New Zealand’s Farm Environment Plans
The Mackenzie basin on New Zealand’s South Island.
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s chair of Irrigation New Zealand, a natural resources engineer at irrigation consultancy Irricon Resource Solutions Services, and an irrigated farmer, Keri Johnston is an expert on the practice and policy of irrigation in New Zealand. Both the technology of irrigation and the New Zealand regulatory environment have been changing in recent years, and irrigated farmers there are under increasing pressure to comply with stricter regulations and to prove their farms’ compliance with farm environment plans. In this interview with Irrigation Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly, Keri Johnston describes what these plans entail, the challenges farmers face in complying with them, and New Zealand farmers’ message to local and national policymakers. Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background.
Kris Polly: Would you tell our readers about farm environment plans? Keri Johnston: Farm environment plans are a tool to help farmers identify and deal with the environmental risks on their farms. For example, runoff may be an issue for some farms. The plans are broken down by management area, including irrigation management, grazing management, and cropping management, and they help farmers determine how they are going to do these things better.
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Keri Johnston: They came into being in a regulated sense around 2010. We were involved with a group of high-country station owners in the Mackenzie basin, an iconic area of natural value. Many of those farms go through a process we call tenure review. A lot of farms, particularly the high-country stations, were leased from the government, and tenure review was a review of those leases. It resulted in the government trying to prevent the farmers from farming on lands it considered to have significant ecological value, but in return was freeholding some of the lands it didn’t consider of significance. Of course, that meant that many of those farmers were losing area, and to make sure that they were still profitable on the area that they were retaining, many of them looked into irrigation development on that land. As this was contentious given the location, the consents required to do the development were publicly notified, meaning that the applications for consent were open to public submission. The farm environment plan was the tool developed by the Mackenze basin farmers to show that the intensification and development on the land that they would retain was going to be okay. Having a farm environment plan that was subject to audit became a condition of resource consents. They have become more embedded in regulation in more recent years. In Canterbury, where I’m based, they became part of the regional planning framework in 2012, which means that any farmer who goes through any sort of resource consent or permit process needs a farm environment plan. Kris Polly: What are some of the things that farmers must do under the plan? Keri Johnston: One of the big ones is the use of the Overseer model, which is a nutrient budgeting software tool. Basically, they need to look at the potential nitrogen and phosphorus losses that could occur from farming activity. They enter the physical characteristics of their farms into Overseer
PHOTOS COURTESY OF BERNARD SPRAGG AND IRRIGATION NEW ZEALAND.
Keri Johnston: I grew up on a farm in North Otago on the South Island of New Zealand. I married a farmer as well, and we are now between two farms here in South Canterbury, totaling 440 hectares. I have a bachelor of engineering in natural resources engineering, which is similar to agricultural engineering, from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. I’m also a chartered professional engineer. I specialize in engineering solutions for major water activities. Today, I am a natural resources engineer at Irricon Resource Solutions Services, a company in which I am also a 45 percent shareholder.
Kris Polly: How long have New Zealanders been using these plans?
