Canterbury farmers say the public don't appreciate how fast they are moving on water quality, with promising projects coming on-stream. Are we really dealing with Canterbury's water issues or just tinkering at the edges? JOHN McCRONE reports.

The Federated Farmers convoy jounces across the fields of the South Canterbury dairy farm down to the drainage ditch where the mudfish lurk – another good news story for Canterbury water!

A jar of Vegemite sits on a fencepost. The lure. The St Andrews schoolkids helping with the habitat restoration project have spent the morning baiting the mesh traps with the black stuff and are hauling up specimens for the visiting board members to have a look.



First we get a quick official health and safety briefing – everything has to be by the book these days. Watch out for the hidden holes around the thickly over-grown gullies, we are told. And the electric fences. "You're on a farm."



Then the board – spending the weekend with national president, William Rolleston, on his sheep and beef spread in the hills behind St Andrews – gather around the buckets to cup a wee glistening eel-like fish in their hands.



READ MORE:

* Canterbury facing 'chronic ecosystem failure' without action, ecologist warns

* Managed aquifer recharge gives hope to Mid Canterbury's declining water quality

* Hunter Downs Irrigation Scheme gets $1.37 million in government funding

* $800,000 into Wainono Lagoon clean-up



Mudfish, a native galaxiid evolved to survive months in the mud of dried-up streams, are seriously endangered. Across Canterbury they have lost 90 per cent of their habitat.



So when dairy farmer Ross Rathgen​ learnt they were on his property in one of the boggy drains, that started a snowballing project with the digging of extra hollows and the planting of protection.



Steve Fennessy, the St Andrews Primary principal who got involved, says trout – the "possums of the rivers" – are a major predator. These guys need lots of nooks to hide.



"We dug 20 ponds and their population has doubled in two years. There's 800 to 900 mudfish now," Fennessy says. Enough to start re-populating other waters.



So a great community-level success story. Farmers, children, and conservationists like the Working Waters Trust, all acting together. It is the new way since the Canterbury Water Management Strategy (CWMS) got adopted.

JOHN MCCRONE/FAIRFAX NZ Quick peek: Checking the mudfish during a Federated Farmers' road trip around South Canterbury.

The Fed Farmers convoy has already been down to Wainono Lagoon, Waimate's equivalent of Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere. The Hunter Downs irrigation scheme – if it can get over the hurdle of gaining enough subscribers – will help pay to fix its water quality.

Later we are shooting up to Opuha Dam near Fairlie for another good news story about how community level thinking on water can deliver environmental as well as economic outcomes.

Then there are the many other things happening in Canterbury, like precision farming, no till cultivation and Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR).



Hey, aquifer recharge could be really big, exclaims Fed Farmers' water spokesman, Chris Allen, who has a sheep and beef farm at Mt Somers in mid-Canterbury.



Forget building dams for irrigation. The gravel of the plains under our feet is a giant reservoir just waiting. We have been sucking all the water out of this aquifer, but we could instead start filling it up every winter with excess Alpine river water.



Dig a shingle pit with a leaky bottom and let it top up the water table like running a tap at one end. Sort out your nitrate problems as well as your water supply.



Allen says a pilot started 10 months ago at Hinds – one of Canterbury's worst nutrient overload spots – and is getting impressive results. An American hydrologist brought the idea over. Used across the province, it could be the game changer no one expected.



Allen says farmers are pissed off about much of the media coverage they are getting. Dried up Canterbury rivers on TV almost every night. Yet the region is several years into an exceptional drought.



Get down to ground level and you will start to find much more to be optimistic about, he says. With the collective approach of the CWMS, farmers are now fully on-board with getting the environmental balance right.



As these wriggling mudfish show, good things are happening, Allen says. "Farming has moved farther in the last three or four years than it has in the last 30 to 40."



★★★



Rolleston, Fed Farmers's president, sums it up. "Farmers don't like to be told what to do. But they do like to fix problems." And the key change in Canterbury is the move to local solutions.



The regional council, Environment Canterbury (ECan), sets the global limits – what is acceptable in terms of water takes, nutrient pollution, E.coli levels.



Then catchment level zone committees bring communities together to work out how to achieve the goals in ways that best fit the local situation.

GRAEME HUGHES/FAIRFAX NZ Ducks over Wainono: The health of the Waimate lagoon is tied to the success of the Hunter Downs irrigation scheme.

Wainono Lagoon where the morning starts is an example. Rolleston admits that even as a local, for years he has driven past the lagoon without realising it sits two minute of bumpy track just off State Highway 1.

Robin Murphy, the Glenavy farmer who has led the Lower Waitaki zone committee's restoration efforts, says Wainono produced tonnes of long-finned eels to supply the Maori Battalion in World War Two. You would be more cautious eating anything out of it at the moment.

But there is a long-term plan hinging on the building of the Hunter Downs irrigation scheme which will take water from the Waitaki River, store it in a couple of new 40 hectare ponds, and supply the farmland lying in the coastal rain shadow all the way to Timaru.



Before the CWMS, Hunter Downs would have been just a standalone farming intensification project. However Murphy says now it has been integrated into community thinking through the zone negotiation process.



"The new water is tied into meeting the lagoon targets." Farmers are having to invest in reducing run-off, fencing waterways, all the other things specified as CWMS "good management practices".



Murphy says there is the opportunity to feed local creeks, keep them running, during the dry season, using a technique called Targeted Stream Augmentation.



And even the towns of South Canterbury will benefit in having a bolstered water supply. "For the district to grow – build more houses – we've got to sort out the water." Urban ambitions are being answered too.



So it has all been put together as a package. Joined-up local thinking. The only worry is whether it is an attractive enough deal for the farmers now to sign up and pay for the construction.



Up at Opuha Dam – built by farmers in the 1990s to water land north of Timaru – it is a similar story.



Pleasant Point dairy farmer and ECan councillor Tom Lambie says the dam always had other community values. Its water made Timaru's processing plants and Washdyke industrial zone possible.



But recently – with a new advisory group including Fish and Game and other local conservation interests – its environmental contribution has come to the fore.



Lambie says the area has been lucky with 18 years of reliable rainfall. However these last three – especially 2015 – have been a story of prolonged drought. And at farmers' expense, dam water has been used to keep the Opuha River flowing when otherwise nature would have seen it dry up.



Lambie says it makes a difference when the politics and economics of water are connected in this fashion and locals can apply their initiative – fix problems, as Rolleston says.

JOHN MCCRONE/FAIRFAX NZ The dam that waters north Timaru: ECan's Tom Lambie talks at Opuha Dam about maintaining environmental flows.

So farmers see reasons for optimism behind all the headlines about evaporating rivers and lax national swimmability standards.

★★★

THE BREAKTHROUGH POTENTIAL OF BOOSTING AQUIFERS

TONY BENNY/FAIRFAX NZ Hydrologist Bob Bower (left) with Hinds Drains working party chair Peter Lowe as the aquifer recharge pond fills up.

What is Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR)? As a technique it sounds like a magic fix – makes you wonder why people ever spent money on dams in the foothills or are still trying to push through schemes that need 40ha artificial ponds like Hunter Downs.



Bob Bower, a hydrology expert from Oregon, now working with Golder Associates in Christchurch, says Canterbury is especially suited to MAR as an approach.



Its plains are a vast shingle reservoir, its famous braided rivers merely surface wriggles of excess flows. Underground is an enormous sheet of ground water seeping its way from mountain to coast, popping up as springs and streams wherever the water table happens to near the surface.



To recharge, all you need to do is dig sink holes in strategic locations where the aquifer is exposed. Pipe diverted river water in at the top to replace what you later intend to take out further down for irrigation.



And the beauty is that this both keeps the water table high – feeding local streams naturally – and also dilutes any farming run-off, particularly the leached nitrates, with clear mountain water.



Bower says people can't believe it could be so simple – the idea of deliberately managing the aquifer as an irrigation reservoir. "Ground water has been sort of a black art to everyone. But the science has progressed a lot."



He says in California and many other parts of the world now, people are waking up to this idea of conjunctive management – learning how to work with the natural plumbing below the ground.



Canterbury is fortunate in having both its stony plains and a steady water supply coming off the Southern Alps.



Yet a tool is just a tool. And what heartens him is the CWMS is approaching aquifer recharge in an integrated community fashion. "The process has been set up so the environmental side of things is also a beneficiary of a healthy managed aquifer system," Bower says.



The Hinds/Hekeao pilot is an example. The water catchments around Ashburton are as bad as it gets due to farming intensification.

Agri-ecology consultants like Alison Dewes say too many conversions have been consented and both nitrate and pathogen levels have become shockingly high.

"Communities in the Selwyn and Hinds areas have some of the highest rates of E.coli diseases in the world, and the highest rate of campylobacter, cryptosporidia and giardia," Dewes has warned.

SUPPLIED/GOLDER ASSOCIATES Under construction: The pit system for the Hinds/Hekeao aquifer recharge pilot being dug in early 2016.

Bower says the Ashburton zone committee agreed there was little point trying aquifer recharge without first tackling the load that farmers were putting on the environment.



A goal was set to cut nitrate leaching by a third. And modelling says 16 per cent has already been achieved in the past three years through a host of measures. "Things like stocking rates, feedpads, choices about clover and nitrogen-fixing crop cover."



Then last winter a pit was dug in a suitable field and flooded with water taken from the Hinds irrigation canals – part of the allocation owned by Ashburton District Council.



Bower says the ground is not accepting the water as fast as he would like. The scheme is consented for 500 litres a second, but is absorbing about 120l.



Buried lens of clay in the area are a difficulty. "We have techniques to deal with that which we are going to try. So it is good to experiment. Other sites would be freer draining," he says.



Yet even so, the pilot is producing promising numbers. It has formed an underground plume of water that is 1km across and reaches 3km down the catchment. The water table has lifted 4m in bore holes. Nitrates have fallen from 12 milligrams a litre to below the 7mg target.



To give an idea of the potential – the final modelling is still to be done – Bower says Hinds might be able to store 400 million cubic metres using its aquifer as a managed reservoir.



That compares with the 20 million it has in its existing storage pond network and another 100 million planned in the various irrigation projects on the table.



In practice, a recharge scheme would be a whole collection of soak pits hanging off the current irrigation network.



The main canals would have large infiltration galleries dug alongside them. "Maybe a dozen big basins." Farmers could add smaller ones to take the excess flowing into their own on-farm holding ponds.



So recharge would become a new habit of topping up the water table constantly, rather than closing the sluice gates and letting consented water flow out to sea during winter or after heavy rains as happens at the moment, Bower says.



And then keeping the aquifer full would mean also having plenty naturally on tap to keep the local springs and streams going even in the dry years.



Although here is one of the ironies that came out of the zone discussions, Bower adds.

Across Canterbury, he says, people have expectations about swimming holes and trout-filled creeks. They want the landscape rolled back to their bucolic childhood experience. Yet agriculture has been a story of change.

In pre-settler times, Hinds was a swampy dip in the landscape where the water table had to climb to reach the sea. The local streams are called drains because that is exactly what they were – ditches cut to drain the swamps and allow farming to begin.

HELENA O'NEILL/FAIRFAX NZ Federated Farmers' Chris Allen talks water with Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy.

And then for decades the water table was kept high because the irrigation systems were actually rather inefficient. Border dykes – flooding fields from a race at the top end – saw much of the water disappear straight into the stone beneath the soil.



"It was actually a gigantic experiment in accidental aquifer recharge," Bower says. And since farmers started getting more efficient with pipes and central pivots, much less is getting away than it used to.



So he says managing the aquifers can be used to bring back the hydrology to more like what people remember. And certainly it can help wash away the nitrates which have started to linger in the water table rather longer.



But the idea of winding the countryside back to the 1970s, or whenever the water last ran "naturally", is not quite the simple environmental target it might seem.



★★★



Get Canterbury farmers talking and they can point to plenty of positive change.



Fed Farmer's Allen pulls out his cell-phone and clicks on an app. Look, he says. A real-time chart of the soil moisture readings back on his farm.



This is the coming age of precision agriculture. His sprinklers are set to dose the ground with computer controlled accuracy. If an irrigator gets stuck in a rut, he can see the spike of the growing puddle right away.



You have the robotic milking sheds, the sheep-herding drones, all the other advances coming down the line. In California, the state of the art for irrigation is drip tapes buried in the soil. GPS navigation means the cultivators can plough the gaps inbetween.



Allen says the community is demanding minimum impact on the environment, maximum efficiency in the use of resources. And modern agriculture is on a technological curve to deliver that.

So a bright picture is being painted of technical and political change – both new farming tools and better catchment-level decision making for Canterbury.

It can't be all so rosy of course.

Freshwater ecologist Lan Pham, recently elected to ECan after serving on zone committees and helping found the Working Waters Trust, says the new localism is great. The question is whether it is going to add up to be enough.

Pham says there is no doubting the good intentions. She got involved with Ross Rathgen and the mudfish habitat project at its early stage. "He was really keen. He was like, aw, go for gold."

And Pham says all farmers have had the same attitude. "I've never had a landowner say no, don't come and help. I've been totally heartened by that."

Yet the reality is that the collective pressure on the environment has become overwhelming. For every mudfish preservation project, how many other corners of paddocks are being inadvertently destroyed?

Pham says the braided rivers and boggy lowlands of the South Island has many unique galaxiid species. But across the board, populations are dropping by 25 per cent every five years.

People might want to do the right thing, however it is hard to combat the sheer weight of the changing land use.

Pham says nationally, New Zealand has over 6 million cows. Each cow produces at least 14 times the waste of a human. So the environment is being forced to support a population equivalent to 90 million people.

"It's not that there aren't little examples where things are being done to help with the environment, but the reality is we can't continue to use our land in this intensive way."

She says the latest fuss over the Government's national standards on swimmability are an example of how expectations are being loosened at the top in ways that undo the good work now happening at the bottom.

The E.coli limit was raised from 260 pathogens per 100ml to 540. So at a stroke of a politician's pen, polluted waterways were reclassified as healthy.

And Pham says if you dig into the detail of local actions being agreed under the CWMS, you find some rather token outcomes. Like the nitrate load being permitted to flow into Lake Ellesmere/Te Waihora.

The existing load is 5600 tonnes of nitrogen a year. To change the lake from being a murky algal soup, that would have to come down to 800t. "Their compromise target was 4600t. Is that really going to make much difference?" Pham asks.

So she says every credit has to be given. Individually, farmers are onboard with change. And catchment-level thinking does promote creative fixes. New thinking, like managed aquifer recharge, could be taken up very quickly as a result.

Yet still, her worry is that the many small positive stories will fail to add up if there are not the tighter general restrictions on water quality and biodiversity creating hard limits from the top down.

Are we really dealing with Canterbury's water issues or just tinkering at the edges? A lot is happening now down at ground level, Pham agrees, however the next question is whether it will all scale to become the story for a whole region.