The Bay of Plenty Regional Council is planning to continue to work with the dairy industry to improve dairy effluent compliance levels following recent monitoring.

As part of the council's routine compliance monitoring programme, 312 dairy farms were visited in late 2011, with 67 per cent (208 farms) found to be meeting all conditions in their consents. This is down from 72 per cent the previous year.

The council's operations, monitoring and regulation committee chairman, Malcolm Whitaker, says while the results are disappointing, the council recognises there are many farmers in the region who were working hard to make sure they were meeting their consent conditions.

'We congratulate those farmers who are doing a good job, especially those in the Papamoa/Pongakawa/Matata area, and the Rangitaiki/Tarawera catchments who had the lowest levels of significant non-compliance.

'We've been and will continue to work closely with a Bay of Plenty Dairy Stakeholders working group, which includes representatives from Federated Farmers, DairyNZ, Fonterra and Open Country Dairies, to try to increase the region's dairy effluent compliance levels.”

Council staff inspected all aspects of the effluent treatment and/or disposal systems during their visits.

This included inspecting the location of stormwater diversion systems, checking effluent sumps, pipeworks, ponds, irrigation systems and checking for obvious signs of seepage or overflows from effluent ponds into waterways.

Malcolm says the monitoring criteria for dairy effluent compliance was the same for all regional councils.

He says staff will be taking the results of this season's monitoring back to the Bay of Plenty Dairy Stakeholders Group to discuss in a meeting in April.