Bruce Rollinson
The High Court didn't make any substantial changes to Horizons Regional Council's One Plan, Ohakune commercial vegetable grower and Horizons candidate Bruce Rollinson says.
But it did discuss at length the plan's most contentious aspect - limits to the amount of nitrogen farmers and growers can allow to leach through into water.
"We have lost the war but we have had some things clarified, so we can get on with doing what we do," Mr Rollinson said.
The 56-page judgment released on September 24 follows an application to the High Court by Horticulture NZ and Federated Farmers to appeal parts of the One Plan, the regional council's blueprint for managing the environment in its region. The One Plan rolls together rules protecting the health of air, water and soil. Its most contentious rules limit the amount of nutrients farmers can add to soil, in particular nitrogen. Limits to it will affect vegetable growers and dairy farmers the most.
The High Court judgement begins with a paragraph about nitrogen, which plants and animals need in order to grow. It's applied to soil as fertiliser, and also excreted by farm animals.
If nitrogen isn't used by growing plants it can cause problems in water systems. It can choke waterways with algae and deplete oxygen in the water, affecting fish and animal life.
Pahiatua sheep and beef farmer Andrew Day has followed the fortunes of the One Plan and is also a Horizons candidate for the Tararua District.
He said adding more nitrogen than plants can use increased profit for individual farmers but caused pollution for everyone else.
"We've all got our own little patch of the catchment and we're trying to maximise what we're doing but there's real consequences to the rest of the community."
In 2004 a report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment noted farming in New Zealand was becoming more intensive and producing more food from the same area of land. One of the drivers was a major increase in the application of nitrogen fertiliser.
"In the short term, New Zealand needs to move rapidly to a situation where all farmers are using nutrient management plans and tools which balance nutrient inputs with plant uptake and minimise nutrient outputs which cause environmental damage."
The report said voluntary approaches didn't appear to be working and regulation would probably be required.
Horizons' One Plan seeks to add that regulation. It imposes limits on the amount of nitrogen that can be leached by the various classes of land - with higher levels for land capable of greater production.
Farmers are to reduce those levels steadily, with five-yearly intervals set. This has alarmed some. The High Court appeal was led by Horticulture New Zealand, because growers like Bruce Rollinson said they could not grow certain crops within the nitrogen limits set.
They were also unhappy with the Overseer computer programme used to calculate nitrogen leaching.
Discussion at court clarified that vegetable growers could use older and more trusted methods to calculate nitrogen leaching. Mr Rollinson said he was still not sure how those limits will work for commercial vegetable growers who lease land.
Mr Day said leasing arrangements were a complication, but leaching would be calculated across a whole property and not on each individual hectare.
Mr Rollinson is happy with Horizons' decisions to date on how the plan will be implemented.
Mr Day is not. He accepts that agricultural land use is largely responsible for increased nitrogen in the region's waterways, and said the way Horizons had chosen to implement the plan was unfair and won't improve water quality.
The council decided to give even the least compliant farmers five years to reduce their nitrogen leaching. Meanwhile, farmers who had already made reductions were expected to make more. That gave people who had done least an advantage, because it would be easier for them to make reductions.
Mr Day doesn't think the implementation decision was fair or would create an incentive for farmers to improve.
He said the One Plan was complex, but complexity was needed to prevent environmental damage from increasingly intense farming.
"If we need intensive farming for our economic wellbeing, then it has to be this complicated.
"It's about growing up as a country."