Protecting and nurturing Darnum’s ecosystem one plant at a time
Leading in sustainability is core to our strategy; it’s how we create long-term value for our business and generations to come. We’re making sustainable improvements right across our business, including how we care for the ecosystems surrounding our manufacturing sites.
Paul Winfield, our Environmental Manager at Darnum, says that revegetation projects like these play an important part in protecting and nurturing the ecosystems surrounding our site.
“We want to ensure that we’re producing dairy nutrition in a way that cares for the environment, and part of this is caring for the land around us.
“To make this happen, we’ve partnered with Habitat Creations, a local family-owned company that specialises in conservation, land management and native plant supply via its Wholesale Nursery.
“While the high volume of rainfall we’ve had over the past couple of months delayed the start, it’s great to finally break ground and get the project underway,” says Paul.
Using plants grown from local provenance seeds, Habitat Creations – along with some people from our site – took on the huge task to plant out the riparian area.
Michael Shore, GM - Environment at Habitat Creations, says that planting a diverse mix of tall canopy trees and understory species complements the existing native plants already on site.
“These plants and trees will help absorb nutrient run-off and prevent it from getting into the waterway, and will also have significant advantages for local biodiversity – creating a habitat, refuge, and a corridor for wildlife movement to the neighboring wetlands.
“When fully planted, this area will also have the potential to sequester significant amounts of carbon which will help reduce levels of CO2 – we estimate up to forty tonnes every year over a 25-year period,” says Michael.
This spring vegetation project is just one of many environmental initiatives taking place at our Darnum site. We’ve just started introducing solar energy to our sites by commissioning a 66kw solar system on the admin building – you can read more about it here.