This interactive infographic is a compilation of actions to decrease the loss of contaminants from agricultural land.
Mitigation actions can be filtered by any of five critical issues (nitrogen, phosphorus, E.coli, sediment and GHGs). They can also be filtered by farm system (deer, dairy, drystock, arable, horitculture).
Selecting both a farm type and issue filter enables a pop-up for each action containing a short description and data on co-benefits, factors that may limit application, and potential standard measurements.
These mitigations allow you to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus losses from your farm by 20% to 50%, without costing more than 2%–10% of farm earnings before interest and tax.
In some areas, some farm systems may not meet water quality goals, even with the right mitigations in the right place. Before investing heavily in mitigations, it’s worth reconsidering what your land is most suitable to produce. Our Land Use Opportunities research is developing tools that will help.
Source: Demonstrating efficacy of rural land management actions to improve water quality - How can we quantify what actions have been done? (Journal of Environmental Management, March 2020)
A strategy for optimizing catchment management actions to stressor–response relationships in freshwaters (Ecosphere, October 2018)
Mitigating the impacts of pastoral livestock farming on New Zealand's water quality III: What could be achieved by 2035? (NZ Journal of Agricultural Research, 2021)
Projects which produced this output