A catchment restoration project in the Marlborough Sounds is bringing a farming community together to tackle water quality issues and achieve wider conservation goals

A catchment restoration project in the Marlborough Sounds is bringing a farming community together to tackle water quality issues and achieve wider conservation goals.

The Te Hoiere Project seeks to improve freshwater quality and biodiversity and be a leading example of community-driven environmental restoration.

Karen Morrison's been the project's Linkwater catchment coordinator for three years.

She runs a small dairy farm with her parents, Nigel and Christine. They milk about 220 cows.

Nigel has lived all his life on the property his dad bought in 1950.

"He got the original part of the farm as a rehab farm, as a returned serviceman."

Back then, Nigel says, when developing land a tree would be cut down if it was in the way.

But now he reckons his dad would give them and the Te Hoiere Project, a nod of approval.

"Initially he'd say, 'What are you doing boy?' but yeah, I think if he could see where it's coming from he would be quite proud of it."

Karen has done a great job of motivating local farmers and getting them to commit to the project.

"There are six farms here that are now involved, and initially we decided that we wanted to do some baseline water monitoring to see what the quality was like," she says.

Learning about the health of their waterways gave the farmers a solid starting point to work from.

Karen said some nitrate and E.coli contamination was picked up in the results, but they discovered that it wasn't all from farmland.

"There's a lot of nitrates coming out of the gorse and broom in the forests ... and some of the E.coli is from the deer and the pigs that play in our waterways."

Since then, they've worked together as a group, to sort out what the best way forward is, to improve environmental outcomes.

"There's been waterways fenced off, which we've had funding through the project for, there's a lot of native planting gone in, there's been funding for that too, and most of us have released dung beetles as well. So that was all at the start, and we've now just continued doing that sort of work."

The beetles, which are also subsidised, are known to rapidly break down dung, reducing the time that it is present on the pasture surface, and increasing the turnover of available grazing area.

Karen said it will take at least five years before they'll see any significant results…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details