- What to monitor
- Who monitors?
- Land managers’ reasons for monitoring
- Why won’t / don’t land managers monitor ?
Measuring change
Monitoring is well-recognised as an essential part of understanding the effects of management practices on-farm. As noted earlier, farmers carry out a mixture of formal and informal monitoring. While there is an clear recognition of the need for monitoring to be increasingly formalised, and an acceptance of the need for environmental monitoring, there is also a clear understanding that the monitoring requires effort, and will only be continued where benefits can be gained.
Some of the reasons that the farmer group gave for monitoring were:
- Understanding the past (& the present) in order to manage for the future
- Monitoring helps know if practices are sustainable
- Will never have all the facts, but need to identify gaps, inadequacies
- For benchmarking against other similar properties
- To see trends over time
- Small changes can be identified before they become major problems
However, farmers also noted that their monitoring data needs to be able to be audited to ensure that it has credibility. For example, where farmers are collecting land condition data, they are concerned about environmental group views that the farmers will just record what they want to see, not what is there.
Farmers had other concerns about monitoring:
- There is a need for independent processing and storage to ensure confidential, off-farm backup of data
- Regional councils and government shouldn’t necessarily expect to obtain farm business information
- Farmer monitoring systems should be easy to use, yet robust enough for scrutiny
- There is a major risk to long term farmer environmental monitoring if current initiatives fail through lack of ongoing agency support.
- Different types of monitoring (e.g. land, stock etc.) need to be able to be brought together to get an understanding of the whole farm system.
- Monitoring must be made useful.
What to monitor
To fully understand what is happening on the land, farmers wanted to have the ability to monitor the whole system, including:
- farm financial viability
- market information
- stock – quality & quantity
- crops / pasture quality & quantity
- risks of natural hazards
- environment
- soil / land
- water
- vegetation
- farm, regional, national levels of detail
- tourist / visitor impacts (e.g. human waste disposal)
Who monitors?
Researchers, agencies, industry and individual land managers all have roles in collecting formal resource management monitoring data. Monitoring at different levels, and for different purposes, is clearly relevant.
Data collection can often be complementary i.e. farm level monitoring can provide useful input to state of the environment reporting requirements; research monitoring can provide audit and verification for land manager monitoring. What is important is that, where possible, data is compatible so that it can be used by others and so increase understanding, rather than be fragmented and of little value to others.
Land managers’ reasons for monitoring
Land managers give a range of proactive and reactive reasons for monitoring, including:
- compliance with regulations
- "defend the patch"
- peg in the ground – basis on which to compare progress
- benchmark and compare over time
- state of the environment
- ownership of information
- identify changes early and respond
- assist make best use of inputs
All monitoring had to return a benefit (or a perceived benefit, if the objective is long term), otherwise it tended to be dropped. However, there was a strong preference for voluntary monitoring, with coercion and encouragement, if needed to be from the community (e.g. via the local landcare group).
Why won’t / don’t land managers monitor ?
While, philosophically, our farmer group agreed that everyone should want to monitor both environmental and production factors, they noted that even so, there are many reasons why it doesn’t happen easily. These reasons include:
- the purpose / benefit is not clear to many; lack of motivation
- there are costs to collect / analyse / use monitoring data
- it all takes time, and most farmers already have limited spare time
- most don’t have right skills
- environmental monitoring mostly has long term benefits, so it’s often a low priority in short term
- science not related to reality (e.g. organic C soil data – what does it tell you?)
- land managers can only use the data in their own system at present – potential benefit if can they compare with like businesses, natural resource bases etc.
- where monitoring has started it won’t continue if no the land manager can’t identify present or likely future benefits.
Contact for Enquiries
MAF Information Services
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526
Wellington, NEW ZEALAND
Fax: +64 4 894 0721
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