Peas were planted for McCain Foods on the 3rd of October as part of our Carbon Positive trial. This was a week after the target planting date due to wet soil conditions at the end of September. Planting Winter cover crops in both the Conventional and Hybrid treatments were sprayed out early, and the soil…
Category: Cultivation
2024 Pea Harvest Results
Our McCain Foods peas were harvested on the 26th of November, one week ahead of schedule. The dry spring meant the peas were ready sooner than expected. You can read more about this year’s pea season here. Ahead of the machine harvest, in each plot we hand harvested all of the pea vines from four…
Earthworm eDNA at the MicroFarm
Hill Laboratories announced a new commercially available soil test for earthworm eDNA this year. The new quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) test quantifies the amount of earthworm eDNA for the New Zealand’s most common earthworm species, Aporrectodea caliginosa. The current approach to assessing earthworms is through field visual assessments, which can be labour intensive and…
Cover Crop Update
In the above picture, you can see our McCain Foods pea crop planted into cultivated (Conventional treatment) soil on the left, and into sprayed our mixed cover crop (Hybrid treatment) in the centre. The golden patch is mixed cover crop residue in the Regenerative treatment plot that was mulched on 1 October. Some of the…
September 2024 at the MicroFarm
As they say, spring has sprung here at the MicroFarm. It has been a busy start to the 2024-2025 cropping season. With the help of McCain Foods and Mike Kettle Contracting our early peas were planted on the 3rd of September, six days after our target date. Pea Planting The Conventional treatment, which was planted…
Lessons from two years of winter cover crops
When the Carbon Positive project began, most of the Operations Advisory Group probably thought “six years = six crops”. Certainly, the focus for the operations group has been on the summer crop(s). A lot of energy has been put into getting the operations right for each treatment. Our winter cover crops, initially thought to be just…
STAMP Field Trip – IFAMA 2024
Last year I joined the STAMP (Strategic Thinking Agri-Food Marketing Program) for young professionals working in the agri-food sector. The program is supported by Massey University, AGMARDT and FoodHQ. We meet four times a year to connect, and through workshops, case study analysis, and discussions, we are provided with a platform to gain insights into…
Non-Chemical Weed Management Workshop
Presented by Dr Charles ‘Merf’ Merfield. 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, Friday 26 July 2024 PIA Event Centre, Pukekohe, New Zealand. In person only, there is no online version. The purpose of this workshop is to give a complete overview of non-chemical weed management as part of Integrated Weed Management (IWM) and will include addressing…
Alternatives for Crop Protection
Presentations at the LandWISE Conference “Rebuilding Our Soils” In the summer of 2023-2024, the LandWISE MicroFarm grew process tomatoes for Heinz-Wattie’s using three alternative management systems: conventional, regenerative, and a hybrid taking from each. One of the principles for a regenerative system is to build natural resilience rather than rely only on a chemical-based crop…
January 2024 Tomato Update
The Carbon Positive tomato crop has now been growing for 13 weeks. Our estimated harvest date is the 5th March, so just under six weeks remaining until harvest. All treatments have had a good fruit set and are reasonably disease free (minus a small amount of bacterial speck). We are on track for a good…