Life below Water with Alison Dewes

Alison Dewes is fourth-generation dairy farmer and a second-generation veterinarian, who has farmed both in Australia and New Zealand. She is fiercely passionate about ecosystem restoration, working with farmers to provided practical solutions and holistic sustainability through her consultancy business, Tipu Whenua.

Tipu Whenua represents the reintegration of life and land in search of new solutions to ensure the future generations survival and wellbeing, and through a ‘one world – one health – one life’ approach, Alison applies a holistic systems thinking lense to all she does.

Through her training as a veterinarian, Alison learned all about diagnostic process, and her passion lay in understanding land and water better, and linking it to human and nature’s health. This led her to study a Masters in Freshwater Ecology and Policy through the University of Waikato, and now she is able to apply her diagnostic skills to catchments and landscapes in her work she does focusing on the mountains to the sea. In 2015, Alison set up her consultancy business, Tipu Whenua, which places great emphasis on the need to work together.

“…the only way that we can have resilient farming is not to work from an industry sector perspective, but to look at the landscape, the whenua, and say, what is the most suitable way to be a good steward for this land? And look at the options of, okay, if it’s got a lot of steep slopes on it, maybe we shouldn’t be running animals on it. Or those river valleys, yes, are more appropriate for a little bit more intensification and saying sheep or beef or running the dairy cows through there. But looking at the landscape, it’s biophysical strengths and weaknesses and developing an integrated land plan. Now, to do that, that means that we have to bring all the sectors together, because you might have forestry, you might have deering, you might have some dry stock, you might have some horticulture on there. And I think we’re just getting to that point where each industry sector has got to work together for farmers that are managing contiguous blocks of land. And I know you just mentioned before your deer and sheep and beef farming from the arable stuff on your farm. So, you got four potentially different enterprises on that one contiguous land block. We can’t have industries working against one another. We’ve all got to be working together. And that really was the theme of Tipu Whenua.”

A lot of Alison’s early years were spent with her father, who was also a veterinarian, in the back of his car, going around farms and treating animals. She never went to kindergarten, but she credits her diagnostic background and her ability to be a holistic, systems thinker from what she learned from her father.

“He’d like to get out the car and look at the animals he was looking at, and he would say and I’ll try and describe what I see, the cows with sore feet or whatever. And then he’d say, look at what’s around them. And then you go, oh, yes, I could see deep and some wet bits on that track. He’d ask me about contours. I’d have to look at the environment. And then he’d ask me about the farmer, how’s the farmer coping with this? So, I was being taught and trained to look at health not as a singular problem in one silo, but as a landscape issue and how it affected everybody that was in that system. And I know this sounds fairytale-ish, but I fully believe that those first five years in the way that I was questioned by my father, trying to get me to see things in a far more holistic way, has now given me the courage to look at catchments in a holistic way and use my diagnostic skills that I learned as a veterinarian and the health understanding how everything does connect as a system.

And interestingly, now we’ve got to start looking at things with a Te Ao Māori lens as well, and it’s really looking at things as systems. Everything is connected, so everything’s come together in the last half century of my life to help me have a far wiser approach to how we do things. That’s probably it. That’s why now I’m trying to deal with things at a catchment scale. So, we’ve got a catchment project here in the coastal Bay of Plenty, which was funded by Jobs for Nature and also community trusts here in Rotorua, dealing with one of the second most degraded catchments in New Zealand, which is down at Pukahina and the Little Waihi Estuary. And there’s 34,000 hectares of land there that runs from the Rotorua Lakes down to the sea. Ironically, probably the wealthiest catchment in New Zealand as well, because there’s a lot of kiwi fruit there, a lot of horticulture, highly intensified land, but one of the worst estuaries in the country as well.”

SDG # 14: Life Below Water

While SDG #14 refers to life below water, it is actually focused on conserving and sustainably using the oceans, marine resources and seas, so it is actually focused on marine water in particular. Some of the targets underneath this goal relate to:

  • Preventing and significantly reducing marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities
  • Sustainably manage and protect marine and coastal ecosystems to avoid adverse impacts
  • Conserving coastal and marine areas

While the goal may be focused on the marine environment, it is of critical importance that we understand that what we do on land has significant impacts on what happens in the oceans, and this is something that Alison is very mindful of in her mountains-to-sea approach. If you think about the pathway of water in a catchment, it starts in the headwaters and flows through its tributaries to its main channel, which eventually will connect with the sea. For Alison, it’s about recognising the knock-on effects within a catchment, and how that impacts the health of humans and nature.

“It’s a good opportunity to describe the one house concept from the mountains to the sea with the catchment that I’m working in. Because if you think about the pathway of water from Rotoiti Lake, Lake Rotoehu that then come out into the catchment midway in the catchment, in the coastal Bay of Plenty, we’ve got very young, volcanic, free-draining soils, pumice, and the water that comes from the lakes, it’s got a little bit of nitrogen in it, for example. But when it’s burst through and springs midway through the catchment, it’s already had quite a lot of leakage. And then it flows to the estuary. So, it’s the water that not only comes from the source to the sea, but also it’s the activities on those young soils that is making its way into the shallow groundwater, which is also making its way to the sea. Down at the estuary, we’ve got high nutrient loads taking some of the essential life support systems for the pipi’s down in the estuary that are needed for human food. That’s a nitrogen one.”

“Everything is connected again and the whole story of one house from mountains to the sea, depending on what activity we’re doing, everything’s got a knock-on effect. We can’t try and fix things by having a massive wetland down just before the estuary. We’ve got to be dealing with things at the source and … we have to get what the causative agent is that’s creating the problem that’s making either the water or the pipi sustainable for human health.”

A key issue on land is that there hasn’t been good monitoring of factors such as nitrates in water, and it is really hard to manage what you don’t measure. Alison has spent a lot of time over the last couple of years monitoring nitrates in different parts of the catchment she is working in, in order to get a better understanding of just how bad things are and what impact this has on things such as shellfish in estuaries.

“So, in the last two years we’ve been doing a lot of monitoring of nitrates at different parts of the catchment, of people’s drinking water and shellfish testing. So now we’ve got a huge repository of evidence to say these things are really bad. And the next step is that I’d like to be looking at things such as Lepto to make its way from the land and the water and the animals right through and be amplified in some of those fish, marine bivalves as well.”

Alison’s take on the biggest challenge facing that Ag sector

Farmers feeling optimistic at the moment, is a key challenge that Alison sees. She emphasises that when we feel like we have a positive journey ahead, something to look forward to, good leadership and support, we are able to innovate really well, and for the next decade we are going to have to be able to innovate.

“I’m confident New Zealand will get through this, but I feel like for the last ten years, sectors have been protecting their patch. And I am really honest that in doing that, industry leaders, probably policies that were made, but industry leaders trying to protect their own space has made it quite unsafe for farmers now because we’ve got so much compliance hitting them but it’s not necessarily meaningful regulation, it’s not necessarily regulation that’s going to have a net gain on the environment. So, I think we are facing a lot of compliance paperwork without the net environmental gain that we need. And we’ve got a lot of farmers feeling very embattled and almost catatonic, whereby they’re not in an innovative space, so they are just wanting to hunker down or get out. And that’s a really big danger because we need our farmers. We need our farmers to be on the land, feeling safe, innovating, and adapting.

So, I suppose that comes back down to people like ourselves that have got the courage and I suppose the safety to be thinking outside the square. So, one thing we are doing at the moment, number of other farmers is experimenting with how we can retire some of our steep land at really low cost into natives. Because that’s a challenge I find in my recent work in the catchment we’ve got 6000 hectares of steep land that needs to be retired from pasture to exotics or natives. And a lot of farmers do want to go to natives, but at $30,000 a hectare, they’re not going to do it. We’re trying to get that cost down to about $6,000 a hectare to restore steep hillsides and vulnerable landscapes into natives, which brings that into a more competitive line with exotics. And there’s still a lot of resistance on farm to be planting swathes of exotics on those steep, vulnerable landscapes. So, again, this is about all of us working together, trying to find solutions, that we know are going to work for us as we diversify our landscapes but create more resilient farming systems.”

When it comes to a practical take home action that farmers can do to contribute to sustainability, Alison says there’s no one answer to how we get sustainable with what’s coming.

“So, the take home action, I would say, is start experimenting, start trialling things that are fun and not broad scale, even if it’s just a paddock or a couple of paddocks or a couple of things that you’re trying on your farm or might be around a breeding thing or trying a different animal in the mix or whatever. Start experimenting, because if we’re not starting to innovate and growing our own confidence and courage and doing things differently, I don’t think going to be farming and flipping the script, starting to do something differently is going to be what gives us resilience and hope for the future.”

Listen to Alison’s podcast episode here:

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