Community involvement urged for Taupo vision

01-09-2010 | Marie Taylor

Taupo's community needs a vision of what its catchment should look like.

That is one of the messages from a study by Californian researcher Sheila Barry. She works mainly with beef producers doing applied research on grassland and catchment management for the University of California in the San Francisco Bay area.

On an eight-month sabbatical hosted by AgResearch, Barry compared water quality regulation work in the Taupo catchment with the Tomales Bay area north of San Francisco.

"I've been looking at the impacts of water quality regulation on farming sustainability."

Barry interviewed 13 farmers in the Taupo catchment - some new to the catchment, some with larger farms, some with low nitrogen discharge allowances, and some with high allowances.

They weren't randomly selected, but overwhelmingly they felt regulation meant they had lost flexibility and future value. They also felt they had been singled out to make changes to protect Lake Taupo's water quality.

Barry also found a lot of stress and a lack of cohesiveness in the community resulting from the regulation, which limits nitrogen discharges from farmland.

In comparison, the Tomales Bay farmers were more motivated to make changes because they were getting more support. As well, the whole community was involved in making significant changes. Barry says some of the Taupo farmers now have a siege mentality, particularly those with low nitrogen discharge allowances.

Farmers are the least part of the problem, she says. In a visioning process for the Taupo catchment in 2009, farmers were seen only as a nitrogen source and an opportunity to make land-use change.

"But several farmers asked if people really wanted a catchment of trees," she says. "There hasn't been a community vision of what the Taupo catchment landscape and surrounding communities should be like. Because of that, no additional benefit is perceived from farming."

She found farmers in the Taupo and Tomales Bay catchments had similar desires to care for the land.

"Mostly people want to be able to make a living on the land, cover their costs, and build up an asset for retirement. A huge part of what they do is about their connection with the environment and the lifestyle."

Barry says the Taupo regulations had not resulted in any environmental changes on the farms.

"The regulation meant there was no motivation for them to lower their nitrogen leaching unless they were going to sell their nitrogen credits or land to the Lake Taupo Protection Trust."

Most don't see an opportunity to sell their nitrogen.

Barry says the Taupo cap and trade system to improve water quality is more certain to reach its target of reducing nitrogen leaching by 20% - because the Lake Taupo Protection Trust has been funded to achieve this objective.

Compared with the Taupo catchment farmers, Californian farmers were getting much more technical support and financial help to change practices. The driver of the Californian catchment work is a move to reduce faecal coliform levels for each tributary, not each farm.

Each farmer has to file a plan similar to Beef + Lamb New Zealand's Land Environment Plan.

Tomales Bay farmers do a self-assessment including a letter of intent to identify water quality impacts and what measures they are taking to address it - like fencing off waterways, improving grazing management, or effluent ponds for dairy.

It is not clear that the actions of the farmers and community in Tomales Bay will be adequate to meet targets for pathogen reduction, Barry says. In both cases, the regulators say more may need to be done to reach the ultimate target of improved water quality.

Half the Californian farmers felt they had better water quality on their farms as a result of their work.

"The regulation agency required significant changes to everybody, not just to those grazing," she says.

Another interesting difference is that in Tomales Bay the average farm ownership period was 65 years compared with 17 years for those interviewed from the Taupo catchment. That longer ownership period in Tomales Bay resulted in much more community appreciation of the heritage the farmers contributed to.

Their land trust, the first such agricultural trust in the US, not only buys covenants to keep the agriculture in place at low intensity, but also promotes and works with policy people to keep agriculture sustainable.

"The community there says ‘We want this pastoral landscape'," she says.

She hopes the Taupo community will be able to work towards shared goals in the future. "I think there is room for there to be some change."

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