News and media
Fonterra backs TA
Pic: Mark Taylor, Waikato Times
Left to right: Conservation Volunteers NZ Team Leader Antony O'Brien, Sarah Thain, Claire Tyczynsxa, and Astrid Becker lift TA across bog on a Waikato dairy farm.
Fonterra has adopted Te Araroa into its new “Catchment Care” programme in the Waikato.
The dairy giant recently launched the new programme to work on large conservation projects including rehabilitation of the Waikato’s polluted shallow lakes. It commissioned Conservation Volunteers New Zealand (CVNZ) to provide the work teams, with a brief to bring in local volunteers also.
Now the dairy company has accepted Te Araroa as a project that will be supported under the Catchment Care programme. The first CVNZ teams have already worked to put the trail across a paper road west of Hamilton. The paper road runs across a Fonterra farm, so is seen as a suitable start-point for a Te Araroa brief whose parameters are still under negotiation.
The aim is not just to lay the track in, but to plant out the trail. The chair of Te Araroa Waikato Trust, Margaret Evans, says she wants CVNZ teams to plant kowhai along TA’s corridor across farmland in the Waikato, creating, in its seasonal flowering, a “golden September.”
