Canterbury’s regional council endorses expanded irrigation with setbacks from a scientific reserve. David Williams reports.
The irrigated area on a controversial Canterbury farm is expanding more than 70 percent, against ecological advice and despite opposition from the Department of Conservation.
The 10km-long farm at Kaitorete Spit, south of Christchurch, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere, shot to national prominence three years ago when new owner Brent Thomas was accused of killing hundreds of rare native plants, after spraying fields with herbicide and planting oats.
Conservation lobby group Forest & Bird took Environment Court action to halt further destruction of rare and threatened plants and habitat. Interim orders have been made preventing intensive farming on some paddocks but the case remains open while sale negotiations continue.
Meanwhile, development at the farm has continued apace, including a water consent granted under the nose of the Department of Conservation, which manages the adjacent scientific reserve but chose not to make a submission to the regional council, ECan.
Last month, ECan granted Thomas’s company Wongan Hills consent to irrigate 350 hectares of the farm – an increase of 148 ha on what was approved last year. No extra water for the new centre pivots is needed.
The nub of the issue, once again, is district plan rules over improved pasture. Some of the area to be irrigated is outside a certificate of compliance issued by the city council in 2018, and was thought to encroach on the “back dunes”.
However, a council-commissioned ecological assessment confirmed the area was “improved pasture” and could be farmed as of right. Even ECan’s ecologist, Mike Harding, found there were few indigenous plants left and nothing of ecological significance. However, he said there had been ecological values in parts of the proposed irrigation area “until very recently”.
Worried about the indigenous vegetation adjoining the paddocks, Harding said a minimum setback should be “at least the distance over which the activity is proposed”. (Unlike most other reports, Harding’s isn’t available publicly on ECan’s website.)
However, ECan’s consent planner Nicola Duke favoured Wongan Hills’ suggestion of a 50m setback from the southern fenceline, and a smaller buffer in the north.
Expert assessments done for the farm company show no change in soil moisture or relative humidity from existing irrigation. Monitoring should be extended to newly irrigated paddocks, suggested Duke, who said the potential effects of expanded irrigation on significant indigenous biodiversity or dryland habitats would be no more than minor.
(Thomas, of Wongan Hills, says: “There is really stringent monitoring in place which is performing as expected over the past three irrigation seasons.”)
Irrigation setbacks would adequately mitigate the effects on the adjoining public conservation land, Duke said – which meant DoC was not an “affected person”.
ECan asked DoC for comment on the irrigation consent “out of courtesy”, but the department maintained it was affected. (Interestingly, the situation is the reverse of the last irrigation consent, when ECan notified DoC as an affected party, and the department chose not to make a submission.)
In a letter to ECan last October, DoC’s resource management planner Linda Kirk said the adjacent public conservation land provided habitat for a suite of rare and threatened plants and animals.
The department opposed Wongan Hills’ consent over concerns such as spray drift, risks to water quality of nearby Te Waihora/Lake Ellesmere, fertiliser applied to a dryland area, and the cumulative effects of “effectively doubling” the current consented irrigated area.
Kirk said large areas of indigenous biodiversity identified in 2018 “are no longer present”. “This should be verified by an independent ecologist and is of concern from a non-compliance issue.”
She concluded: “It is the department’s view that increasing the irrigation area in the dryland habitat of Kaitorete will further fragment the sensitive environment and the rare and threatened species and ecosystems present.”
Nearby Te Taumutu and Wairewa Rūnanga had no such qualms. They supported the expanded irrigation, as long as cultural monitoring was done to identify valuable or sensitive sites. (Kaitorete Spit also has the highest concentration of Māori archaeological and sacred – wāhi taonga/wāhi tapu – sites in the country.)
In an email to Newsroom, Thomas says he hasn’t seen DoC’s letter, but recalls from discussions with an ECan staffer that the department might have its wires crossed about the area proposed for irrigation. “At all times, all irrigation development has occurred in areas where we had a certificate of compliance or written confirmation from CCC that the areas were improved pasture and irrigation could occur as a permitted activity.”
ECan refused to answer questions about active and completed investigations into Wongan Hills Ltd and related companies at Kaitorete Spit. The regional council is putting Newsroom’s questions through the Official Information Act process.
Thomas’ farm operations are among the biggest on Banks Peninsula, spanning 5400ha and employing 10 permanent staff and two or three casual workers. Its annual rates bill is $129,000 – three-quarters of which goes to the city council, with the balance to the regional council.
