Fonterra–Department of Conservation Living Water Partnership (New Zealand)

In 2013, Fonterra — New Zealand's dairy farmer-owned co-operative and the country's largest company — signed a 10-year, NZ$20 million partnership with the Department of Conservation (DOC) called Living Water / Whakaora Te Waimāori. The programme targeted five priority dairy catchments chosen for their freshwater and biodiversity significance: the Wairua River (Northland), Pūkorokoro-Miranda shorebird habitat (Hauraki), the Areare–Ruatuna–Rotomānuka lakes (Waikato), the Ararira River (Canterbury) and the Awarua–Waituna Lagoon (Southland), covering roughly 35,000 hectares of land.

Over the decade the partnership ran 70 projects and 44 on-farm and catchment trials — sediment traps, floating wetlands, GIS mapping tools and riparian fencing among them — of which nine were subsequently scaled up and adopted outside the original trial catchments. By the partnership's conclusion, DOC and Fonterra reported 5,213 hectares enhanced through protection, restoration and pest control, and by 2021, 72% of Fonterra suppliers farming in the five catchments had adopted Farm Environment Plans, compared with 53% nationally.

The partnership formally ended in 2023, with results folded into Fonterra's ongoing Sustainable Catchments programme and DOC's regional freshwater work. Because Living Water was a co-funded advisory and trial programme rather than a per-hectare payment scheme, and measured water-quality outcomes (e.g., nitrate or E. coli trends) were not consistently published catchment-by-catchment, its evidence rests mainly on activity and uptake metrics (hectares, trials, farmer plan adoption) rather than independently verified environmental outcomes.

Read the full analysis: https://www.fonterra.com/nz/en/our-stories/articles/living-water-new-approaches-delivering-results.html