GORE, New Zealand – On a damp, grey day, a small line formed at the entrance to a church in Gore, a rural town in New Zealand’s Southland region. Bright yellow banners hung from the building’s brick exterior, while informative posters featuring cartoons of cows decorated the walls, hung by a group of volunteers who welcomed the attendees with tea and cookies. One by one, area residents filed in, clutching bottles of water they’d collected at home. They’d come to check the nitrate levels in their drinking supply, after hearing news that elevated readings could be linked to serious health problems.
It was the latest in a series of local water-testing events, hosted around the country by Greenpeace in conjunction with local scientists. Southland, the southernmost part of New Zealand’s South Island, has some of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the country.
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The area is largely farmland – predominantly dairy farms. It’s a reflection of the explosive growth of the dairy industry here, which has in the past 30 years completely reshaped the landscape. The number of dairy cows in the country has almost doubled since the 1990s to today’s total of roughly 5 million. Milk products are now New Zealand’s largest export, and are being shipped to countries including China.
But recent research suggests there are serious side effects from this intensive dairy farming – specifically from nitrate contamination, where the compound of nitrogen and oxygen flows into the ground from cow urine and fertilisers and seeps into the water supply.
Nitrate levels have been regulated for decades, ever since high levels in drinking water were found to cause health problems such as “blue baby syndrome,” a sometimes fatal condition in which babies don’t get enough oxygen and turn blue. But new data suggests that even lower levels – which are still legal – are linked to other medical problems.
A 2018 Danish study found a link between nitrates in drinking water and increased levels of bowel cancer, while in 2021, researchers at Stanford found that higher levels of nitrates in drinking water are associated with increased rates of preterm birth.
New Zealand is now seeing some of the highest cases of bowel cancer in the world, which scientists say can be directly linked to nitrates. Over 3,000 New Zealanders are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year, and some 1,200 die of the disease annually. It is now estimated that 1 in every 18 New Zealanders will develop bowel cancer in their lifetime.
Despite New Zealand’s international image as a pristine environmental destination and a haven for wildlife, the country now has some of the most polluted water in the developed world. The government’s own data has found that 45 percent of the country’s rivers are unswimmable and up to 95 percent of the rivers in rural areas are contaminated, while a study found 60 percent of the country’s freshwater sources carry concerning levels of nitrates.
Dairy cow urine is one of the biggest sources of this pollution, a challenge when the industry is one of the country’s most powerful.
Steve Abel, a veteran environmental activist and Green Party candidate, has facilitated many of these water testing events, and sits down with residents to help them interpret their results.
“If we want to have safe drinking water, we need to farm differently,” Abel told VICE News. “Dairy is king in New Zealand, you know, it has a huge power and influence on politics, on culture, on the economy. And people are reluctant to speak out against it.”
Jane Lawrence, a local sheep and deer farmer, said the topic of dairy pollution is taboo in her community, where she’s a teacher, as many of her students’ families are farmers. She and her family live across the road from a dairy farm, and she visited the water testing event because her husband was concerned about the risks of high nitrate levels. Their water test showed nitrate contamination of 5.95 mg/L – well within the country’s legal guidelines, but at a level the Stanford study found to be correlated with premature birth.
“Our first son was eight weeks premature when he was born, and perhaps that had something to do with the high nitrates,” Lawrence told VICE News. “It’s really alarming.”
Mark McCall, who travelled 45 minutes to the centre to have his water tested, was concerned to see a level of 7.1 mg/L of nitrates in his drinking water; more than 7 times higher than what the majority of New Zealanders consume.
“My father passed away from bowel cancer, so being a hereditary disease, it’s something that concerns me,” he said. “I’m now going to go away and screen myself. We live in a very rural area and we’re surrounded by dairy farms, so we’re going to do some homework about whether we can put in a filter system that’s more effective than the one we already have.”
With farming so vital to New Zealand’s economy and ingrained in the fabric of the country, its impact on the environment brings up complex and existential questions – not least of which for Indigenous communities. George Davis, a Māori leader, known as an ariki, says the quality of water has changed drastically since he was a child.
“Water is life; life is water,” he said. “Our people used to come and fish here. They gather food in the ocean and live off the land.
“Now, I wouldn’t drink the water. You put your hand in and you end up getting a rash, that’s how bad it is… we’re not able to feed our next generation or teach them how to fish or be self-sustainable. And if we’re not able to come in and practice traditionally what our ancestors have been doing for thousands of years, then we’ll become disconnected. We won’t know who we are.”
VICE News went with Abel to visit Chris and Christine MacLean, a sheep-farming couple in Balfour, just outside Southland. Chris was diagnosed with bowel cancer three years ago. They have high nitrate levels in their water, and only found this out recently after having their supply tested, which has made the couple consider his diagnosis in a new light.
“It could be a possible cause why I got it, but then they say red meat too, don’t they?” Chris said. “It’s just another problem.”
He added: “I was surprised by the water results, I mean my sheep won’t drink certain water, so maybe that was a sign? This used to be a dairy farm before we lived on the property.”
Beyond water contamination issues, the dairy industry is also a major contributor to climate pollution: agriculture is responsible for half of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
In recent years, the government has recognised the urgent need to make changes, most controversially approving a “burp tax,” which will make New Zealand the first country in the world to charge farmers for their animals’ emissions. The measure was introduced under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as part of an ambitious plan to go carbon neutral, and she set aggressive targets to achieve it, including cutting methane emissions from agriculture by 10 percent by 2030, and by up to 47 percent by 2050.
Farmers have been protesting the idea since it was announced, echoing the last time they pushed back on a government attempt to crack down on agriculture, 20 years ago. Back then, they led a revolt against a similar measure, dubbed the “fart tax,” until it was withdrawn.
Andrew Hoggard, a third-generation dairy farmer in Kiwitea, in the south of the North Island, said his first reaction to hearing the government’s plan was “bugger off.”
Hoggard, who until May was the President of New Zealand’s Federated Farmers, has been one of the loudest voices against the measure. He says he’d have to reduce his herd by 10 percent to comply with the new law – which would mean a correlating reduction in revenue.
He was much more optimistic about the government’s other efforts to reduce dairy farming’s environmental footprint – such as its funding of scientific advancements to lower pollution. Working with a half dozen of the country’s largest dairy companies, the government is funding a series of trials, from genetically engineered grasses that have been found to lead to lower methane emissions in the animals that eat them, to a study on whether climate-friendlier herds can be bred by testing methane emissions from different bulls.
If tangible solutions emerge to alleviate the water and air pollution caused by livestock, the dairy farmers VICE News spoke with said they’d quickly embrace them. Even resistance to the so-called burp tax – set to take effect in 2025 – has dwindled; it’s now publicly supported by the country’s largest dairy company, Fonterra, which has committed to helping New Zealand achieve its net-zero goals.
Experts say the solutions can’t come quickly enough.
When asked how urgently the country’s cow problem needs to be solved, New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Center’s chief scientist Harry Clark was plain: “Yesterday, if possible,” he told VICE News. “But we have to be practical.”
“A billion people get their livelihood from animal production. You can’t stop that overnight because you create another problem…We have to address the urgent problems of environmental integrity while at the same time paying attention to the social implications of whatever we do.”
Additional reporting by Maeva Bambuck
