What is our water quality?
At that stage, Hedgehope farmers and the wider community did not know, as the only water testing site was in the Makarewa, down from the Hedgehope.
Now, three years on since those initial conversations, the catchment and community is continuing to be proactive and looking at taking the next step in improving their water quality.
Last week, they hosted Agribusiness farm management consultant Deane Carson, who gave his presentation on citizen science.
Citizen science is the collection and analysis of data relating to the natural world by members of the public.
‘‘It’s things farmers can do around the environment.’’
Farmers completed citizen science regularly, through soil testing and the like, Mr Carson said.
What he liked about it was how useful it was and how respected it was by authorities, the Government and others.
Mr Carson took a major interest in citizen science when Southland’s Water and Land Plan was first proposed.
Knowing he would need to be informed to have conversations with his clients, he began looking through the numbers and analysing the data available, he said.
‘‘But also for me, I wanted my own view as to what I thought was good and bad.’’
Mr Carson began looking through Land, Air, Water Aotearoa’s (Lawa) water quality data for Southland over time, at E. coli, nitrogen and so on.
A couple of key notes he took out of the information was to look at both the mean and median.
The water quality data showed the mean in some instances was really high compared with the median, he said.
‘‘It got me back to the thought that we’ve got some outliers that are driving E. coli in the region.’’
This raised the question: how do we find them, how do we discover them?
At the same time there were a whole lot of pressures around ‘‘social licences’’.
As New Zealanders, everything was now referred to as our water and land, and everyone having a right in what farmers did, Mr Carson said.
There had been a lot of misinformation in the public arena, but farmers needed to be informed to tell the real story.
As the former minister for primary industries Nathan Guy put it, the story could not come from suits, but needed to come from the woolsheds and dairy sheds, he said.
Hedgehope Catchment group member Jeanette Topham said this started with the community doing their own citizen science, as Mr Carson had been doing.
Looking at the data Mr Carson had collected, it showed at times the Hedgehope catchment had E. coli levels which were not safe to swim to in, Mrs Topham said.
There could be many causes for this, but wanting to identify them and remedy the situation, the group was looking at investing in its own E. coli testing kit, she said.
‘‘It’s tests that we as farmers can do on our own waterways to actually find out what waterways have an issue.’’
Sometimes the issue was out of the community’s control, but testing would allow them to identify problem areas, she said.
E. coli was also easier to remedy than contamination from other nutrients, as its source was over land, Mrs Topham said.
‘‘It’s about what we can do at a farm level to do something about it.’’