Biodiversity brought to Fonterra farms

'Farming with Native Biodiversity' is a 20-month project coordinated by the NZ Landcare Trust and funded by the National Bioheritage Science Challenge, Living Water, Silver Fern Farms and the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI).

Protecting and restoring native biodiversity on farms provides clean water, shelter, shade, carbon sequestration, drought resilience and other benefits of a healthy ecosystem.

The Living Water partnership has identified that the biggest barriers to the protection and restoration of biodiversity on farms is limited access to advice and ecological expertise, along with the cost of preparing restoration plans.

"There is widespred interest from farming communities and farm advisors to protect and restore native biodiversity on farms, though expert advice is hard to come by and costly," says Trish Kirkland-Smith, Fonterra's head of environmental partnerships.

Development of a farm biodiversity restoration and management plan can cost between $5,000 - $10,000, with additional costs for monitoring.

Across 25,000 pastoral farms in New Zealand, this is over $125 million for the planning alone.

"This new partnership project trials a more cost-effective way of providing expert advice to the sector, working with over 60 sheep and beef and dairy farms to develop biodiversity plans and implement biodiversity management, then sharing the results with 6,000 more sheep and beef farms and 9,000 dairy farms.

"There is widespread interest from farming communities and farm advisors to protect and restore native biodiversity on farms, though expert advice is hard to come by and costly."

The expected outcome of the project is that farmers adopt biodiversity objectives into their Farm Environment Plans and support wider catchment biodiversity goals in the process.

For Fonterra suppliers, these biodiversity plans will become a part of their existing Farm Environmental Plans, which Fonterra provides to farmer owners free of charge.