Manawatu River Trip

On November 27th 2015, Sita Venkateswar and PERC organised a trip to several sites along the Manawatu river, where Dr. Mike Joy, Senior Lecturer in Ecology at Massey University explained a range of issues surrounding freshwater ecology and the health of native species of fish that are currently caused by dairy farming in the area.

The trip was attended by numerous academics who had come to Massey for the 40th Annual Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of New Zealand (ASAA/NZ), alongside PERC members and other interested Massey researchers.

The locations visited included the Horseshoe Bend Recreational Reserve, a popular swimming spot, where Dr. Joy discussed some of the issues surrounding water quality in the Manawatu and NZ, and how this impacts on the health of the nonhuman assemblage of NZ-based life as well as restricting the ability of humans to safely swim in many of NZ’s streams and rivers.

From there the tour party moved on to see a stream that feeds into the Manawatu river which runs through land used for dairy farming, where Dr. Joy explained how the farm runoff and concentrated cow urine was the major factor in the Manawatu river scoring by far the worst river in a global test for changes in oxygen levels.

Finally, the group visited a property in the hills above Shannon, which is home to a river free from dairy-related pollution where Dr Joy demonstrated how his team have found ingenious ways of locating bottom-dwelling native NZ fish species, and the assorted researchers met some of the stream’s inhabitants.

Overall the visit provided a series of fascinating and frightening insights into how human agricultural activity and the socio-political system that supports it is currently having a devastating impact upon the indigenous nonhuman inhabitants of New Zealand.