62 percent saying that being short staffed was causing increased stress.

Obviously, we're meant to feel sorry for them and stop demanding that they stop destroying the planet so they can lead comfy lives. But I'm going to turn that around. After all, their two biggest "mental health issues" are caused by people's absolutely legitimate response to their dirty, polluting behaviour. So how about they stop that behaviour, accept regulation, cut herd sizes, and clean up their act? Doesn't that seem likely to improve public perception and so their mental health? And if its causing so much stress, doesn't refusing to change seem dysfunctional, an ongoing act of self-harm?

Honestly, its like bigots complaining about being called on their bigotry. And just like bigots, it seems that farmers, as represented by their industry groups, would rather play the victim than change.

Too many cows in the Netherlands

The Netherlands has a water quality problem. Too many cows, producing too much shit and piss, which flows into the rivers and poisons them. But they also have a solution: forcing farmers to destock or sell up:

Dutch politicians are considering plans to force hundreds of farmers to sell up and cut livestock numbers, to reduce damaging ammonia pollution.

After the highest Dutch administrative court found in 2019 that the government was breaking EU law by not doing enough to reduce excess nitrogen in vulnerable natural areas, the country has been battling what it is calling a “nitrogen crisis”.

[...]

Now civil servants at the finance and agriculture ministry have drawn up proposals which include slashing livestock numbers [pdf] by 30%, one of the most radical plans of its kind in Europe. Two proposed scenarios include forcing some farmers to sell emissions rights and even their land to the state, if necessary.

Aotearoa also has a water quality problem, driven by the same cause: too many cows. And its time we pursued the same solution as the Netherlands. We cannot let farmers continue to destroy our environment and poison our drinking water supplies for private profit. We need to make them stop, and make them pay for the damage they have caused.

Too many cows in Canterbury

More than a decade ago, the then-National government overthrew the elected Canterbury Regional Council (ECan) and imposed a Wellington-appointed dictatorship to steal Canterbury's water for farmers. As part of the PR for this, they promised "ambitious" goals to improve water quality. A decade on, have they met those goals? Of course not:

Canterbury’s future water health is murky as a new report reveals that a region-wide conservation plan has met just two of more than 30 goals it set itself a decade ago.

The Canterbury Water Management Strategy (CWMS) was created in 2010 in a partnership between Environment Canterbury (ECan), local councils and iwi. It established ten target areas with more than 30 goals to improve water health and management.

A progress report released this week revealed that, 11 years on, just two of those goals had been achieved.

[...]

Most of the goals related to freshwater health and biodiversity targets. By last year, just one had been achieved – understanding the risk posed by potential contaminants, which ECan managed through monitoring programmes.

The only other fully met goal was in recreational water quality. Of Canterbury’s lakes and rivers used for swimming, more now met recreational water quality guidelines.

Meeting recreational water guidelines is important, but "understanding risks" is a very soft target. As for the rest, they're failing to meet even basic drinking water standards, while nitrate contamination is increasing.

The fundamental problem for all of this failure is simple: there are too many cows in Canterbury. Those cows pump out shit and piss, which ends up in the rivers and the groundwater, contaminating both. Nitrate levels are rising because of cowpiss and fertiliser. Freshwater health and biodiversity are shit because of cowshit. If Canterbury wants better water, the solution is simple: it needs to cut the pollution at its source, by cutting cow numbers. Until it does, they will continue to poison the environment, and poison Canterbury's people.

Climate Change: Just predatory delay again

Another day, another story arguing that climate change is Just Too Hard for farmers, and that they should be given more time to wait for a magic technological solution which will cut emissions while allowing them to continue doing exactly what they're doing at the moment. Today, the magic Technological Solution is low-emissions cows, and like a methane vaccine, its just another exercise in predatory delay by New Zealand's biggest polluters. How can we tell this? Because their magic low emissions cows already exist. But rather than using them to reduce emissions, farmers use them to crank out more and more milk and pollution.

You can work out the efficiency of the New Zealand dairy herd from the herd size and production numbers in the NZ Dairy Statistics [PDF, p8 and 9] and the implied emissions factors per cow in the Greenhouse Gas Inventory [PDF, p192-193]. They tell a tale of continuous improvement. In 1990 we had 2.4 million cows producing 599 kg of milk solids, which at 77.8 kg of methane per cow, means an efficiency of .312 kg of methane per kg of milk solids. In 2019 we had over twice as many cows - 4.9 million of them - producing over three times as much milk solids - 1896 million kg - which at 96.8 kg of methane per cow, means .251 kg of methane per kg of milk solids. Thirty years of ordinary, business as usual breeding for more efficient production has produced a cow which is 25% more emissions efficient. Which sounds a lot like the supercow farmers say they're looking for! So why do we need to wait again?

The answer of course is so farmers can keep polluting as usual and not do anything to take responsibility for the problem they are causing. Its pure predatory delay. But we've given them 20 years already to start lowering emissions, and now (according to the weather at least) we are out of time. The planet is simultaneously on fire and flooding, and its simply no longer credible for them to stand there and pretend they can't do anything about when they clearly already have (and then wasted those gains by using them to make our problems worse). Farmers need to do their part, and since they obviously won't do that voluntarily, they need to be regulated into doing it.

How do we do this? The bare minimum is to cap milk production, and force reductions in herd numbers. Or we just do it directly and cap and cut cow numbers. Either will ensure that efficiency gains help the planet, not farmers. And on current business-as-usual that would meet the bottom end of the statutory 2050 methane target range. If we want to better - and we have to, because the current target is laughably weak - then we reduce those caps faster. Think of it as an incentive for farmers to go beyond business-as-usual, and do more than just talk about breeding better cows.

(Again, I am ignoring sheep and beef cattle from this, on the basis that a) they are also getting more efficient by business as usual, and b) high carbon prices will see them displaced by trees anyway. The problem is dairy, and so that's where we should focus the solution: on slaughtering the sacred cows).

Climate Change: The solution farmers don't want us to talk about

RNZ this morning has a piece asking Can NZ really meet its methane emissions targets?. Posing it as a question like this frames it as difficult, more of the "but its too hard!" whine from farmers. But its not hard at all. Pretty obviously, we can meet methane reduction targets simply by reducing the number of cows.

This is the solution farmers don't want us to talk about. So, they spend a lot of time holding out the prospect of a methane vaccine to reduce emissions technologically. Obviously, this would be great if it actually existed, but we've had nearly twenty years of research on this and we still don't have one. Meanwhile, the focus on a non-existent future solution has distracted us from the very real things we can do to cut emissions here and now, allowing emissions to rise and rise. Its honestly beginning to look like a dairy version of the coal industry's constant talk about "carbon capture and storage": using the promise of non-existent technology as a tool of predatory delay. Governments have stopped believing the CCS bullshit, adopting a "you can have policy when you deploy it" approach, and we should treat methane vaccines and other promised technological solutions to agricultural emissions the same way. Yes, that would be nice, but for the time being its a fantasy, and we no longer have time for fantasies. We need to focus on what we can do now. And what we can do now is cut cow numbers.

This isn't as radical as it sounds. New Zealand has had fewer cows in the past [PDF, p9]. A 10% cut would simply mean cutting the herd back to the size it was a decade ago. A 49% cut by 2050 would mean cutting it back to what it was in 1990, the baseline year for our emissions (interestingly, both cuts would occur over a similar length of time to the original growth, so the industry should easily be able to handle that change). It would mean fewer farms, and fewer farmers. It would also mean cleaner water and a better overall environment. (It would mean less food, but we export 90% of that, so even significant cuts will leave more than enough for all of us).

(I am focusing on cows here because they're the really big emitters, and because current carbon prices mean trees will cut the numbers of sheep and beef cattle quite happily by normal market mechanisms. Those industries are now uncompetitive compared to sitting back and watching trees grow. And the quicker they admit it and move on, the better off we'll all be).

We need policy to start driving these cuts now. Bringing farming fully into the ETS with no subsidies will help, but we will probably need explicit herd-size and stocking limits as well to drive the reduction. The good news is that this policy is completely reversible: if in the future farmers get their magic vaccine, we can let cow numbers rise again (subject to water quality and other environmental limits). But in the meantime, we need to start cutting them down to size. And the sooner we start on it, the better.

Bring fertiliser into the ETS

Nitrous Oxide is a potent greenhouse gas, 265 times worse per ton than carbon dioxide. Its also long-lived, with a half-life of 121 years in the atmosphere. New Zealand emitted 8.36 million tons CO2-equivalent of it in 2019, almost 10% of our total emissions. And yet, we're doing nothing to limit that. Why not? Because its emitted by farmers, of course.

1.5 million tons CO2-equivalent of those emissions is caused by farmers' (over)use of fertiliser. Stuff's Olivia Wannan points out that we have an easy way to control this: bring it into the ETS:

In its new report, the Climate Change Commission noted fertilisers could be charged the same levy that is already put on every litre of petrol. By pricing fertiliser under the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the country could start making in-roads on the greenhouse gas now.

However, the Government took this option off the table in its deal with the agricultural industry – a 2019 partnership called He Waka Eke Noa, set up to solve the thorny problem of how to measure and price greenhouse gases from sheep and cows.

That solution won’t take effect until 2025, which will give the country just 25 years to get nitrous oxide to net zero.

Which isn't good enough. This is the lowest-hanging of low-hanging fruit, and sticking a carbon price on it would incentivise farmers to use less. And it makes perfect sense to do it at the importer/producer level (as is done for oil, coal, and everything else), not least because its far easier to audit two fertiliser companies to ensure they're not cheating than thousands of farmers. As for how much it would cost, at the current carbon price of $43.35 a ton, we're talking an extra ~$31.60 per ton of fertiliser. According to this article, urea sells for $1290 a ton, so we're talking a roughly 2.5% increase - less than the extra they'll be paying on a new, dirty ute. And of course that cost can be completely avoided just by using less.

Our refusal to bring fertiliser into the ETS is effectively a $65 million a year subsidy to farmers, ot encourage them to pollute not just the global atmosphere, but also our rivers and streams (which is where the nitrogen ends up). Its also a subsidy for dead babies, bowel cancer, and poisoned drinking water. We wouldn't accept it if the government subsidised tobacco companies to cause cancer - but that's effectively what they're doing with farmers. Pretty obviously, I think that needs to stop. Farmers need to pay the full cost of their pollution, as well as facing environmental controls to prevent them from poisoning our waterways. And if the government refuses to do that, we need to get a government who will.

A Potemkin review

Nitrates are a serious public health threat, posing a risk of death for babies and a long-term risk of bowel cancer for adults. Farmers are currently spewing them into the water table via fertiliser and dirty dairying, poisoning drinking water across Canterbury and threatening the drinking water of our second-largest city. The government was apparently worried enough about this to set up a working group to study the problem. And then they secretly buried it:

An official information act request showed a working group that was supposed to be looking at nitrates in water only met twice in 18 months and was recently disbanded, with little to show for its efforts.

After months of pressure from councils and environmental groups and amidst mounting international evidence of a link between nitrates in drinking water and bowel cancer, then Minister of Health David Clark asked for a working group to be set up.

Chaired by the Ministry of Health's chief science advisor, professor Ian Town, it met for the first time in August 2019 and undertook to review nitrate levels and provide advice to affected communities about the health risk.

Funders would also be told about the urgent need for New Zealand research to match that coming from overseas.

But following a second meeting in December of that year, the work of the working group - which was supposed to meet every three months - stopped altogether.

A question from RNZ this month uncovered the group had recently been disbanded.

The government is using the pandemic as an excuse, but with the government refusing to set a bottom-line limit on nitrate pollution, it looks like the whole thing was a scam, a Potemkin review to distract the public. Because obviously, we couldn't let the fact they were killing people threaten dairy industry profits, could we?

Earning their reputation again

Farmers complain about being seen as environmental vandals. Meanwhile, down in Southland, they're doing this:

Southland farmers will consider holding more tractor protests, not applying for resource consents, and not paying regional council rates to protest against new freshwater rules introduced by the Government last year.

A farmer’s group called Groundswell will host a meeting in Gore on Thursday to come up with an action plan to protest against the rules.

[...]

Groundswell spokesperson Bryce McKenzie said the options the group were considering to protest were ‘’bordering on civil unrest’’.

“How else do you get your message across? We’ve tried to get the message across and that hasn’t worked, so what else do you do? That’s what we now need to decide,’’ he said.

I may be missing the farmer-logic here, but promising "civil unrest" in response to environmental regulation does not a good way to sell yourself as an environmentally responsible industry, or to shake off a reputation for being environmentally destructive. Instead, it seems like a way to cement that reputation, and paint yourself as a problem industry which needs to be regulated more strongly. As for their protest tactics, if they refuse to apply for resource consent then their unconsented farming activities can be shut down (and they can be fined $10,000 a day for continuing without consent). If they refuse to pay rates, their property can be seized and sold to pay them. If farmers wish to be environmental delinquents, I think the public would welcome such outcomes.

That's the point

Farmers are whining that new freshwater rules designed to stop them shitting in rivers or polluting the water table with nitrogen will mean they make less money:

Farm profitability across the Ashburton District is expected to decline 83 percent per year due to the government's freshwater reforms, a new report states.

The desktop report, requested by the council, notes dairy farming takes place on nearly a third of the district's agricultural land and would be the hardest hit financially.

"The regulations will challenge existing farming systems with a number of established farm practices needing to change, and new technology and innovation adoption will be required."

It conservatively estimated that farm profitability would collectively decline more than $57 million, while farm expenditure would fall by about $140 million.

Essentially, they'll have to have fewer animals, and that will mean lower profits. But that's the point. Clean farmers will continue to make money. Dirty farmers will have to either change or go out of business. If they choose to do the latter rather than downsize their operation to one that lives within our environmental means, well, whose fault is that?

Farmers earn their reputation

Farmers feel New Zealand has turned its back on them, Stuff, 13 September 2019:

A young Wairarapa farmer's voice starts to crack when he talks about the pressure the sector is feeling from the Government and the wider New Zealand public.

Masterton sheep and beef farmer Sully Alsop fully supports an open letter written to Government leaders by an agricultural consultancy firm saying farmer morale was at an all time low.

"You feel like the country's turned their back on you. When you introduce yourself and say 'Hi, I'm Sully, I'm a farmer', they treat you like you're a leper like 'way to ruin the environment'," he said.

Farmers launch nationwide petition against freshwater rules, Stuff, 3 December 2020:

The group that organised more than 100 tractors to be driven through Gore’s main street in protest of new freshwater rules are now taking their protest across the country.

Groundswell NZ has launched an online petition calling for a rewrite of the essential freshwater rules, which came into force in September.

Here's a suggestion: if they don't want to be treated as dirty environmental vandals hellbent on shitting in every river in Aotearoa, maybe they should stop acting like it? Because at the moment, it seems like they are earning their poor reputation fair and square.

Farmers earning their reputation again

New Zealand farmers routinely complain about the public viewing them as environmental vandals. At the same time, they're opposing basic environmental regulation:

Federated Farmers has asked that a wide-ranging plan change setting water use rules for South Canterbury remove all references to the protection of “indigenous fish”.

[...]

In its submission, Federated Farmers says there needs to be ‘’thorough analysis and discussion about the identification and value of these habitats, how widespread they are likely to become, what areas will be covered by them and what the impacts will be, especially economic impacts’’.

“Until this is done, Federated Farmers is opposed to all references to indigenous freshwater species habitat,’’ the submission says.

The underlying argument here is that we don't know enough to know what we need to protect. But if that's the case, then the precautionary principle suggests we should protect it all, then work out what doesn't need protecting. Leaving stuff unprotected is a recipe for environmental destruction and predatory delay.

The good news here is that the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management requires councils to protect the habitats of indigenous freshwater species, so they literally can't do what the farmers demand. Better, the "best information" clause requires that where information is uncertain, decision-makers must interpret it so as to give best effect to the NPS - that is, to habitat protection, via a hierarchy of values which places ecosystem health above economic development. So Federated Farmers should lose this argument, and if the Council illegally bows to their demands, the courts will correct them.