Over regulation of the Farming Sector

One policy we are advocating with vigour is repealing the mass of regulations that have beset farmers over the term of this government. The myriad of regulations that now govern farming in New Zealand have been increasing in recent years and are now bordering the ludicrous. Essential Freshwater regulations are an example of impractical ideas and over regulation.

It makes farmers get resource consents for some aspects of winter grazing by setting new rules around pugging, deadlines for re-sowing crop paddocks and what angle of paddock slopes can be cropped. Federated Farmers have called them “unworkable ‘stifling the sector with unachievable and unworkable rules to the extent that stock numbers will have to fall to even start to comply”.

Under the new rules, pugging, which is defined as hoof prints in the ground, are to be no deeper than 20cm anywhere in the paddock, and pugging of any depth must not cover more than 50 per cent of a paddock, without a resource consent.

The rules have a provision that crop paddocks must be re-sown by October 1, or November 1 in Southland and Otago. Farmers plant their crop according to the vagaries of the weather not regulations set by Wellington. Spring can come early or late and no regulation issued by government can change that.

Sowing according to the rules can cause more risk and damage to soaking paddocks and risks failed crops and the need to expensively resow the crop when conditions are right not when a government regulation says it should be done.

If a farmer well acquainted with conditions on her land plants crops on a slope more than greater than ten degrees, they need to get resource consent. An expensive and time-consuming business perhaps costing several thousand dollars.

This has been said to exclude up to a third of the cropped area in Southland, especially for sheep and beef properties.

Micromanaging the rural sector of the economy by bureaucratic measures has become increasingly fashionable egged on by a bureaucracy of city dwellers who have no idea of sound farming practices

HeartLandNZ will repeal the regulations that are stopping farmers farming their land to the best of their abilities