Water used to feed stock drinking troughs was measured by an electronic monitoring system, which sends an alert if water use is higher than usual, indicating a leak.

The system is connected to flow meters that measure how much water goes to each paddock or drinking trough.

The meters which are connected to an electronic system also take the guess work out of finding leaks.

Using less water also made financial sense. Pumping less water used less electricity, Slattery said.

“It’s about making sure that the total water usage is reduced while also increasing the water quality,” she said.

Farm effluent is used as fertiliser on grass, reducing the amount of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser needed, Slattery said.

According to Dairy NZ effluent includes liquids, sludge, slurries and solids from cow dung and urine that are captured and stored so they don’t enter waterways.

“The more work we do today, the easier it is tomorrow. We try and follow that kind of thinking and front foot things, so we can enjoy better water quality in future,” Slattery said.

Nitrogen fertiliser was not applied uniformly across the whole farm, but was only applied when, for example, soil moisture and temperature was right for grass to take up fertiliser efficiently and grow better, she said.

When grass took up the maximum amount of fertiliser at the right growth stage, it also meant less nitrate leached into the environment.

Soil testing was done in each paddock to see how much fertiliser or specific nutrients soils lacked.

With soil test results in-hand only the exact amount of fertiliser that soils and grass needed was applied.

As an accountant it made financial sense to Slattery to use only what was needed, especially at a time when the cost to farm has increased significantly and farmers needed to save costs wherever they could.

Good fencing could stop runoff from cow dung and urine reaching waterways.

Areas on the farm that were high risk for leaching were fenced off first and gave the farm easy “water quality wins”, she said.

Areas that don’t grow much grass were also fenced of.

“It’s a low hanging fruit,” she said.

Slattery said local farmer catchment groups had started to measure water quality reports that were publicly available, and had seen improvements which would continue as farmers became more focused on better practices.

She believed there was a lag effect for the environment to respond, with changes made on farms only showing weeks or months later.

DairyNZ sustainable dairy general manager Dr David Burger said members of Dairy Environment Leaders were farmers who were committed to sharing their experience with other farmers, to encourage and grow more positive environmental practices.

The group’s work included researching mitigation tools, such as constructing wetlands on farms to treat contaminants before they enter waterways, Burger said.

Nationally the group worked with research organisations to identify water quality issues at a catchment level and then uses scientific methods to prioritise on-farm actions that lead to water quality improvements, he said.