OPINION: Happy New Year to you all – I hope you had a restful and stress free festive season.
The timeline for Healthy Rivers: Plan for Change/Wai Ora: He Rautaki Whakapaipai has been extended by a couple of months.
A proposed plan change will now go to Waikato Regional Council for adoption on 30 June 2016, rather than in late April.
This change gives:
- an extra three months to deliver first recommendation of the overall policy mix to the Healthy Rivers Wai Ora committee (March 2016 rather than December 2015)
- more time to consider community and sector feedback and technical information, and to engage with their sectors once again in February 2016.
The project partners and the CSG appreciate that potentially affected people are waiting to know what is expected of them and their businesses.
However the new timeline provides a better chance at the best possible overall outcomes for stakeholders.
Another topic of interest is a water irrigators meeting being held this month to consider the merits of alternative options for a water charging policy.
That work is still in progress and pros and cons and implications of the various options are still being worked through.
I hope to see you at the Grasslandz See Ag in Action event in Eureka on January 28-29.
This is a biennial event, see the website for further details www.grasslandz.co.nz.
And I leave you with this fact - according to the agricultural production statistics (provisional) as at June 2015 there were nearly 6.4 million dairy cattle in NZ.
This figure is down 300,000 from 2014. As always, feel free to contact me, phone 027 330 030.
Stuart Husband.