Vital water going out to sea

VITAL WATER

GOING OUT TO SEA

Words by Geoff Lewis : Photographs by Trefor Ward

Vikki and Chris Nicholson

Dealing with the Covid-19 emergency provided challenges for North Waikato and Pukekohe growers, but access to water remains a daunting and ongoing issue.

Chris and Vikki Nicholson run Hinemoa Quality Producers on a gorgeous piece of rolling landscape overlooking the great westward bend in the Waikato River.

Blessed with highly productive Patumahoe clay loam soil, the 200ha property, with 16ha leased adjoining, has been owned by the Nicholson family since 1945 and was diversified from sheep to cropping in the 1970s, initially growing potatoes and squash. Today onions and potatoes are grown about equally for the domestic and export markets. As Vikki explains, when Covid-19 hit there was a lot of fear and so many unknowns. The Nicholsons’ workforce is made up of a small number of local permanent employees and a group of workers from the Auckland Syrian-Christian community. Generally, this arrangement has worked well. But the speed with which the Covid emergency arrived created immediate challenges. ‘’In the week leading up to the lockdown we tripled our throughput. Our casual staff opted to stay home and we were meeting our full-timers daily to convince them to come to work. Most of them don’t speak English and they were scared. We provide a seven-seater van for staff transport but due to the social-distancing requirements we had to create work bubbles, redistribute our ute fleet and arrange the appropriate travel paperwork so they were classified as essential workers. It was a challenge to keep up with the protocols just to work within the law.’’ The couple were lucky in having their son Thomas return home from university only the weekend before the Covid lockdown. Their daughter Julia also returned. For the first week of lockdown the family found itself flat out doing the harvesting, sorting and packing, with only a skeleton staff in the packhouse. Suddenly, many of the independent fruit and vege retailers who took Hinemoa’s produce were closed. Restaurants, cafés and fast food outlets closed, reducing demand from the wholesale markets which the business had supplied daily. The Nicholsons were faced with the immediate problem of where to sell a portion of their product – and this raised the question of whether or not to plant the usual volumes of onions and potatoes for the coming season, Vikki explains: ‘’Chris made the decision to plant. He figured people needed to eat. We were lucky with the weather which was kind to us and allowed us to get the ground work done.’’ On the upside there was a significant increase in the demand for potatoes and onions through the My Food Bag outlet and more people learning to cook for themselves at home – a lot more produce was being delivered to the door. ‘’It was a big learning curve. We had meetings every morning. We were visited by the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) and audited and checked for our protocols. It was the speed with which it all happened. There was no precursor. People just had to use their common sense. ‘’Getting hold of PPE (personal protection equipment) was difficult. Even the MPI guy hadn’t been issued with any. If we’d had one person turn up in the packhouse sick we would have had to have shut the whole operation down.’’ In the field the problems of social distancing weren’t as intense as workers were basically quarantined in their vehicles and tractors.

‘’Sanitising became a key thing and we had to rearrange our staffrooms to cater for the workplace bubbles, segregating different groups. This added to the tension as the staffroom is normally a social area where staff can relax and chat.’’ Hinemoa reduced from a six-day to a five-day-a-week operation during the Level 4 lockdown, and back to six days when Level 3 arrived.

‘’It’s all back to normal now. We didn’t lose any staff. They all wanted to come back.

Now the focus has returned to the struggle for water.

Hinemoa Quality Producers is in the Waikato District and isn’t subject to the water restrictions in force in the Auckland area only a few kilometres away across the river. However, they rely on irrigation. Due to the drought conditions their winter catchment storage dam emptied, which was the first time this had happened since it was built in 2009. This brought into sharp focus the ongoing “nonsense” they have endured attempting to establish another catchment dam on the other side of the farm, Vikki says.

Without irrigation we wouldn’t survive. We wouldn’t get the yields or the quality because plants need water.

Part of the answer is creating more water storage. The property includes a 3ha gully, currently used as run-off for cattle, which they want to dam and turn into another water storage area.

Weather station recently installed by Onions NZ

No such luck. Ten years and more than $100,000 spent struggling through the Resource Management Act requirements imposed by both the Waikato District Council and the Waikato Regional Council, and still no dam. ‘’Eighty percent of the rainwater in the catchment is running out to sea. There is demand on the water resource and we need to be looking ahead. We need to ask the question ‘’why are we in this situation with water in Auckland?” This problem has been forecast for a long time. ‘’We have water, but we have to shift it across the farm. This requires pipes, diesel and labour. It’s all cost. In the heat, plants need irrigation and we need to make sure we have adequate supply. I’m passionate about water storage and I’m not giving up. If we’d been able to build the dam five years ago it would have cost half as much as the current estimated construction costs and we would be sustainable and selfsufficient with our water requirements.’’

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