Limit Dairy Farming: Greens

By GALE,Hayley

The growth of dairy farming in New Zealand should be limited because the industry has outgrown the ecological capacity of the country to support it and is the country’s biggest contributor to climate change, says Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons.

She told a meeting in Takaka on Saturday that methane was “30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in warming the planet”.

But Federated Farmers dairy farming spokeswoman Michelle Riley, of Collingwood, said Ms Fitzsimons had ignored the huge amount of effort being put into environmentally sound management by farmers.

She also expressed disappointment that Ms Fitzsimons had not taken time to engage with “real people on farms” during her visit .

Ms Fitzsimons visited Golden Bay, where dairying is the largest contributor to the local economy, as part of her party’s nationwide Climate Defence tour, but there were no dairy farmers among the 60 people at the meeting at the Aubergine Cafe.

She also opened the new Collingwood mural and attended a stall at Takaka’s Village Green.

“I know it’s a radical and unpopular thing to say, but dairying has outgrown the ecological capacity of this country to support it,” she said.

“I’m not saying we should get rid of all our dairy farms but we can’t afford to let dairying grow further than it already has.”

While dairy farming was “very profitable” and growing very fast, it had a serious downside, Ms Fitzsimons said.

It not only caused the production of large amounts of methane, but run-off from dairy farms led to “serious degradation of water quality in our streams and rivers”.

In some parts of the country, rivers were being “sucked dry” due to irrigation, and “huge” amounts of plantation forest had been cut down and converted to dairying, she said.

“It is very, very climate-unfriendly.”

In terms of per capita emissions of greenhouse gases, New Zealand was the fourth-worst country in the world, and agriculture was the main culprit, contributing 50 percent of the country’s emissions, Ms Fitzsimons said.

This was well above emissions from transport (19 percent), industry (13 percent) and electricity (10 percent), the meeting heard.

Ms Fitzsimons called for a Climate Defence Fund of $1.6 billion, equal to the country’s defence budget, to be funded by requiring major polluters to buy carbon credits from the Government. The money would be “recycled” back into energy efficiency initiatives.

She also called for more research into cattle feeds that produced less methane; more tree planting on farms; and schemes to encourage the manufacture of biogas from farm waste, to lower greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

But Mrs Riley was unimpressed by Ms Fitzsimons’ comments.

“In the Tasman district alone, the extremely high rate of 98 percent compliance for dairy effluent disposal indicates the importance farmers are giving to issues of water quality in our region,” she said.

Effluent management on farms was a high priority, and sustainable solutions for its environmentally sound management were being promoted, Mrs Riley said.

“On our farm alone, more than $30,000 was spent this season on new systems to better utilise the nutrients in cow manure collected during milking times.

“The Green Party has got to do economic analysis to stand alongside their policies. People still need to be fed in the world. It makes sense environmentally for New Zealand to continue in that role, and it makes sound economic sense for the New Zealand economy and therefore New Zealand society.”

Together with the Government, farmers were already doing research on methane emissions, Mrs Riley said. Her farming business had paid about $15,000 last year towards research, money that was levied on its milk and meat production.

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(c) 2007 Nelson Mail, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.