King Country River Care chair Reon Verry says farmers needs to be seen as stakeholders by Waikato Regional Council.
King Country sheep and beef farmer Reon Verry says farmers need to be seen as stakeholders by Waikato Regional Council.
Verry, also Waikato Federated Farmers Meat and Wool chair who farms south of Te Kūiti, contributed to a debate at this month’s Waikato Federated Farmers executive meeting on how the relationship between the regional council and farmers could be better.
“We need to be seen as a stakeholder,” he said.
“It’s not just regional council, it’s all district councils,” North Waikato Federated branch chair Chris Woolerton said.
Woolerton started the debate by bringing a remit before the executive asking for the organisation to instigate a joint management agreement with the council to ensure that the agricultural sector’s voice was fully heard.
Fenced and planted streams
Woolerton said farmers wanted a better relationship with the council.
“They are not getting traction, they are getting bypassed, they are not talking to them,” he said.
Federated Farmers is expecting the outcome of its appeal against the council’s wide-sweeping set of rules for agricultural land use next month.
“May will see an interim Plan Change One decision which will find the Waikato Regional Council scrambling to get their house in order,” Verry said.
“It will take months for the decision to register with most farmers, if at all, and then there may be some angst.
“I’m not sure there will be anything finalised this year as far as actions from farmers are concerned.”
Plan Change One sought to improve freshwater quality in the Waikato and Waipā River catchments. It will apply to around 10,000 properties and a land area of 1.1 million hectares within the two catchments. The plan change is a requirement from a Parliamentary Act and River Iwi Treaty Settlement.
Federated Farmers appealed against which waterbodies stock need to be excluded from, setback distances, how critical source areas are identified and managed, and how often fertiliser spreaders need to be calibrated.
Keith Holmes
Waikato Federated Farmers president Keith Holmes said Woolerton’s draft was applicable to all regional councils.
Verry also wanted to know what Woolerton meant by a joint management agreement.
Vice president Phil Sherwood said Woolerton was really after a memorandum of understanding and asked for the remit to be redrafted and brought back to the provincial annual general meeting.
Sherwood also floated the idea of preparing a remit on pest boards.
“I am going to keep on about pest boards, as we have got so many of them,” he said.
“We need to put some thought into a remit for pest control, trying to get some efficiency. The regional council, Department of Conservation and Operational Solutions for Primary Industries (Ospri) all work up to their little boundary and then stop.”
Andrew Reymer
Waikato Federated Farmers vice president and Ōhaupō dairy farmer Andrew Reymer’s remit requesting Federated Farmers be given a seat on the Ospri board recently failed.
Reymer asked Ospri to explain a $16.6 million write-off related to the failure of a major software project in January.
Ospri’s Informations Systems Strategic Programme was meant to add functionality to the MyOspri portal, integrating new National Animal Identification and Tracing (Nait) functionality.
Where there’s muck, there’s grass
