Farm Plans

A farm plan is a tool which helps identify and implement Good Management Practices.  Farm plans can benefit your property and farm by: 

• Aligning your productive system to work best with the environment around you
• Increasing sustainability with soil health and water quality
• Identifying opportunities to improve on-farm biodiversity
• Incorporating freshwater values into your work
• Giving you access to funding to implement these GMPs

You may already have a farm plan in place – perhaps with Fonterra, Beef & Lamb, or perhaps you have a Farm Environment Plan prepared by Greater Wellington. 

Farm Environment Plans (FEP) 

We’re dedicated to enabling continuous environmental improvement on farms that is informed by catchment scale objectives and priorities.  We’ve been helping farmers in our region with Farm Environment Plans since the 1950s. 

Farm planning in the Wellington region has been focused on engaging with landowners in catchments with the greatest need, as identified through our Whaitua process.  The aim is to implement Good Management Practices. 

While we continue to support Farm Environment Plans, our focus remains on enabling environmental improvement on farms within the frameworks set out by new regional rules and national regulations. 

Certified Farm Environment Plans (CFEP) 

The regional rules (the Natural Resources Plan) are designed to help protect the environmental values of our region.  Under these rules, farmers in priority catchments listed below will need to have a Certified Farm Environment Plan by the dates listed.   

This web map shows the priority catchments in which farmers will require Certified Farm Environment Plans.

View the priority catchments

Benefits of a Certified Farm Environment Plan

A Certified Farm Environment Plan will help control adverse effects of farming and improve the health of freshwater in your catchment. CFEPs will likely be more detailed than any existing farm (environment) plan that you may currently have.  Your existing farm plan, and work undertaken so far, will be integrated where possible, but may not be able to be certified as a CFEP in its current format.  

We’ll help you through this process.  We hope that you’ll see CFEPs as a useful tool to help plan and implement Good Management Practices on-farm.    

Find a Farm Environment Plan Certifier or Certified Farm Nutrient Advisor  

We’re working to appoint:  

• Farm Environment Plan Certifiers: people who can work with community members to produce CFEPs 
• Certified Farm Nutrient Advisors: people who can complete a risk assessment required as part of your CFEP. 

A list of people who have been appointed to one or both of these roles to date has been provided below. This list will continue to grow as further applications are processed.