Fonterra has been working to help our farmers to elevate good farming practice by establishing Farm Environment Plans (FEP) for their operations. Helping our farmers to develop FEPs is one aspect where Fonterra can make a difference to a Healthy Environment and areas such as soil health, water quality, carbon footprint and freshwater biodiversity.

The development of a FEP commences with an on-farm visit to identify priority modules for the farmer, and to gather key data and photos. Each FEP is unique to the farm, identifying areas of existing strength and prioritising improvement actions.

The program is fairly new with FEP development for farmers commencing in 2021. Fonterra is looking to improve the transactional process of the FEP – with an opportunity to integrate the collection of data, generation of a tailored report and implementation of actions into a seamless interface for the user. There is also an opportunity for students to learn more about the technical aspects of the assessment such as carbon calculators, GPS, soil nutrient measures, and leverage technology and innovation to incorporate these tools and data fields into a more user friendly platform for farmers to use.

Students will have the opportunity to interact with Fonterra farmers, experience a range of dairy farming operations first-hand and understand how farming links to our dairy manufacturing processes.

The program is young and largely dependent on manual processes. In improving the transaction process it is anticipated that the project team can leverage technology to streamline data collection on farm and create a user interface that is more interactive.