Dairy News April 30, 2013
6 // news
Co-op issues heads up on monitoring water intakes GARETH GILLATT
ALL FONTERRA suppliers must
be monitoring water intakes by 2020 regardless of their location, a Fonterra sustainability advisor told a DairyNZ effluent system field day last week. Kim Windlebourne addressed farmers on a property near Whangarei as part of a DairyNZ farm tour looking at the handling and disposal of effluent. He advised farmers that by 2020 they would need to record all water used on their property regardless of where they were or whether they drew water from a stream, bore or urban supply. The Fonterra programme is aligned to the dairy industry’s Sustainable Dairying: Water Accord objectives which aim to improve the quality and quantity of the country’s fresh water resources. The cooperative is consid-
ering steps to put suppliers at the front of the queue for any benefits monitoring offers, says Windlebourne. “It’s not about charging farmers, it’s all about finding excessive use on relevant farms.” He says the need for water monitoring has been especially apparent during the drought this year. “You go onto one guy’s farm and the only water he’s got is an alkathene pipe running into a creek. Then you go upstream a bit and his neighbor has heaps of water. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work out what happened. “It’s not about stopping accessing water, it’s about making sure everyone has access to it, and finding ways to put more dollars into farmers’ pockets. How can you maintain that production and increase profits by altering your inputs.” While most farmers are unlikely to be monitoring water use, those in
Waikato and Canterbury are monitoring water levels. Windlebourne says these farmers are now able to use this information to prevent water loss before it becomes a big problem. “This will be a useful weapon in the farmer’s pocket. If there’s a water leak half the size of a nail you’re loosing half a million litres of water a month – 14,000 litres of water a day, that’s enough for 140 cows a day.” Windlebourne says those losses become even more significant on smaller operations where the smallest input cost change or production change can have big impacts. “On smaller 140 cow dairy farms the smallest efficiency can have a big impact on the bottom line so I think water meters will have a huge impact for them.” Windlebourne says he experienced this first hand in Ngatea when working as a contract milker on a farm using a town water supply.
Kim Windlebourne, Fonterra sustainability advisor.
“They didn’t worry about how much water we were using; what they were concerned with was leaks. When you
checked the readings in the morning and you saw the water use readings way up you knew what had happened.”