Cleaning up Waterways with the Landcare Trust

Small rural communities are getting serious about streams and finding strength in numbers as they rise to the challenge of cleaning up waterways.

Read about the work being done in the Aorere catchment of Golden Bay under the guidance of RWNZ member and Landcare Trust Co-ordinator for Nelson and Marlborough, Barbara Stuart.

Barbara is full of praise for the support of Rural Women NZ members in the region.

“The Rai Valley Rural Women are absolute Trojans in working on water quality and we’ve had great support from Bainham as well.”

Barbara’s role is to support private landowners in sustainable land management, working with communities where water quality problems have been shown to exist.

“Our job is to help farmers deal with that.  We like our farmers to be the leaders, so they commissioned their own scientific reports and together they all sat around and decided how to deal with it.  It’s a bottom up approach, working with land owners and land care groups to help them to resolve their own industry issues.”

The three key messages being promoted by the Trust are that livestock needs to be kept out of water through fencing systems; there needs to be sufficient effluent storage capacity, with councils pushing for two to three months, and the effluent should be spread on the land at low rates when the soil can take it up to capture the nutrients, thus saving the farmer money.”

Rural Women NZ is a trustee of the Landcare Trust. 

In May 2013, Landcare Trust CEO, Nick Edgar, took part in a workshop in Burlington, Vermont called, Managing Agricultural Nonpoint Source Pollution: A New Zealand – Vermont Initiative to Share Experiences. Read the thank you note from NZ Ambassador to the U.S. by downloading it here.