Maury Leyland alongside Fonterra CEO Theo Spierings at the time of the 2013 botulism crisis.

As the clamour has risen in recent days over excessive Fonterra executive pay, one of the dairy giant's top management team has announced her resignation.

Maury Leyland was the co-operative's managing director of people, culture and safety.

As one of that team, she is likely to be one of the 22 Fonterra executives who earns more than $1 million a year.

In a statement, Fonterra said she had resigned for "personal reasons". She had been with the co-operative for 11 years.

Leyland's latest public role for Fonterra was to manage the recent shift to its impressive new headquarters in Auckland.

Waikato University agribusiness professor Jacqueline Rowarth said the move to an HQ in Auckland was continued proof of the disconnect between head office and its shareholders.

Fonterra had no need to rent prime real estate in downtown Auckland, Rowarth said.

Rowarth told Fairfax Media that she did not know the reasons for Leyland's resignation, other than what was in the Fonterra statement.

"But it would have been difficult to deal with all the bad news in the dairy industry, and difficult to work in a culture of extreme stress," she said.

Labour's Primary Industries spokesman Damien O'Connor, who has been vocal about Fonterra needing to cut executive pay, particularly that of CEO Theo Spierings who earns more than $4m a year, said decisions were made at the highest level and it was hard to apportion any blame to others.

Federated Farmers dairy spokesman Andrew Hoggard said he would be sad to see Leyland go.

"She was involved in the 1995 America's Cup, where it was focused on how you spend money on making the boat go faster, probably the kind of attitude we need at Fonterra at the moment," Hoggard said.

Too much "churn" in the top management team was not a positive thing, especially in difficult times, he said.

Spierings said Leyland had made a difference to Fonterra.

"Maury has been involved in some defining events for our co-op. Highlights include Maury's work on the launch of the Fonterra Shareholders' Fund, working closely with me on the development of our V3 strategy and developing a comprehensive people strategy to deliver to our ambition.

"Maury also stepped up to work closely on the WPC80 precautionary recall as spokesperson and lead of our response. More recently, Maury led our response to the 1080 contamination threat."

He said the process to appoint Leyland's successor was underway.

Her resignation is effective March 31.

*comments are closed