"The two best-performing farms in the trial reduced their water use by roughly half and the others by roughly a third," Wright says. "Data collected at two of the four farms showed that they also managed to cut the effluent volume generated by roughly half."
He says the dairy industry spends many millions of dollars on projects aimed at mitigating adverse environmental effects and improving its image. Yet the trials had proved with just a few simple and cost-effective changes, it was possible to tackle issues related to water extraction and point source effluent management.
"This not only improves environmental performance, but can result in significant reduction in on-farm operating costs."
Wright says central to the trials has been the use of water meters to measure actual use at different points around the dairy, the installation of more water-efficient cleaning nozzles and diverting as much clean stormwater as practicable away from treatment ponds.
Other initiatives included changing from water to electric-driven yard backing gates and using recycled effluent to clean their dairy yard.
One of those trialling — and impressed by — Wright's system is Ken Finlayson, who milks 780 Friesians on his 300ha Ngararatunua dairy farm.
Since moving into a new dairy shed three years ago, he has almost halved his water use, largely though changing nozzles on hoses, the farm dairy bridge and D-gate, by capturing plant wash water and recycling through a yard wash system.
"We're saving about 5.4 million litres of water per dairy season, which equates to usage of about 27 litres per cow per day on average."
Typical standard industry usage is about 70 litres of water per cow per day.
Finlayson says as well as the obvious environmental benefits — it's much easier to be compliant because you're not handling such large volumes of effluent — the fact he would not need to pay for an additional effluent storage pond was worth about $80,000 to him.
"We also save almost 400 hours we don't need to spend irrigating from a tractor-driven pump and there's about 120 times our irrigator doesn't have to be moved so these equate to some big savings in terms of labour and pumping costs."
Finlayson says his key focus when he built his dairy shed about three years was to save labour "but, with a few quite minor changes, it's really been quite dramatic in terms of water savings too".
"Water is a scarce resource and it's only going to become more valuable over time."
Wright says the idea for the effluent reduction project stemmed from his own frustration that co-operative and willing Northland farmers could still find it difficult to comply with resource consent conditions.
"Regional council staff work closely with dairy farmers and both parties are keen to improve the industry's compliance rates in the region and achieve better environmental and economic outcomes."
He's keen for others to follow the lead set by the council and its farmer trial partners.
"I've said many times that on an industry-wide basis, there's a potential to implement similar measures — especially if applied to new dairies during construction — which will not only enhance environmental performance, but also improve financial results by reducing capital, energy and labour costs."
