After almost a decade as chief executive of water supply scheme MHV Water Ltd, Melanie Brooks (pictured above with Chair, Cole Groves) stepped down in December 2024, immensely proud of what its farmer-shareholders have already achieved and are continuing to achieve in improving environmental outcomes. She has left with the knowledge the cooperative is well-positioned for the future. BY ANNIE STUDHOLME
Much has changed since Melanie Brooks assumed the helm of the newly formed MHV Water Ltd in 2017. Despite many ups and downs, the cooperative has flourished under her direction, gaining significant momentum in its mission to provide long-term, sustainable solutions for the whole community.
“It’s not my success, though,” says Melanie. “It’s the community’s success. I have enjoyed being part of a ‘we’. When I came to MHV, I wanted to leave it in a stronger place than I found it. I thought, ‘I’m’ going to do this, but it’s a team effort with our farmers, and all about what ‘we’ can achieve. MHV is just the vehicle; it’s our farmers who are doing the heavy lifting on farm. We are moving in the right direction. As a community, we have already decided where we want to be; farmers have stepped up and are taking responsibility for where we want to be.”
Melanie’s appointment as CEO came just days before farmers unanimously voted for the merger of Mayfield Hinds and Valetta irrigation schemes. The merger made it the country’s largest privately owned irrigation scheme responsible for delivering water to up to 58,000ha of productive land across the Hekeao/Hinds plain between the Rangitata and Ashburton rivers.
Both irrigation schemes have successfully delivered water from the Rangitata Diversion Race (RDR) for more than 70 years, with the original canals and races built by the Ministry of Works in the 1940s after more than 50 years in planning. County engineer William Baxter started working on an irrigation scheme in 1884 to turn Mid Canterbury from a desert to productive farmland.
Since then, the RDR has become the virtual lifeblood of rural Mid-Canterbury, irrigating more than 100,000 hectares of farmland and powering two small hydroelectric stations that generate enough energy to power about 13,000 households a year. With access to water, farming practices have also changed drastically, underpinning the prosperity of the area and leading to its becoming one of New Zealand’s largest food-producing regions. Dairying has taken over from sheep and beef as the most common land use.
Over time, irrigation practices have also changed, moving from almost entirely border-dyke irrigation (flooding paddocks using temporary dams) to much more efficient sprinkler-type irrigation (centre-pivot, k-line or fixed grid).
But with the tidal wave of legislative change and rise in anti-irrigation rhetoric, MHV has had to assume the roles of infrastructure managers and environmental advisors rather than simply delivering water.
MHV has done a huge amount in the infrastructure space, with farmers investing hundreds of millions of dollars in water storage, automation, and piping, improving the schemes’ overall resilience.
Carew storage ponds with a capacity of 6.3 million m3 provide reliability and resilience.
“In the old days, delivering water was much more art than science. Water ordering and constant flow were a game changer. That sort of technology has made a massive difference to how we operate and how efficient we are.”
Piping the Ruapuna and Valetta lines also reduced leakage, reduced evaporation, and meant automated delivery at pressure to farm gates. Irrigation race capacity had also been upgraded, and the installation of automated farmer offtakes, pond sensors on the on farm ponds, water storage and the SCADA network led to better delivery management. Those upgrades significantly improved reliability for farmers without taking any more water from the rivers.
One of their biggest challenges was the collapse of 1.8km of the Valetta line in 2018. Coming off a dry winter and the irrigation season fast approaching, the team had to work hard to get the line up and running. “I was proud of how the team responded,” she says.
Afterwards, assessments of all the infrastructure was carried out, and based on risk assessments a structured remediation was undertaken where needed. A lot of work has also been done in preparation for an Alpine Fault rupture, ensuring the scheme was well-placed to continue providing for farmers and the community. As a result, she says MHV was much more resilient in its infrastructure space across the whole scheme.
Perhaps the biggest changes though have come in the environmental space. Based on her experience in the banking sector, Melanie firmly believed improving environmental outcomes required collaboration, not just amongst its more than 200 farmer shareholders, but across the community and broader primary sector.
Changes in mindset and irrigation practices had been massive since she first started. “The nature of the majority of the soils in the Hekeao Hinds is that we’re always only a couple of weeks away from a drought, especially in the height of summer. Before, farmers would always take their full allocation just in case it got dry, because they weren’t sure if they’d be on restrictions next time they needed water, but now that we have storage, they are using far less water on the same piece of dirt. They no longer use water ‘just in case’ of drought, but instead apply ‘just enough’ for the plant they are growing and the soil type they have based on their soil moisture monitoring and we are also seeing irrigation turned off on the forecast of rain.”
On-farm, farmers have been working hard to reduce their nutrient footprint, whether it was through effective water management, soil moisture monitoring, variable rate fertiliser, riparian and wetland plantings, using different forage species or trialling innovations such as Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Under MHV’s consent, nitrogen losses have to be reduced by 15 per cent this year from the Baseline Period (2009-2013) and a total of 36 per cent by 2035, and she is confident farmers would achieve it.
The introduction of Farm Environment Plans (FEPs) in 2015 as part of MHV’s environmental plan helped drive environmental awareness on farms by identifying risks, documenting the changes required to address them, and sharing knowledge and education. “The independent auditors are largely farmers themselves and have a wealth of knowledge. They are educators as well as auditors.”
Seen initially as just a box-ticking exercise, now FEP’s focused on actions that drive change. From the FEPs audits, she says MHV has been able to identify the areas where they were not doing so well or where there was a lower confidence level and set up targeting training for its farmers to line up with those gaps. The training evolves as our farmers’ knowledge grows and research evolves.
“We have made massive strides in the past five years. It’s amazing how far they have come. It is a journey, though. You can’t just flick a switch, but we are heading in the right direction. We just have to keep reinforcing where we want to go.”
Nearly all farmers within the catchment were on board with the new regime. Last year, 94 per cent of farmers received an A audit grade or better. To support the wider community, MHV welcomed non-MHV shareholders within the catchment to join the environmental programme.
“We are the enablers. Farmers are time-poor. There’s a lot of noise out there, and we aim to distil the noise into practical and relevant information that will support farmers in driving improved environmental outcomes, allowing farmers to get back to farming.”
Because it was a catchment, there was also peer responsibility and more significant opportunities for learning and sharing information. The late South African Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu once said that the best way to eat an elephant was one bite at a time. “That’s the best change; it’s more sustainable,” says Melanie.
MHV’s water monitoring programme has grown substantially and has been well-supported by farmers. MHV commenced monitoring NO3-N (nitrate) levels in the scheme area in 2016 with just 29 bores to understand what was happening with nitrate levels in groundwater. Over time, it has been amped up considerably. The programme was now the country’s most extensive community-led water monitoring programme, partnering with Barhill Chertsey Irrigation and the Hekeao Hinds Water Enhancement Trust to undertake quarterly monitoring of 150 bores and 60 surface water sites across the Hekeao Hinds catchment.
MHV Water continued to develop the programme to include more holistic measures of water-body health, says Melanie. “The science has been invaluable. The programme has increased our knowledge of the catchment and highlighted where we want further research. It’s also enabled us to understand responses to rain events. Utilising the data has also been helping farmers make better on farm decisions.”
Since September 2019, the nitrate trend in shallow and deep bores has been improving, but there is still a way to go. When it came down to it, no one, including our farmers and growers, wanted to see the decline of freshwater in New Zealand. Everyone wants to be able to enjoy their local rivers and for their children and children’s children to enjoy the rivers too. “But these are big gnarly problems; no one is going to solve them on their own. Communities must come together and be responsible for the future of water for generations. We have to solve this together to support New Zealand’s and its communities’ prosperity.”
Melanie’s focused on developing critical relationships with other irrigation schemes, Ashburton District Council (ADC), Environment Canterbury (ECan), Federated Farmers, Dairy NZ, Ashburton Water Zone Committee, NZ Fish & Game, and the Te Rūnanga o Arowhenua and its consenting arm, Aoraki Environmental Consultancy (AEC).
“It’s about getting people in the room and opening the discussion. We are a big part of the Hekeao Hinds, but we are not the only part. It’s about understanding a wider perspective than our own. We don’t have to agree on everything, and that’s okay because there is trust in the relationship. It’s about finding a common ground. We should focus on what we can agree on and come up with pragmatic solutions that will drive mutually beneficial outcomes.”
She has worked particularly closely with farmer-led group like the Mid Canterbury Catchment Collective (MCCC), Hekeao Hinds Water Enhancement Trust (HHWET), and Hekeao Hinds Science Collaboration Group. She praised them for their ground-breaking projects, such as Vadose Management System (VMS), managed aquifer recharge (MAR) and near river recharge (NRR) and the development of the Wairuna runoff. “There is some fantastic work being done in agricultural innovation. Some clever research is going on, and our farmers are at the forefront of it.”
MHV was also part of the group driving the formulation of Mid Canterbury’s vision for freshwater, environmental and community wellbeing as part of ECan’s Canterbury-wide consultation process on the national policy statement for freshwater. “To be part of that was really cool. We got 622 local people together across all parts of our community to join the conversation to develop a cohesive vision for Mid Canterbury that everybody wants.”
Over the years, Melanie has also found it important to engage in the urban space. She has spoken to many community groups in Christchurch, including The Tuesday Club, Rotary, U3A, and Lions, helping non-farmers understand what progress is being made in the environmental space, the importance of infrastructure and how farmers care for the land. She has also shared MHV’s story and the journey it is on.
After MHV received their contentious discharge consent, Melanie took the unusual step of inviting members of the Extinction Rebellion Group, Greenpeace and Forest & Bird to join farmers on a tour of the scheme. “I was nervous and excited at the same time. I thought, ‘This could be so wrong in so many ways’. It was great that members of those groups took the time to come and visit and had sufficiently open minds to listen. I think it helped because it started conversations. I’m still really pleased we did it.”
Inviting groups to tour the scheme helps to start conversations.
Despite progress made at a local level, Melanie says changes in political ideology threatened to undo efforts. “It just takes one thing to derail all the good work. We’ve been on an environmental journey for many years and following the release of the 2020 National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, which ‘threw the baby out with the bathwater’ in many respects, many farmers threw their hands in the air in frustration. That frustration often comes when changes are not about improved outcomes; they’ve been about political will. We really need to stop having big swings in regulations from one political cycle to another. Bipartisan support is needed to achieve environmental improvements. We’re okay with having challenging goals but need consistency to have a runway to get there.”
Melanie believed regulation should only be a backstop. Communities were best placed to drive change in their community. “We just need to let them get on and lead themselves, and they will. They already are.”
MHVs new consent was through to 2030, and while plenty of challenges were on the horizon, she preferred to look at them as “opportunities”. “Many people are quick to condemn dairying, but with water and the change in land use came new options that wouldn’t have been possible before. Farmers are quite resilient and open to change; that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
Despite the challenges ahead, she was confident they could be overcome if people worked together.
Melanie may have departed the helm of MHV Water, but she has left behind an important legacy – a strong vision, strong relationships and a strong belief in the continuance of MHV to strive for improvement for the benefit of future generations.
