Environment Southland has fired a heavy round into the side of the dairy industry in Southland - and not before time!
The front page of today's Southland Times carries the comments from ES Compliance manager Mark Hunter who says there has been a serious failure of compliance amongst dairy farmers here in recent times, resulting in half of all farms inspected being found to be seriously in breach of their effluent discharge consents.
Of the 54 farms inspected, 24 were found to be in this state.
Mark Hunter said those 24 offenders had been graded 10.
"That means something has been happening that is a prosecutable offence."
The article by Mark Hotton suggests that the findings will 'come as a surprise to the industry.' Indeed. Let's hope it is a galvanising kind of surprise. The Environment Southland council is to meet with DairyNZ shortly for talks of the general situation with their industry in Southland and it will be a good time to hear what they have to say about this latest disappointing and disgraceful development.
The article is accompanied by a photograph of an expanse of what appears to be effluent spread across a paddock somewhere in Drummond.
The Dirty Dairying campaign just fired up its engines again I think.
* Up-date: RoarPrawn thinks so too!
2 comments:
So why isn't ES prosecuting those farms?
I'm guessing we will but I'll have to wait for Wednesday to find out what's going on. In the background, there is soul-searching and calls to arms!
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