We were delighted to host a visit by members of the McCain Foods global team involved in their regenerative agriculture work. The team was interested to discuss the Carbon Positive project setup, challenges along the way, and lessons to date. They expressed appreciation of the way the project had been established with plots sized to…
Category: Projects
Carbon Positive Field Walk this Thursday, 9 November
Through spring and summer, we’re holding monthly Carbon Positive field walks at the MicroFarm. The November walk is on Thursday 9th, starting at 1pm and includes both indoor and outdoor elements. Its main purpose is to allow people to see the tomato crops in each of our treatments now they have been planted, but we’ll…
Carbon Positive Summer Crop 2023-24
Heinz-Watties’ tomatoes are planted Alex had a busy winter and spring, getting the operations programme for the 2023-2024 tomato crop developed in conjunction with Heinz-Watties, McCain Foods, regenerative consultants and advisors, interested local growers, organic vegetable producers, international process tomato growers, technical field representatives and contractors. We particularly note the large inputs of Caleb Burbury…
Carbon Positive Winter 2023
Results from monitoring Cover crop growth As seen in the boxplot chart above, the canopy cover (percentage of the ground covered by the cover crops in each treatment) varied with the conventional annual ryegrass planted into cultivated soil getting most cover earliest, and the regenerative oats/vetch and lupin mix direct-drilled into uncultivated soil starting slowest….
Robots and shocks
Emerging non-herbicide weed control options for vegetable and arable cropping This is the first post with details of Dan’s research into ultralow energy weeding using pulsed micro-shocks. It is an introduction by way of a comprehensive literature review, that was published in the New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research as part of the AgResearch lead…
The Electric Spatula
Killing weeds with pulsed microshocks from a flat plate electrode This is the third post with details of Dan’s research into electric weeding undertakenas part of the AgResearch lead Herbicide Resistance management project. In this work, he was looking at easy ways to apply very small electric shocks to weeds, without having to carefully place…
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 –…
LandWISE 23: Normal Practice Revisited
Following our successful annual conference in May, we wish to thank all the speakers and sponsors who supported us, and the delegates who enriched proceedings and made it an enjoyable event. The conference focused on building and rebuilding our soils, topics close to recovery from the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle and “Carbon Positive”, our new…
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: Field Sessions
What will you see at the field Horizons, session? See a prototype electric version of the proven Oxin vineyard robot (have a drive!), Ross-AI bio-degradable netting clips, Croptide plant water status sensor (and the app), watch the Mulch-Tec transplanter working, watch the soil spader for sediment mixing at work, check out the Einboeck air-seeder for…