Nationals in battle to overturn EPA’s ‘mad’ manure rules

The Nationals have backed Victorian farmers in trying to overturn Environmental Protection Authority rules that from July 1 bog farmers down in impractical new regulations.

Farmers say the EPA has failed to recognise decades of work developing standards to manage manure as a valued resource.

THE Victorian Nationals have promised to try to free farmers from being caught up in the Environmental Protection Authority’s new web of green tape, which defines animal manure as industrial waste.

Nationals leader Peter Walsh said “slapping our farmers with onerous paperwork and forcing them to treat a valuable by-product as industrial waste is bureaucracy gone mad.

“There may be a number of different appropriate avenues to go down to lift this additional burden from farmers.

“One is to disallow the changes, but this option is only available after gazettal. We’d have 12 sitting days to put this motion into Parliament”.

The EPA regulations, which are due to come into effect on July 1 establish new “determinations”, defining how farmers store, transport and use manure, including:

A BAN on manure being spread on paddocks grazed by sheep and cattle, rather than adopting the widely accepted industry practice of withholding stock for three weeks.

FARMERS must prepare a Declaration of Use document outlining “any potential harms to human health and environment, and handling requirements”, if the manure contains dead animals, such as chickens in manure taken from a broiler shed.

INFORMATION in the DoU must then be supplied to anyone transporting or receiving a farmers’ animal manure — such as vegetable growers, compost facilities or another livestock producer

ANYONE who receives manure must ensure it is deposited in a dedicated area that provides containment of run-off as far as reasonably practicable.

Last week the EPA held an online briefing on the new determinations, with pig, poultry and dairy farmers, plus compost producers and others lodging more than 150 questions with facilitators.

Victorian Farmers Federation pig group president Tim Kingma said the main concern was the EPA decision to define manure as industrial waste and the lack of recognition of its value and how each industry sector had already spent decades developing standards to manage it.

“As an industry we believe we’re world leading, so we want them to recognise what we’re already doing, not try and reinvent the world.”

Others raised questions such as why does the spreading of animal manure need EPA oversight, especially when the current system “works perfectly well” under the Livestock Production Assurance scheme.

Other farmers had questions on what the regulations and determinations meant for composting manure and mortalities on farm, while others expressed frustration that EPA facilitators ongoing failure in “getting to the point” when answering questions.