LandWISE Project Manager Alex Dickson discusses some of her thoughts on Regenerative Agriculture after her trip to Europe in June. As I grapple with my own understanding of Regenerative Agriculture (RA), a trip to Europe was just the thing I needed to provide me with more questions than answers! EU Green Deal- Farm to Fork…
Category: Nutrition
Rebuilding Our Soils – Successful Conference
Many thanks to everybody involved in our 2024 Annual Conference! All up we had 99 registrants who heard from 23 amazing presenters and saw 9 different practical demonstrations. Our special thanks to everyone who contributed by sharing their knowledge and experiences, and to delegates for their active interaction. Thanks to Pure Catering and our hosts…
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…
Carbon Positive at the MicroFarm – February 2024 Field Walk
Please register at Eventbrite Once again, we are opening the gates and doors to the public for a Carbon Positive at the MicroFarm field walk to view and discuss the Heinz-Wattie’s process tomato crop. We’ve been making nutrient, irrigation and crop protection decisions – come along and discuss our strategies and apparent effectiveness! Please register…
December in the MicroFarm Tomatoes
Our tomatoes have now been planted for eight weeks and we have seen a lot of growth since the November newsletter. Since our last update, the Watties operations team have mechanically weeded the interrow and Andy Lysaght has mechanically weeded in between the tomatoes. We have applied several sprays, side dressed, and irrigated. It is…
Soil Recovery after Cyclone Gabrielle
Gisborne Workshop Bushmere Arms, 1:30pm Tuesday 20 June We welcome growers and other interested people to an afternoon meeting to discuss actions growers can take to help restore paddocks impacted by Cyclone Gabielle. This meeting is open to all growers; pasture, fruit and vine crops as well as vegetable and arable crops. Please register –…
Vegetable Production Nitrogen Management
This project is built on the previous Future Proofing Vegetable Production project and presents a series of on-line workshops and tutorials and make the lessons available to the wider fresh vegetable production industry. We previously published our first courses and have seen uptake. Give them a try. We have published the next two courses in our series of…
LandWISE 2023 Speakers – Soil Health
Allan Machakaire Regenerative Cropping – McCain FoodsAllan Machakaire is McCain Foods Agriculture Manager based in Hastings. He has been involved in the cropping sector for two decades, involved in growing crops, canning, dehydration and frozen products. Alan has a PhD in agronomy and has published research on photosynthesis and water use efficiency, crop coefficients and…
LandWISE 2023 Speakers – Starting afresh
Responding to Cyclone Gabrielle Industry Perpectives Our group of four Hawke’s Bay industry representatives will discuss the impacts on the vegetables and fruit sectors and the various ways people have responded. How did people react, what were the urgent priorities, and how are people trying to remediate impacted sites? Far too soon to look back…
Carbon Positive Update
The Carbon Positive project is progressing well. We harvested the first crop, sweetcorn for McCain Foods, on 11 April. It was planted just before Christmas and given the season we had, we were reasonably happy with an average yield of around 16 t/ ha. We have not had time to analyse all the data yet,…