Welcome to the Water Innovation Network
Innovative farmers in the Ballinderry Catchment are trialling low-cost systems to prevent pollution, improve biodiversity and yield harvestable crops that can be used as feed and fertiliser. Water friendly farming isn’t just better for nature, it saves costs and increases income
Projects
Bill and Adrian are a typical NI dairy farm found in the Ballinderry river catchment. They milk approximately 150 cows which calve year round. They run a grass based system, with cows grazing during the day and housed at night for supplement feeding.
Kenny is a part time suckler beef farmer. The farm is situated above land leading down to the Ballinderry river. He runs a split calving system, with some cows calving in the spring and some in the autumn. The majority of Kennys farm is free draining as it sits on shattered rock.
Robert is our part time free-range poultry farmer. The farm has cereal growing land which has high levels of nutrients, especially Phosphate. This is assumed to be a result of historically annual applications of nutrient rich hen manure. Similar to our other farms…
James is a prominent pig and beef farmer in the Ballinderry river catchment. The main problem on the farm is that yard water is caught in a slurry reception tank which has limited capacity. There is a manually operated pump in the reception tank which must be switched…
How We Can Help
In order to make water management on farms profitable, as well as protect our freshwater environment and its wildlife, we need innovators, researchers and farmers to work together to come up with workable, sustainable, win-win solutions for farming and for the environment.
Mark Horton MBE
Chief Executive,
Ballinderry Rivers Trust.
Stage one of the project involved identifying water problems on various farms, making a list of the problems and brainstorming potential innovative solutions. This stage was very much about thinking big and not limiting our options.
Site work has begun
Digger work for the first of our Nature Based Water management areas began on Monday the 1st November at the Henrys dairy farm!
Ballinderry Newsletter
Keep up to date with the latest news & updates from Ballinderry Rivers Trust.
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