Thread: Eugenie Sage wants to Ban Whitebaiting

Farmers are doing their bit, they get grief about dirty dairy etc and to be fair historically there was some truth to that. I remember growing up on a dairy farm and watching the effluent from the yard just running down the drain. However farmers have stepped up and all that is long gone. The change in the water quality of the lower Waikato in the last 30 years has been dramatic, when I was a kid a times over the summer the water would literally stink, to the point you would hesitate to let the gun dog to swim in it let alone yourself.
Now while there is still more sediment in the water than is ideal of which a fair bit of is coming out of the Waipa river( even that is getting better ) it at least is safe to swim in!. If anything the whitebait catches from what the oldtimers have told me (one of which was a buyer for the whitebait factory when it was running) have improved. However one thing that has dropped off is the smelt or parorai (spelling) runs.