Stock access to waterways

There are a number of issues regarding stock having access to waterways. Animals trample the banks and remove vegetation¹, leading to erosion². They stir up the stream beds, which affects stream habitats³. Animal faeces⁴ contain harmful bacteria⁵ such as E. coli.

Fencing streams not only protects the waterways, it protects stock from becoming injured or dying if they get stuck in boggy areas. Riparian planting⁶ filters out sediment⁷, nutrients⁸ and faeces from surface run-off⁹ and creates habitats for creatures living on the land and in the stream.

Waikato Regional Council monitors riparian fencing to assess stock access to waterways. Farmers who take water from a stream on their property need to have a riparian management plan and are required to fence the stream and progressively plant the stream banks.

The Sustainable Dairying Water Accord is a set of national good-management practices that guide farmers to quality riparian management. It reported in 2019 that significant progress has been made to exclude stock from waterways across New Zealand.

Transcript

SANDRA McKINNON

We’ve farmed at this place here probably for about 26 years. So we’ve had that luxury of being able to make improvements on something that we’ve stayed on for a long period of time rather than shifting around. We chose to stay here. We wanted to put all our energies into one good farm that we could be creative and passionate about how we were presenting our land. It goes without saying that it has to be sustainable¹⁰ and that we have to look after the land, and farmers need to have, you know, an increased awareness of that, which many of them do already.

We produce food, and people want to know where their food came from. They want to know that it came from good conditions¹¹, they want to know that it is hygienic, they want to know that it is safe, that it’s not filled with toxins or anything else. And that’s how we market our milk and our dairy products in New Zealand, across the world stage.

ROD McKINNON

For us, it was about having real peace of mind about what we were doing, and for me, it was just about doing the right thing to make sure that we weren’t putting nutrients into areas where we shouldn’t be putting them and protecting that environment that we have. We’ve geofenced the whole farm, so our irrigator works on a GPS¹² system and all of our wetlands¹³ that we’ve planted, all of the riparian, the drains, the stream that runs through the farm, they’re all geofenced out of boundary for the farm.

We’ve retired about 25 hectares of the farm, so a little bit over 10%. And really, it’s had no real effect on us economically. The areas retiring are swampland or riparian around the river. A little here, a little there is not doing anything, and that’s a compliance issue now anyway, although we’d done it well before that time. And the other areas of bush that we’ve retired became naturally places that looked like they needed to have plants put on them rather than cows.

We’ve found that the quality of the water in the Mangawhio Stream that runs through the farm has actually improved over the last 5 years that we’ve been testing. So that’s really encouraging for us to see that the work we’re doing actually has some positive results on the river and the water quality that we’ve got.

SANDRA McKINNON

The return of wildlife – tūīs, we have the tūīs round the house, we have the tūīs on the farm. Bees coming back I think as well. And the stream itself has always been quite clean but we’re seeing now more of the fish swimming around there. Frogs, you know – the general wildlife returning to the area. And the farm looks better. When your toetoe is blooming and when your mānuka¹⁴ is flowering, you know, it’s a beautiful place to be in.

Acknowledgements
Sandra and Rod McKinnon
Drone footage of McKinnon’s farm and shots of effluent¹⁵ spreader filmed by AF Productions and Paul Sutherland Photography. Copyright Yardmaster