Source: Federated Farmers of New Zealand
The Government has stepped in to give a group of Manawatu and Tararua farmers stuck in consenting limbo for more than a decade a way forward.
“It’s great news that the Government has heeded calls from Federated Farmers and announced a pause on Horizons’ Plan Change 2 (PC2),” Federated Farmers Tararua president Aaron Passey says.
“It gives 167 farming families a controlled consent pathway that is much more straight forward than what they faced under an Environment Court ruling.”
Passey says they’ll have to demonstrate they have good farm practice and a nutrient management plan as they apply for a controlled activity resource consent.
“So there are still tests to meet but for farmers who have been under a cloud of uncertainty year after year, we think yesterday’s announcement from the Government will be very welcome news.”
Under the Environment Court decision, the dairy farmers had just 12 months to get their consent applications in once PC2 kicked in, or their applications would be subject to a tougher discretionary consent.
Even to qualify for approval, farms would have needed to achieve either a 20% reduction in nitrogen loss from their 2012 baseline (35% for commercial vegetable growers), or reduce nitrogen loss to the 75th percentile for their catchment – whichever is lower – within two years of receiving consent.
“That was a near impossible ask,” Federated Farmers Manawatu-Rangitikei president Ian Strahan says.
“It’s not reasonable or practical to expect farmers in 2012 to have anticipated the complex chain of regulatory and technological shifts and to have known they’d need to keep a record of their N-discharge because there would be a software update three years later.
“It was that software update that made the 167 dairy farms non-compliant, leading to a new set of rules in 2026 that required farmers to produce a record of what Nitrogen loss was in 2012.”
Many of the properties affected by the 2026 rules have changed hands multiple times since 2012.
New owners do not have legal or practical access to the specific input data (fertiliser receipts, stock rates, feed use) required to construct a valid 2012 baseline, Strahan says.
In 2012, the One Plan was built around a specific version of Overseer. When the software updated its underlying scientific models in 2015, it instantly changed the calculated nitrogen output of those farms-on paper only-without any actual changes happening on the physical land.
“Expecting a business owner to maintain records for a hypothetical compliance standard that did not exist yet, using software that would later redefine the rules retrospectively, is ridiculous,” Strahan says.
“It’s really good news that the Government has stepped in to end the insanity, and also to usher in new resource management rules that will cut down the unnecessary red tape that has hobbled our sector, and many others.”