A Heretaunga Sustainable Water meeting in Havelock North on Thursday night was attended by about 300 people. Photo / Chris Hyde
A Heretaunga Sustainable Water meeting in Havelock North on Thursday night was attended by about 300 people. Photo / Chris Hyde
Farmers on arguably the best soils for growing in New Zealand are revolting against council water restrictions.
Faced with a Hawke’s Bay Regional Council plan to reduce their takes by almost half, water users on the Heretaunga Plains have decided to unite under one banner.
They’ve already drawn up an alternative plan for how water would be allocated on the Heretaunga Plains over the next century.
The group is to be called Heretaunga Sustainable Water and is being led by orchardists Greig Taylor, John Bostock and three Hawke’s Bay Regional councillors - winegrower Xan Harding, Twyford orchardist Jerf van Beek and Jock Mackintosh.
With widespread industry support, the group has $150,000 in donations already in its coffers.
On Thursday night, close to 300 people in the horticultural and agricultural sectors of the Bay, and a variety of regional leaders, came together to hear from group spokesman Taylor and other speakers on how it would work.
The crowd spilled out of the Havelock North Function Centre, with a gaggle of large modern utes struggling to fit into the car park alongside it.
Taylor told the meeting it felt like “one of the more definitive crossroads in the history of our region”.
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council and farmers have been locked for roughly five years in an intense fight over a water allocation document called Tank, which took further years of discussions to draft.
The document aims to reduce takes from everyone in the Tūtaekurī, Ahuriri, Ngāruroro and Karamū catchments - including urban water supplies - to just 90 million cubic metres a year.
The current take is 160 million cubic metres.
Sixteen appeals were lodged against the plan in 2022. Mediation has since failed, with agricultural interests intent on taking Hawke’s Bay Regional Council to the Environment Court.
The Ngaruroro River through the Heretaunga Plains. Photo / NZME
Growers say they have a mandate from the Government to double their current exports, but can’t do that with such severe water restrictions.
Apple orchardists in Hawke’s Bay are already exporting $1 billion of product a year.
“If we want excellence across the board for our region, then we need excellence in water usage,” Taylor said. “Growers are committed to that. However, what is currently being proposed is not what excellence looks like.”
He said significant pressure from Heretaunga Sustainable Water‘s founding members, as well as other industry representatives, saw Hawke’s Bay Regional Council issue a late reprieve to growers last Friday.
The new model was supposed to have begun already, but now the existing water allocation model will remain in place until the outcome of an Environment Court hearing, expected in late 2026.
Taylor, van Beek and Harding walked the hundreds at the meeting through what they needed to do next to keep the pressure on.
They told farmers they all needed to tell the council to pause issuing new take consents for them under the Tank plan, and instead turn their attention to “collective action”.
Van Beek talked through a model at Twyford, where dozens of farmers had got together and worked out how much water each of them had, and then decided to share it.
It had allowed each of them to avoid take bans during dry months and also lowered the cost of their consents as individuals by grouping their consent into one, van Beek said.
Harding talked about the HBRC-proposed dam at Whanawhana on a Ngāruroro tributary. He said the regional council wanted to “get the hell out” of leading the dam’s creation “as soon as possible”, but Heretaunga water users - as a group - could move into that space, with support from mana whenua, Napier City Council and Hastings District Council.
The Karamu Stream floating through Havelock North. Photo / Warren Buckland
HBRC: There is no water left
Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s official stance on the amount of water left in Hawke’s Bay to set aside for growth for horticulture and viticulture is that there is no more.
If it doesn’t reduce the take from the Heretaunga aquifer, it will have dire environmental consequences, it says.
HBRC manager of policy and planning Nichola Nicolson told Local Democracy Reporting that all parties had agreed at the beginning of the Tank process that the aquifer was over-allocated.
“That’s not disputed. But when people walked away from the table and perhaps realised what it would mean for their business, that’s when the collaborative approach dissolved somewhat.
“The need to lower the water take is not disputed. What is disputed is how fairly the available water is allocated.”
Water takes were often less than the allocation, and the council had based its new figures on actual water use, she said.
While the Tank plan on the one hand was trying to claw back “over-allocation” (the allocation on paper, not the actual use), it set up several pathways for introducing additional water in the system.
The council’s manager of consents, Paul Barrett, said some people were upset because of future development plans they might have had.
“There are three factors the plan sets up to look at. One is how much water they actually used in a 10-year reference period. Another is how much water their consent currently provides for, and third is crop water demand estimate based on their crop type and the area they are in.
“At the current level of extraction in dry conditions, something like 1000 litres a second is depleted from the Ngāruroro River.”
Nicholson said that, if the Tank plan didn’t go ahead, the impacts, on top of climate change, would be “more algae bloom, more eels dying in our streams because of low flows”.
There was a perception in the 1990s that it didn’t matter how much water was taken from the aquifer because it would replenish itself.
“But through the process of us undertaking science and seeing the rivers running dry, we realised that there is a limit on what we can take and that the streams and rivers that sit above it are highly connected.
“The amount of water we are taking out sometimes has a catastrophic environmental impact. That’s a big shift, going from thinking we can take as much as we like and there are no negative effects to living with a system that has a limit and how to live within those limits, which have different impacts on parts of the community.”
The council is not expecting the Environment Court to hear the Tank appeal until next year.
What is Tank?
The Tank plan came about after research in the 1990s showed water taken from the aquifer exceeded the rate at which it recharged.
A working group of 30 members from industry, stakeholders, NGOs and tangata whenua found the best way to achieve the necessary reduction in the water allocation was the “actual and reasonable use” approach.
It culminated in the council’s Tank plan change nine, a plan for the Tūtaekurī, Ahuriri, Ngaruroro and Karamū water catchments overlaying the Heretaunga aquifer (hence the name Tank).
Heretaunga Sustainable Water’s plan is essentially an alternative to the Tank plan. It does not have the backing of the region’s water regulator, Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.
