Improving the economic and environmental performance of a New Zealand hill country farm catchment: 1. Goal development and assessment of current performance

Abstract

A multi-stakeholder group including land managers, policy agencies and biophysical scientists was establishedto oversee a catchment scale project examining the economic and environmental performance of a representative North Island hill country catchment (296 ha Mangaotama catchment, Whatawhata) in the western Waikato region of New Zealand. The group first identified goals relevant to achieving a "well managed rural hill catchment", including viable businesses, healthy ecosystems, protected landscape values, active partnerships, demonstrable environmental performance, and adequate rural services and infrastructure. The current state of the case study catchment was characterised by collecting data on key indicators chosen by the group to assess business viability and ecosystem health. Data included land use capability, vegetation cover, soil fertility, erosion, water quality, aquatic fauna, plant growth, terrestrial biodiversity, livestock enterprise performance, and economic farm surplus. The results were compared with a range of benchmarks, including adjacent catchments in different land use (water quality, biodiversity) and with hill country pastoral sector survey data (livestock performance and profitability). This comparison demonstrated that from both economic and environmental points of view, the catchment farm system was failing to meet the goals set by the management group. That result provided the impetus for the investigation of ways to improve performance.

Integrated catchment management effects on flow, habitat, instream vegetation and macroinvertebrates in Waikato, New Zealand, hill‐country streams

“…Catchment characteristics of soils, topography, vegetation, farming system, water quality and stream habitat are described in detail elsewhere (Quinn et al 1997a;Quinn & Stroud 2002;Dodd et al 2008b;Smale et al 2008). Briefly, the area is dominated by hilly to steep (17° to >30°) topography and yellowbrown soils on parent rock of sedimentary sandstones and siltstones (weathered greywacke and argillite).…”

Improving the economic and environmental performance of a New Zealand hill country farm catchment: 2. Forecasting and planning land‐use change

“…The CMG took the view that the essentially all-grass system in the catchment farm at the start of the project was not sustainable from either economic or environmental perspectives (Dodd et al 2008), and that vegetation change was the principle means of effecting change. Numerous other authors have suggested the need for increasing the level of tree cover in New Zealand hill land pastoral systems, dominantly in the context of erosion issues (eyles & Newsome 1992;Wall et al 1997;McGregor et al 1999;Cameron 2003).…”

“…The second group of three scenarios involved a reduced pastoral area (128 ha) that was focused on the most favourable land within the catchment (to complement the 50% forestry scenario noted previously). These three scenarios used the same stock policies as the first three, with reduced numbers and assuming both greater average pasture production and a seasonal pattern of pasture production that better matched animal demand (given a higher proportion of lower land-use capability (LuC) class land; table 1 in Dodd et al 2008). These scenarios thus required a lower rate of nitrogen fertiliser supplementation, at 40 kg N ha -1 year-1 .…”

“…We sincerely thank the members of the multi-stakeholder Catchment Management Group (named in Dodd et al 2008) for the time and energy they devoted to oversee the project, and the agencies that a number of those members represented, for their sponsorship in kind …”

“…The previous paper in this series (Dodd et al 2008, this issue) outlined an integrated catchment management study designed to apply a multi-stakeholder participatory approach to defining management of low-altitude steep hill land in the North Island of New Zealand. The multi-stakeholder Catchment Managem ent Group (CMG) assembled for the study included local government policy agencies, farm managers and researchers.…”