Whenever a rural landowner applies to develop their property to provide some lots for rural-residential development, the planning reports, from both the District and Regional Councils, will express concern about the "loss of productive farmland".
One could be forgiven for believing that New Zealand was highly urbanised and that farmland of any kind was in short supply.
However, the plan-writers and the decision makers are clearly ambivalent about the importance of productive ventures to our economy.
For one thing the transfer of high country grazing land into the DoC estate is usually treated as a praiseworthy event – especially by the metropolitan dailies even though these transfers take hundreds of thousands of hectares out of production and are putting the whole merino wool industry at risk.
Some readers will remember the infamous Johnson piggery case where the Johnson family who had been operating a pig farm on their Waikato property for decades suddenly found their operation under attack from near neighbours complaining about the smell and from Environment Waikato who supported the complainants. Finally, the Environment Court ordered the Johnson's to close the pig farm and Waikato lost one of the largest and most productive factory farms in the region.
The only way the Johnsons could hope to recover some of their losses was to subdivide the land into several rural residential lots but a combination of objectives, policies and rules in the plans blocked their proposals because "the subdivision would have a negative impact on the productive capabilities of the land" or words to that effect. These convolutions make Kafka's world look reasonable.
Anyhow, Environment Waikato is not satisfied with closing down a pig farm. With the enthusiastic support of neighbouring residents, Environment Waikato persuaded the Environment Court, and subsequently the High Court, to effectively force NZ Mushrooms, a subsidiary of Christchurch based Meadow Mushrooms, to close down. The company has been operating for about 54 years, and about 160 workers will lose their jobs.
The problem lay with discharges of odours from the company's composting plant which is 3 km from the farm itself. On 12th November, Judge Harland in the Hamilton District Court fined NZ Mushrooms $32,000 and costs for "discharging oudourous compounds to air in breach of its resource consent and section 15(1)(c) RMA.
In the August 22nd decision the Environment Court found that "the cumulative effect of unpleasant odours can be considered objectionable, even if individual odour events are not bad enough to be considered objectionable on their own.”
The court said operational improvements at the site that had been largely put in place designed to eliminate odour nuisance had “not succeeded in eliminating significant adverse chronic odour effects, or offensive and objectionable effects”.
“Neighbours of the site should not be subject to objectionable and offensive odours from it,” the court said.
“Even taking into account the substantial beneficial effects of New Zealand Mushrooms’ operations and weighting those benefits as high as we can in our consideration we are of the view that the neighbours should not have to pay the environmental price in the form of offensive and objectionable odours which they presently do.”
This was a long established mushroom factory in an industrial area, more than 250 metres from the nearest non-industrial activity. The composting facility was in a rural area. The neighbours near the composting facility complained about a smell like 'dead cows'? One of the objectors was a competing mushroom grower.
No rural industry is safe under this court ruling. And the pattern is now well established.
In September this year, another Waikato piggery farmer was fined $35,000 for failing to contain odours. The owner, Ken McIntyre, was sentenced "for discharging a contaminate, a strong odour, into the air", the second time he had been prosecuted on similar charges. Judge Melanie Harland, the same judge who fined NZ Mushrooms for a similar offense, said the odour from the farm was "very intense" and the effect "severe."
In April, Environment Waikato and the Matamata-Piako District Council had declined the McKintyre's application to expand the piggery and develop a 300 tonne per day organic waste digestor producing biogass at Keeone near Morrinsville. The McIntyre family wanted to expand their existing 1100 pig operation this to the equivalent of 22,000 fifty-kilogram pigs, with the whole new operation having a combined floor area of 42,000 square metres. The piggery would have been the second largest in the country.
It was proposed that the generator would produce electricity from biogas produced by a biogas generator which used piggery waste and industrial waste, such as expired supermarket food and waste from meat and food processing industries. Up to 300 tonnes per day of industry waste would be trucked to the site.
The total investment proposed was $30 million to $60 million.
That is a substantial investment and would have provided a few hundred job. These rulings against the Johnson and McIntyre piggeries, and NZ Mushrooms, encourage people to buy bargain priced properties next to pig farms, mushroom farms – and Speedways – and then use the RMA to close them down and enjoy the windfall rise in their property values.
No compensation was offered the operators of the pig farms or the mushroom farm – or their workers.
Surely it should not be beyond the wit of the planners who are so determined to control other land uses, to maintain a decent separation between genuine rural industrial operations and rural-residential settlements. There is plenty of room out there.
In the meantime, why would anyone invest in high productivity agricultural industries in New Zealand when their future viability is so uncertain?
