New Zealand’s minister for primary industries (the equivalent to Ireland's Minister for Agriculture) Nathan Guy was in Ireland recently and he spoke exclusively to the Irish Farmers Journal.

Minister Guy said the government has designed an “aspirational target” of having 90% of the county’s water bodies swimmable by 2030. Currently 72% of the waters can have people swimming in them but water quality is coming into sharper focus.

“An OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] report came out last week and it was quite critical of our agricultural systems. We realise that we’ve got some challenges. It’s not just farmers, it’s urbanisation too,” minister Guy said.

However, the country’s farmers will have to carry a large part of the improvement works as well as the associated costs.

To exclude livestock from waterways, “56,000km of fencing will need to be done”, minister Guy explained.

That gets you from Dublin to Auckland three times

"So it’s a massive challenge for our farmers [but] they’re up for it. The cost on that is estimated to be $370m. A large portion of that cost will have to be on putting in water reticulation systems.

“Our dairy farmers, on a voluntary basis, have already done 25,000km of fencing over 10 years so they could see this coming a long time ago ... I acknowledge that they have done a fantastic job in his regard."

Guy said sitting alongside the necessity to drive improvements at an environmental level is the need to keep the consumer informed and educated on how responsible farmers are becoming.

“The consumer is closer to the farmgate than they ever have been before and they want to know that each individual farmer is doing more to look after the environment than ever before,” he said.

We will have more with Nathan Guy in the coming weeks.

Read more

Full coverage of all farming issues in New Zealand