With Greenpeace trying to whip up a mass anti-irrigation demo in mid-Canterbury next week, nicely timed for the general election, this is the question.

Should rural Canterbury be allowed to press on with a local collaborative process to manage the province's water?



Or has that process become so conflicted, so soft on farmers, the voting public needs to say time is up, someone has to step in and start imposing far stronger regulation?



Genevieve Toop, Greenpeace's agriculture campaigner, is in little doubt.



She says the regional council, Environment Canterbury (ECan), has been charged with pushing through a Canterbury Water Management Strategy (CWMS) that is meant to sort both the water quality and water quantity issues of the plains.



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To help do this, ECan has established a novel system of local zone committees which are claimed to represent the community interests of every water catchment – farmers, recreationalists, iwi and environmentalists, all sat around the same table.



That regulatory process has been chugging along in the background of Canterbury politics for a good few years now. But Toop says it has proven deeply conflicted.



A National-led Government took control of ECan to push through an economic agenda, she says. It wanted new irrigation that would deliver increased farm production, dairy in particular.



"Central government has driven a lot of this intensification. They've encouraged farmers to go down this path."



The result is then a water strategy which is left to try to patch up the inevitable consequences of too many cows leaching crap into streams and aquifers.



She says it is like driving environmental policy with one foot on the brake, one on the accelerator. And you can judge the effectiveness of that with examples of the CWMS process in action.

SUPPLIED/GREENPEACE Going nowhere: Greenpeace activists disrupting the construction of the CPW irrigation scheme in August.

Take the Selwyn catchment zone which feeds into Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere. There, the local agreements have cemented the right to continue to pollute, says Toop.

The lake is already eutrophic – foul green and oxygen-starved – from the 4500 tonnes of nitrates now going into the catchment every year, 40 per cent of that from dairying alone.

Because of the lag between nitrates leaching into the aquifer and reaching the lake, 1200t of that is still in fact to hit Te Waihora. It is looking as bad as it is, and yet more is locked in.



But now the zone agreement is going to allow a further 300t to be leached every year – a total of 4800t annually – for the next two decades, Toop says.



"So they've actually set a goal of increasing pollution. It's not going well."



Fish and Game's environmental advisor, Scott Pearson, agrees. He says the CWMS represents good intentions, but its logic is backwards.



Canterbury's reality is lax regulation allowed a nitrate problem to get established in the first place.



It began with too many 35-year water take consents being granted to farmers.



ECan figures show that between 1995 and 2000, there was a goldrush to claim water rights. Permissions to pump from local rivers and aquifers leapt four-fold.



What was happening was sheep and crop farmers were grabbing the opportunity to turn their land into more profitable dairy conversions.



So the Canterbury problem was an extreme over-allocation of the right to extract water. And that bulge of consents doesn't come up for expiry until the early 2030s.



Pearson points to a chart of groundwater levels in Hinds. From 1973 to 1995, the level of its aquifer was in fact rising. Local streams flowed strongly.



But after 1995, the bore hole results turn sharply downhill. By last year, Hinds' groundwater had dropped an average 10 metres.

JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/STUFF As nutrient polluted as it gets. The Irwell River flowing into Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere.

"The rivers are going dry, the groundwater is tracking down, because it is a race to the bottom with people digging ever deeper wells."

Belatedly the CWMS came along to bolt the stable door, Pearson says.

Yet then the new game became to build big alpine water irrigation schemes to replace the aquifer bores. The annual Southern Alp snow melt would be trapped and stored in a network of reservoirs.



It sounded good. However Pearson says it then takes intensified farming to actually pay for a $400 million scheme like Central Plains Water (CPW) – the project Greenpeace is focusing its "peaceful civil disobedience" rally on.



So a quantity issue got solved by creating a quality one. More cows are needed to pay for the pipes, ponds and pivots. And then still more alpine water will be needed to flush away the effects of there being too many cows.



"It's got quite crazy now at the regional water level. They're saying public money should be going into economically unviable irrigation schemes because of the environmental benefits they will provide."



You can see how the CWMS looks founded on a contradiction, says Pearson. The way to pay for things to get better is first to make enough money from letting them get worse.



★★★



The CWMS a soft touch? Hardly, replies Cust dairy farmer and ECan's water portfolio lead, Cr Claire McKay.



McKay and David Caygill, the Government-appointed commissioner who has been steering the CWMS since 2010, are at ECan head office to defend the regional council's approach.



McKay says consider her own experience of how ECan is ratcheting up the action until its water targets are met.



Since 2015, her farm has been on an "N-loss" limit of 57 kilograms per hectare. That was the fixed number placed on permitted nitrate leaching from the first round of the CWMS.



Now under the latest Plan Change 5 tightening of the strategy due to come into force next year, the figure will come down to 36kg.



As a councillor, wanting to be an early adopter, McKay has run the Overseer modelling built into ECan's new online Portal for creating individualised farm nutrient plans.



This told her that 85 per cent of her leaching was due to not using the latest precision irrigation gear. Over-watering would be washing cow urine out of the paddocks and into the ground below the root zone.



So even though the farm had been investing in irrigation improvements, Overseer said she would have to do even more to meet the new industry-agreed standards of "good management practice" (GMP).



"We've already spent something like $46,000 putting stuff in place. But we're looking – we've got the math done – at spending another $1 million on our 220ha farm to enable us to meet that target." So nothing toothless about the process. "Yeah, it's costing us money at the moment," McKay says dryly.

KIRK HARGREAVES/STUFF Water agenda: David Caygill (centre) with other Government-appointed ECan commissioners in 2011.

Caygill takes over. He says water may be a heated election issue – many are pointing the finger at Canterbury – but his gripe is that few at the national level seem to understand what ECan's approach is actually about.

"I guess I'm staying outside that debate in part because I don't think they're debating the CWMS as such."

Although Caygill also agrees a big part of it is that the CWMS keeps changing almost every year. Being experimental and rather unique, even those involved in it can rather struggle to keep up to date with how it all works.



Caygill says the first broad point is accepting that Canterbury's issues with water have built up over decades. So likewise, they will take decades to unwind.



The CWMS discussion began in 2005 and it was formally adopted as an initial set of targets in 2010. But it had the problem of even knowing how to measure the environmental impact of any individual farm.



You can't control what you can't measure, says Caygill. So solving that has taken a good few years and been a world-leading regulatory feat just in itself.



Then having created new rules on water use, nutrient leaching and effluent run-off, these have to be given long enough to see if they are working to hit the general environmental targets, Caygill says.



Thus while it is easy during election time to whip up calls for someone to step in and stop everything, it would be cutting across a powerful new process just starting to build its momentum.



★★★



How best to explain what is actually happening on the ground in Canterbury? Caygill pauses a moment to adjust his glasses before launching into the technicalities.



The evolution of the CWMS breaks down into three stages, each creating a more granular control of farming on the plains, he says.



Step one was the creation of an overarching regional water plan, first publicly notified in 2012, then brought into force in 2015.



On the water take side, Caygill says this red-zoned and orange-zoned a lot of Canterbury. New consents couldn't be granted, or were given for just 10 years. Lots of restrictions were established.



Then on water quality, farmers had to start by "holding the line". Whatever nitrate their properties had been leaching between 2009 and 2013 became their fixed limit. "The average of the previous four seasons."



That first action might not sound much, says Caygill, but it immediately put the brakes on further dairy conversions. From 2012 a slow down began because of a hard limit affecting any change of use on a property.



Caygill says driving around Canterbury, the public might think conversions are still racing ahead. However mostly what they are noticing is farmers being forced to shift from wasteful border dyke irrigation to more efficient central pivots.

SUPPLIED March of progress: Irrigation pivots are spreading across Canterbury with the switch to alpine water.

The sprinkler gantries are a visible change in the landscape. "And you tend to think cows even if there aren't necessarily any cows under the irrigator."

Caygill says a lot of big conversion plans – like Ngai Tahu's Balmoral forest – have been halted in their tracks. The only way many could happen now is if farmers pay to keep cows in barns and stay under a property's leaching restrictions that way.

So cow numbers have peaked, Caygill says. Canterbury is currently 50 per cent dairy, 25 per cent arable crop growing, and 25 per cent "everything else", including sheep and beef.



With leaching rules only going to get tougher, he says economics will push farmers back towards lighter-impact farming over the next decade.



Although that doesn't mean ECan has to dictate against cows. If dairy can innovate to farm within the new constraints, that is also what CWMS's "outcomes-focused" plan is designed to allow.



Moving on, Caygill says step two was the setting of next level rules for individual water catchments.



Having held the line – frozen leaching rates where they were in 2013 – the new water zone committees then negotiated what more needed to be done to achieve the actual expectations of local rural communities.



And while the zones could have argued to do little extra, Caygill says they have all so far come back agreeing to tighter targets. Selwyn, for example, wants to beat the generic rules by 30 per cent. "Hinds, the same thing."



Of course, critics like Greenpeace say these are some of the worst catchments. They had to do better. Why not self-impose a 70 per cent cut? Why not halt dairy farming completely?



Caygill says the zone committees are there to strike a reasonable balance between cleaning up local waterways and the economic needs of a rural community.



"Are Selwyn's rules too soft? Well, they are the result of a public process – a collaborative exercise run by the zone committee with 60 public meetings, and then public hearings.



"And compared to the fight that was going on before then, they show remarkable agreement about how to make a start."



Caygill says what doesn't get mentioned is that there is also then a review step built into the CWMS.



After five or 10 years – long enough to see if the rules are working – ECan can come back and see if a catchment is on track for its targets. If not, it can insist more needs to be done. "I think people do forget there is this feedback loop."



On the question of the over-allocation of water rights, Caygill says this is another example of how the CWMS has continually evolved.

JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/STUFF ECan's Portal: Overseer modelling will tell farmers what they actually need to do to meet the collective water target.

ECan did in fact try to take back consents in red-zoned areas like Selwyn in the mid-2000s with legal action.

There was some success even though the Resource Management Act (RMA) forces ECan to take each farmer to the Environment Court individually.

"We did a review exercise in Selwyn. It was time-consuming, it was fractious, it was expensive. We walked out of it and said, boy, I'm not sure we'd want to do that again in a hurry."



Caygill says to illustrate the change in attitude that has come with the CWMS, the Ashburton zone committee has now itself called for a review of some 200 takes connected to the Ashburton River. ECan is considering if it is practical.



Yet really, the water consent issue is fading in importance with the arrival of irrigation schemes like CPW, Caygill says.



Farmers may still own consents out until the 2030s, however they are retiring their boreholes in large numbers as a result.



"We know that because Orion, the lines company, monitors the people who have relinquished their connections to save themselves the power bill."



Like the sudden brake on dairy conversions, this is another way the CWMS is already doing what people have asked for.



★★★



So to step three. The first two steps set area-wide limits. Now to bring action down to the individual farm level, ECan is about to drop the expectation on farmers that they must conform to appropriate "good management practices".



This is where McKay is finding she will have to spend $1m on GPS-controlled irrigation systems and also make other changes, like pulling her fence lines further back from any waterways to allow protective riparian planting.



Caygill says the fact the CWMS could even achieve this next step has been remarkable and unexpected.



It began with ECan having to figure out how much nutrient pollution a property might be producing.



Caygill says poking a probe in every square metre of every field in Canterbury might seem a nice idea, but not that practical. So instead a software model – Overseer – was developed that could make predictions of a farm's likely leaching rate.



Plug in the detail of what the property grows, its soil type, its fertiliser load, its water use; then press a button to calculate a number.

JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/STUFF Green shoots: New riparian planting on Cr Claire McKay's farm. Part of the changes expected.

Having got such a model, it was realised Overseer could be flipped from being a measurement device to an actual regulatory tool.

The same software could be used to tell farmers what they needed to do by way of changes to hit a catchment's overall target number. And to spread the load fairly, they would have to accept an industry-wide standard of good practice.

Caygill lets the craftiness of it sink in. It closes the loop. The software imposes the community level average behaviour needed to achieve the stated community level goals.

Rather than hit and hope, it would see Canterbury being tightly managed as a region. It is a system to filter out bad farmers and raise standards to wherever they need to be.

Yet farmers would also have a freedom of choice, the flexibility to change as export markets change. They could grow broccoli, cows, goats or whatever, so long as they can stick within the new limits designed to repair the province's water.

Caygill says this step three was proposed as part of Plan Change 5. The Environment Court ticked it off earlier this year.

He admits the farming lobby – Federated Farmers, Irrigation NZ, and others – agreed to the general concept, however is now tying it up with eight appeals.

The farmers' view is Overseer is too buggy in its predictions as it stands. Caygill says he is confident its modelling shortcomings can be sorted and the GMP approach will kick in next year.

And again, the GMPs can be a moving target. Once there is a system for managing individual behaviour at the farm level, it becomes easy to raise the collective bar if stronger action is needed.

Getting animated – because this is now another further step – Caygill says the dairy industry is likely in a much better position to reduce its ecological footprint than many realise. With new innovation, it will be able to afford to raise its bar much sooner.

Lincoln University research is showing that switching from traditional paddocks of rye grass to a deep rooting legume like lucerne – able to suck up nitrate before it escapes – can make a difference to nutrient leaching of as much as 40 per cent.

Another change in practice is culling the cows in a herd whose genetics makes them particularly bad at producing nitrates. That could save another 20 per cent.

Then nitrate inhibitors like dicyandiamide (DCD) – used for a while, but stopped because traces of the feed additive were coming though in the milk – offer a potential 40 per cent saving as well.

Caygill says world food authorities may give DCD the green light as it has no ill effect on humans.

So there are lots extra ways to make dairying cleaner. "These percentages aren't small numbers."

And with the Overseer approach, they can be plugged into the GMP modelling, forcing their swift adoption by the industry.

So Caygill says it is fair enough that Greenpeace and others should criticise.

At a national level, it is the job of a government to set standards on water that voters demand. ECan is ruled by those general goals as the targets it has to meet regionally.

But Canterbury is suffering a legacy of rushed agricultural change. It can't roll that back instantly. "This is a 30 year process. A generation's worth of change."

And the CWMS is a pioneering approach for controlling the environmental impacts of farming which no one else yet has.

It is how change can happen, says Caygill. So that is why it needs to be understood and now given a fair chance.