Dairy corporations have poisoned the well in Canterbury

Notes for my presentation to the Canterbury Regional Council on September 9 2026

My name is Russel Norman, I am the Executive Director of Greenpeace Aotearoa, a role I have held for the last ten years. Prior to that I was Co-Leader of the Green Party for ten years. In both of those roles, over the last 20 years, I have had a focus on freshwater, with a particular focus on Canterbury.

You’ve asked me here to provide information to inform your response to the Nitrate Emergency declaration that Canterbury Regional Council made about one year ago. I’m speaking to you as elected councillors, hence I’ve approached this session from a values perspective as well as a science perspective.

The reason why Greenpeace is here today, bookended on the one side by the water regulator and the other by the health department, is because of our extensive work on testing nitrates in drinking water.

But the question you may ask quite legitimately is why did Greenpeace, an environmental campaigning organisation, end up testing nitrates in drinking water in the first place? So I wanted to provide some context.

I first started working on freshwater issues about 20 years ago because of my concern with the collapse of many of our freshwater ecosystems. Rivers and lakes are special places because they are usually the last of the wild places left on the lowlands, and the last of the commons left on the plains. Sure, we have conservation land in the high country but, on the lowlands and the plains, where we actually live, it is usually in and around rivers that some wilderness survives and the rivers banks are open to everyone to visit, they are commons. 

But once those rivers are drained for irrigation and they are filled with nitrate pollution and algae, they are no longer wild because most of the wildlife is gone, and they are no longer really commons, because no one wants to go there anyway. They become privatised drains.

I was appalled by this and started campaigning to protect rivers and lakes. I travelled the country on a dirty rivers tour meeting up with people who loved the rivers and lakes of the motu and wanted to save them.

Over time it became abundantly clear to me that rivers were being destroyed by over-abstraction for irrigation and polluted by the overgrowth in dairy cow numbers. Twenty years ago the dairy herd was growing quickly and it was clear where it was headed.

Even then the science was straightforward, more dairy cows, more irrigation, more synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, leading to more pollution of rivers, lakes and aquifers. It’s hardly rocket science, and there is a tonne of peer reviewed science to back it up. I presented the science to the annual meeting of Federated Farmers, the Dairy NZ Board, the South Island Dairy Event, Fonterra managers, and so many other agribusiness groups.  

But it was very much as Upton Sinclair observed long ago “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” 

Then I realised that it wasn’t just that ecosystems were being wiped out, but that subcultures of society were being slowly eliminated. The fly fishers and the kayakers could no longer find a fish or paddle a river without risk of sickness. Those two defining recreational users, those two cultures, have been largely driven to extinction in many parts of Canterbury today. I worked alongside Fish and Game to draw attention to this – until the current government changed the law to block Fish and Game’s advocacy for protecting rivers.

And then there are iwi and hapu. Listening to the stories of Ngāi Tahu from across the rohe telling their stories about loss of rivers, loss of food gathering sites, loss of tuna, and perhaps most of all loss of identity. I am the river and the river is me. The Ngāi Tahu court case seeking co-governance of rivers is not an attempt to gain power, it is an attempt to protect te taiao, and an attempt to protect identity.

And, after I started at Greenpeace about a decade ago, it became clear that there was another group on the frontlines of the water wars and that was rural people, not just Māori but Pākehā rural people. 

Rural people are the most exposed to dairy industry contamination in their drinking water, especially if they are on their own private bore. The pollution flows from the cows into the aquifers and rivers from which rural people get their drinking water and it comes out of their kitchen taps.

But no one was offering ordinary rural people testing for their drinking water.

Which was odd, when you consider that the narrative from agribusiness lobby groups is that they are doing their lobbying to help ordinary rural people, but they never lobbied for clean drinking water, never lobbied for drinking water testing, and they certainly never provided it for free.

But Greenpeace did. 

Over the last five years we’ve travelled around the country offering free nitrate testing in small rural towns. We’ve set ourselves up in small rural town halls, with a spectrometer and a scientist to oversee it, and ordinary people have queued up in their hundreds. We also set up a mail-in service to meet demand. Nationally we’ve tested around 4000 water samples, and at our town hall testing in Canterbury we’ve tested around 1200, plus the mail in testing. 

And as you well know here it’s not a pretty picture. Denmark has now adopted a maximum acceptable nitrate level for drinking water of 1.3 mg/L, due to colorectal cancer risks, and  much if not most rural Cantabrian private bore water is worse than that.

We wanted to see the national situation so we loaded all the results into a national database, alongside the town water supply results and made it publicly available at https://maps.greenpeace.org/maps/aotearoa/know-your-nitrate/.

Our data on rural people’s private drinking water bores was the first national data set of its kind, and the biggest.

And what it shows is that while the owners of the giant dairy corporations, living in Auckland, Christchurch, Queenstown, Tauranga, have access to clean water with low nitrates, ordinary rural people are exposed to nitrate pollution that will make them sick.

Often rural people find themselves surrounded by dairy companies, and they feel pressured to stay silent about the pollution. Our testing gave those people a chance to see what was really happening and also a chance to speak out. The nitrate emergency declaration by your council was also a brave effort to give those people a voice. 

So I wanted to use my time to hear their voices – the voices of ordinary rural people who don’t own a $15m dairy operation, ordinary rural people who they don’t have Federated Farmers to call up the Minister to lobby on their behalf, ordinary rural people who don’t have Dairy NZ to write pseudo research papers based on on dairy industry data about how farm best practice will solve everything, ordinary rural people who don’t have Fonterra to go to court to try to stop action on clean water. 

This is their story: Cancer Water: The nitrate contamination of rural water supplies in Aotearoa New Zealand

So having heard from ordinary rural people forced to drink dairy industry pollution in their kitchen taps, let me finish on some hard realities that most of us understand.

And, to be clear, none of the people in the video should be thought of necessarily endorsing anything I say here.

We know that the nitrate emergency you declared one year ago is getting worse, as more groundwater wells are increasing in pollution.

We know that adding tens of thousands more dairy cattle onto the Canterbury Plains, as is happening right now, will make water pollution worse.

The idea that we can keep increasing the dairy herd and fertiliser without increasing nitrate pollution is nonsense magical thinking. The industry is arguing that farm best practice will solve the problem but it will not. Industry-defined and industry-audited farm best practice is not serious regulation and it is not a sinking lid on pollution. The industry has a simple goal of growing bigger and bigger and they will produce whatever research is necessary to justify that goal. 

They are just corporations with a singular purpose which is to maximise profit, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as we understand it. The Companies Act requires them to prioritise delivering profits to their owners. All the rest about sustainability etc is just window dressing. Their job is to grow profits. Period.

So what can you do.

Now we all know that central government and the dairy industry lobby has done everything they can to stop Canterbury Regional Council from regulating to protect clean drinking water. They are making it as hard as they possibly can for you to do your job.

Central government, on behalf of the dairy industry, has put a plan-stop in place to stop the regional council from taking further action to protect clean water by updating its regional plan. They have legislated over court decisions that would have restricted diffuse dairy water pollution such as the decisions on section 70 and 107 of the RMA. They have eliminated Te mana o te wai, which required decisions on resource consent applications to prioritise human health ahead of commercial imperatives. They have gutted freshwater farm plans so they are just industry plans. And so on and so on.

So I understand that there are real limits to what you can do.

But there’s still a few things you can do.

First, use your voice, individually and collectively, to keep talking about clean water. Sure the government may eliminate elected regional councils but in the mean time speak out about what is really happening – you are elected to represent the values of your constituents and they value clean water.

Secondly, as others have called for, commission an independent evaluation of drinking water source protections, with the research question: Can existing plans and rules achieve existing limits for drinking water sources? Because so far it’s getting worse. Plans and rules that rely on industry best practice instead of proper limits will not deliver clean drinking water for Cantabrians.

The government has indicated that they plan to kill off elected regional councils. So don’t be afraid to tell the truth you’ve got nothing to lose. 

[I wrote thess notes to guide my presentation, but it is not identical to the presentation which can be found on the ECAN Youtube channel from around 3.06.30]