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Farmers are urging the Authorities to simplify freshwater farm plans and make the entire course of less complicated and extra reasonably priced for them.
Federated Farmers wrote to the Authorities this week, calling for “pressing and vital adjustments”.
Freshwater farm plans, legislated beneath the Useful resource Administration Act 1991 (RMA) and the Useful resource Administration (Freshwater Farm Plans) Laws 2023 laws farmers to do an on-farm freshwater danger evaluation and establish actions to both handle or mitigate these dangers.
Freshwater farm plans will must be licensed and audited. The outcomes of certification and auditing can be reported to the respective regional council.
Federated Farmers nationwide vice chairman Colin Hurst says that with the best settings farm plans current an enormous alternative to enhance environmental outcomes, scale back duplication and take away the necessity for farmers to acquire costly and time-consuming consents.
Sadly, the present framework is ‘a whole canine”, he says.
“It’s put in place an impractical and inefficient system the place it’s extremely costly to write down, certify and audit the plans.
“To make issues worse the principles go too far and seize all properties over 20ha, and current business or council farm plans usually are not recognised.
“There’s a irritating degree of duplication with most farmers nonetheless required to get a useful resource consent along with their farm plan.”
Federated Farmers desires the Authorities to place in place a sensible, pragmatic and efficient system that may enhance environmental outcomes whereas decreasing the regulatory burden and pointless value.
Hurst says they don’t wish to see one other costly ‘field ticking’ train that ties farmers up with infinite and arbitrary paperwork for little or no environmental achieve.
“What we’ve requested for is a tiered system that takes a risk-based strategy, the place the extent of plan you might want to put in place is set by your particular catchment and farming exercise.
“These plans ought to be a substitute for, not along with, costly useful resource consents for issues like winter grazing and inventory exclusion.
“They need to additionally substitute the necessity for a few of the impractical one-size-fits-all laws utilized nationally and permit farmers and catchments to tailor their environmental enchancment actions to match native wants.”
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