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

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

Chairman of the Regional Council's Operations, Monitoring and Regulation Committee Malcolm Whitaker said while the results were disappointing, the council recognised that there were many farmers in the region who were working hard to make sure they were meeting their consent conditions 365 days a year.

"We congratulate those farmers who are doing a good job, especially those in the P?p?moa/Pongakawa/Matat? area, and the Rangit?iki/Tarawera catchments who had the lowest levels of significant non-compliance," Mr Whitaker said.

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

Bay of Plenty Regional 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.

Mr Whitaker said the monitoring criteria for dairy effluent compliance was the same for all regional councils.

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