Southland farmers have held their environmental compliance steady through a year marked by a damaging wind storm and persistent wet weather, Environment Southland's latest monitoring report shows.

The 2025-26 Compliance Monitoring Report records 1393 on-site dairy discharge consent inspections, with 87 per cent rated fully compliant or low-risk non-compliant. That compares with 88 per cent the previous year.

Council chair Jeremy McPhail said the results showed farmers were putting in the work to manage environmental risks. "It's been a pretty tough year for Southland farmers," he said.

McPhail said a fully staffed compliance team and improved efficiencies had put the council in a better position to meet its consent monitoring requirements, lifting the number of inspections completed and contributing to the strong results.

The report notes there is still room for improvement.

Land use and feed pads

By aligning land-use consent checks with dairy discharge visits, the council completed 554 land-use consent inspections during the year. Of those, 509, or 92 per cent, were fully compliant or low-risk non-compliant.

Staff also inspected 114 feed pads, most of which were fully compliant or had only minor issues.

On the enforcement side, the council led one prosecution that resulted in a conviction and laid charges against two parties over separate incidents, with those proceedings continuing. It issued 13 infringement notices, down from 20 the previous year, while abatement notices rose to 34 from 27.

The year covered by the report included the 23 October 2025 windstorm, one of the worst wind events the region has seen, which tore through Southland and Clutha and left damage that farmers and communities are still working through a year on. Wet conditions in the months that followed added to the pressure on farm systems.

Compliance monitoring is a core part of the regional council's role under the Resource Management Act, and the annual report sets out how it has monitored consents, responded to incidents and enforced the rules during the year.

The dairy discharge programme is the largest single strand of that work, reflecting the scale of dairying in a region that is one of the country's biggest milk producers. Inspections check how effluent from milking sheds and stand-off areas is stored and applied to land, and whether consent conditions are being met.

The full 2025-26 report is published on Environment Southland's website alongside previous years' compliance monitoring reports.