Waiora : Water is Life Research

Notes taken from an interview with Mike Joy from the Breakfast Show Channel 1 (government owned station) that was failed to be published on their website, 28th April 2017.

Dairy herds up 69% in twenty years. 'Dairy isn't solely to blame. What else is?' - News anchor.

'This is just them politic-ing, what they try and do is to make it out like its an urban and pastoral issue. Our urban rivers make up 0.8% of all of our rivers in NZ, while farming is 40%. Its just a mirage to take the emphasis off the real problem that is intensification. '

'The secretary for the environment says In terms of cow numbers, we can't back it up with evidence.' -News anchor.

'Thats just unbelievably wrong, 70% of all of the sites have got worse for nitrogen. What they neglect to tell us is that 72% of pastoral rivers have got worse. The trend is worse over 20 years. Look at the map of the country where the high nitrogen levels are in rivers and it overlays with the dairy farming areas of NZ. '

'Its a huge industry that doesn't pay its costs. Nobody talks about the money its costing us to stop it. Taxpayers are paying millions of dollars such as at Lake Taupo and Lake Rotorua, we are currently paying farmers $400 a kg of nitrogen leech to not farm. 14 mil dollars to stop 100 tonnes of nitrogen getting in lake rotorua. As tax payers to stop farmers from polluting while at the same time we are subsidising through this massive irrigation fund we have the intensification of other parts of the country. If farmers were smart here they could take the money to intensify knowing in the future not to do it again, its a scam and we have to stop it.' - Dr. Mike Joy, lecturer at Victoria University.