Plantain - a promising animal feed to improve water quality. Photo / Brad Hanson
Plantain - a promising animal feed to improve water quality. Photo / Brad Hanson
A project initiated to help local farmers adopt plantain on their farms is also showing promise in improving waterways.
Stakeholders, including farmers and iwi had the opportunity to hear about progress on the Tararua Plantain project at the DairyNZ water quality field day in Norsewood this week.
DairyNZ's Francesca Bennett with plantain. Photo / Brad Hanson
The project, ledby Dairy NZ and supported by the Ministry for Primary Industries, was initiated in the 2018-19 season.
The field day was hosted at one of the whare constructed under Tu Te Manawa funded by the Ministry for the Environment's Te Mana o te Wai fund and part of the Manawatū River Leaders' Accord.
Hone Morris, Adam Duker and Tararua District Council mayor Tracey Collis beside one of eight whare or educational kiosks constructed under Tū Te Manawa. Photo / Leanne Warr
Hone Morris of the Te Kāuru Hapū Collective welcomed guests to the field day by talking about the connection to the land.
"We say in Māori: 'the language is in the land and the land is in the language'. You farmers might realise you have that connection to the land."
He said the area was once all bush but once the Scandinavians settled the area they "gave it a good hiding".
There had been some planting done in 2013 and the collective was now seeing the result of that.
Morris said the Tu Te Manawa plan saw eight whare, or kiosks, erected along the length of the Manawatū River.
He said children from schools would come out and learn the history, then go down to the river to do a bit of monitoring, count specimens and learn how to look after the river.
"We're hoping that Te Kāuru can assist farmers and people who work on the land to give it a Māori perspective. It would be nice to be able to merge western science and tangata whenua knowledge."
Tararua District Council mayor Tracey Collis said she had been able to see the whare constructed throughout the district through her term as mayor.
She said when she first came out to the farm, the plantings had been very small and she'd been able to watch the change.
Mavis Mullins acknowledged the farmers who were a big part of the project. Photo / Leanne Warr
Mavis Mullins, chairwoman of the plantain project, acknowledged the families who had been involved with the project all the way through.
She said they'd had help from industry experts as well as Fonterra, Horizons Regional Council, Dairy NZ and "a whole group of amazing farming partners who've put their hands up to say we'll have a play around and see what we can do with plantain to make sure that if this thing does go, we have systems".
Mullins said the science told them it really worked.
"So it's gone not from just plantain as a pasture, as a forage to mitigate end loss, but now to the bubbling brook that we hear. It's about water quality."
Minister and MP for Agriculture Damien O'Connor said the heart of the project was environmental protection.
Hone Morris, Adam Duker and Tararua District Council mayor Tracey Collis beside one of eight whare or educational kiosks constructed under Tū Te Manawa. Photo / Leanne Warr
"People in the market are talking about emissions, they're talking about sustainability and about a better world, frightened almost by what is coming at us through climate change, biodiversity loss and all those things but if you live in a big city, you have no idea what you can do about that."
He said it was acknowledged that some of the practices needed to be improved.
"A lot of the bush has gone, we've protected some of it thankfully and then we've intensified our farming systems. Then with a bit of scientific knowledge we've worked out the impacts of that."
The Government was assisting with projects like the plantain project "to ensure that what we say is what we do", O'Connor said.
"We do need to ensure we have good water quality. We have to show that we have good farm practice. Plantain's one of the tools and we need to develop many more."
Plantain was showing "great promise" in reducing nitrate leaching, which improved waterways, according to DairyNZ.
Project manager Adam Duker showed the waterway monitoring programme to those present.
He said while Horizons had its own monitoring programme, what dairy farmers had done was effectively double that.
About 18 months of data had been collected on water quality parameters.
"Not only are we making the changes on-farm in terms of environmental programmes, we're also interested in wanting to know the state of the waterways throughout Tararua and also be able to then track the change through water quality monitoring."
Adam Duker talks about the waterway monitoring programme and explains the data on the board. Photo / Leanne Warr
The board showed a map of the district with data recording the Macroinvertebrate Community Index as an indicator of stream health.
Macroinverterbrates such as insects, worms and snails were highly sensitive to environmental changes and their population numbers changed in parallel with water quality.
Duker said the Tararua sites only showed two years of data and five years of data were required to get a median score, which would provide a better reflection of the impact of environmental changes.
