WWU’s Gren Christie crunches the numbers on the effluent produced by local dairy company, BEL Group

Map showing BEL Group Farms, CHB (Source BEL Group)

Some interesting things about cows and people

What goes in must come out.

In the case of dairy cows this works out to be around the same effluent as 14 people.

Source: Bel Group, CHB.

Source: BEL Group, CHB

The number of cows the Bel Group have in Central Hawkes Bay equates to about the same as 113,932 people all doing their business on just 2,573 ha.!

All this with not a port-a-loo in sight.

Concentrated waste is a major cause of water pollution.

For example, take Hastings and Napier districts, in Hawkes Bay.

Hastings district has a population 88,000.

The area of the Hastings district is 522,700 ha [this covers a lot of country side]

Napier district has a population of 118,404

The area of the Napier district is 10,500 ha [mostly city]

New research suggests it takes up to 11,000 litres of water to produce one litre milk. This figure includes the amount of water needed to dilute nitrate pollutants so that receiving waterways remain above water quality standards.

However, since this level of dilution doesn’t occur, the bulk of water used in dairy production remains polluted and unusable by humans.

• 1,000 litres of water is what the cow uses to actually make the milk with.

• About 85% of a litre of milk is water.

• The rest is milk solids. [3,332,328 kgs for the Bel group].

• In processing milk solids, water is evaporated off to leave just the solids.

• Coal is also burned in the drying process, releasing greenhouse gases.

Simply put, it takes massive amounts of water to produce a small amount of milk, which then has the water evaporated out of it, which at the same time helps accelerate climate change. As a bonus, we get polluted waterways and aquifers.

This is what the water consents Hawkes Bay Regional Council has issued to intensive dairy ventures is enabling, while others who would use water more wisely miss out. Still others, namely the Tukituki Water Storage Project group, want to build a hugely expensive (estimated as being as much as $1 billion) environmentally damaging dam to keep this situation from changing.

Hardly what you would call a win/win.

Better to allocate water to those who can do the most with least and have the lightest environmental footprint.