A good example of riparian creek planting at Raupuhu Studs, owned by Russell and Mavis proffit at Mahoenu
King Country River Care (KCRC) has $200,000 of left-over funding in the kitty to give away for riparian planting.
This amount represents the third and final year KCR received a share of the Jobs for Nature funding, a $1.219 billion programme that managed funding across several government agencies.
The fund was set up during the Covid era to benefit the environment, people and the regions.
In the final year of the subsidy KCRC Coordinator, Anna Nelson, said KCRC had decided to relax its rules a little to help to disperse the money.
“Applicants will no longer need a farm environment plan to access the funding and we are open to applications from across our catchment area, which includes Kawhia Harbour, Marokopa, Awakino, Mōkau, and Mangaokewa Rivers, upstream from Te Kuiti township.
“All farms and parts of farms within this catchment can apply and we will also consider applications from councils or community-owned organisations, where people are trying to do restoration.”
A previous example of the latter had been the granting of funds to the Tainui Wetere Domain Restoration Committee, Mōkau, for estuary planting few years ago.
“We would definitely look at more such requests.
There is money there for plants and those who have utilised the funding so far have put it to good use. It would be great to get some new farmers onboard.”
However, Anna acknowledged that it could be a tall order for some farmers to consider riparian planting at present.
“It isn’t exactly straight forward for many farming businesses right now, there are a lot of increases in on-farm costs and things are not quite where we would like them to be.”
“We acknowledge that it is not an easy time for everyone to do planting projects, so that’s why we are open to looking at projects beyond farms as well.”
Anna also made a plea for King Country Farmers not to put their freshwater farm plans on the back burner.
Central Government legislation demanded these plans, which were to be administered by regional councils, and the new Government had not cancelled them.
“All catchments listed above – except for Kawhia and Marokopa – are now in the “go live” area and this means farmers would only have 18 months to submit their plans,” Anna said.
“The understanding is that potentially those time frames may be lengthened by the Government – but nobody has heard anything to confirm this.
“The danger will be if every farmer decides to leave this for another year and see what happens, they may only have six months, to try to get them done.
“Then it could become really costly, because the consultants who produce such plans would be under pressure.
“And in that case, if you don’t have the beginnings of a farm plan it would be a significant cost to get one started.
“At River Care we are keen to help people to do their own farm plans, which will cost them their time.
“We believe the best thing would be to start early so that it will be not quite such a big job, and even if they don’t get it all finished by the deadline, if they have made a good start it will save significant amounts of money when the consultant comes in to help finish it off.”
Anna acknowledged that with fresh water farm plans there were still plenty of unknowns.
King Country River Care was waiting to see if it could get some additional funding from the Ministry for the Environment to do more workshops and secure additional resources to support locals to develop their own Freshwater Farm Plans.
