Launched in July 2013, the Water Accord was a voluntary dairy industry commitment to improving water quality. Led by industry body DairyNZ, the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand (DCANZ) and dairy companies, it covers all dairy farmers, no matter where they are located or what dairy company they supply.
The One Year On report by DairyNZ’s environmental policy manager, Dr Mike Scarsbrook, with assistance from dairy company staff and other sector bodies, said progress had been made on stock exclusion from waterways, effluent and riparian management and accreditation of expert advisers.
The areas identified as needing more work by the industry were nutrient management data collection, effluent compliance in some regions and data collation and verification systems across all dairy companies.
“We’ve made meaningful progress in our first year of operation and we’d like to thank farmers for all the work they have done. There is still a lot more to do but there are lots of examples where farmers are making a real contribution to improving water quality,” Scarsbrook said.
“We need to put a greater focus on nutrient management data collection at the farm level and on how to benchmark and deliver useful information back to farmers. The dairy companies are going to lead a review of how we collect information across the industry to ensure we can gather more data and lift the level of reporting from farms.
“We’ve achieved some but not all our targets for this first year so we need to keep working on all the initiatives we have underway. We’ve got new EnviroReady field days for farmers, a Warrant of Fitness programme for effluent systems and 15 local projects focused on waterways. We are committed to proactive environmental stewardship.”
The independently audited report said significant steps had been made in improving water quality with every dairy company having an assessment programme in place for new conversions that set out environmental and other requirements that had to be met before milk supply could start from a new dairy farm.
Dairy companies also had programmes in place to assess the effluent systems of suppliers on a three-yearly basis, with several companies assessing every farm every year. A recent DairyNZ survey of 1000 dairy farmers showed that 69% of them had either invested in an effluent system upgrade in the last 12 months or were planning to in the next 12 months.
For a copy of the One Year On report including a highlights summary, go to www.dairyatwork.co.nz.
