Dairy farmers win praise for clean up

Only a few years ago shellfish farmers off Collingwood in Golden Bay were pointing the finger at dairy farmers alongside the Aorere River for contamination that put their livelihoods at risk reports Country-wide. Now they are patting them on the back for a job well done. The success of the Aorere Catchment Project has just earned it a further $259,000 grant over the next three years to continue its work and take on a leadership role with other dairy communities facing similar challenges. For the past three years the project has been developing solutions to improve the water quality in the river and hence the bay beyond where an aquaculture industry turns over up to $15 million in shellfish a year. Marine farmer Hika Rountree remembers the water quality being so bad in 2002 that the industry was able to harvest only 28% of the year. The relationship between the dairy farmers and their aquaculture counterparts was tense and emotional. "We were faced with the real possibility of complete closure," he says. Now, shellfish harvest days have been lifted to 79% to reflect improved water quality results and he is effusive of the farming community upstream, which he says saved the aquaculture industry in the bay. The project is driven by 33 dairy farms, with funding provided mainly by the Ministry of Agriculture's Sustainable Farming Fund and co-ordinated by the NZ Landcare Trust. Initial funding provided the group with help from scientists to evaluate the problems and individual farm plans to implement the best management practice for each. Project spokesperson Sue Brown says much of the challenge has been working out solutions for such a high-rainfall area that spills into a shallow sandy bay with a mussel industry. Where she farms at Rockville, rainfall reaches around 2.4m a year, while further up the valley on the Heaphy Track, it soars to 5m. Intensive dairy farming covers just 16% of the catchment along the valley floor, with between 11,000 and 13,500 cows, while 80% is the bush-clad hills cradling the valley. Because of the high volumes of water flowing down the Aorere River, nutrient concentrations are fairly diluted. Generally E coli levels are low as well, but spikes when there is little or no rainfall, and that was hitting the shellfish industry hard.  Brown says it was not so much that water quality had deteriorated over the years because of dairy farming, but rather stricter regulations and improved testing methods that picked up the E coli problem in the shellfish.