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…
Category: soil health
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…
More questions than answers – Regenerative Ag
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…
Carbon Positive
June update Most of June has involved watching cover crops grow! but we also completed a series of soil measurements including visual soil assessments (VSAs) and worm counts, and we have sampled for labile soil carbon. To monitor the cover crops’ development, we have made weekly ground cover measurements since germination using the smartphone Canopeo…
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…
Rebuilding Our Soils
LandWISE 2024 – Rebuilding Our Soils Havelock North – 15-16 May 2024 We are looking forward to our annual conference this week. We will report on our current work with industry, researchers and growers seeking out and trialing best ways to rebuild soil.Our invited speakers will present alternative practices and novel ideas, some perhaps fringe,…
Revitalise Te Taiao
Mātauranga-led, science-informed research Revitalise Te Taiao is one of the Our Land and Water projects, involving place-based research to develop evidence-based examples of how agribusinesses and communities can make enduring changes in land use, management, value chains, and market focus to revitalise our natural world, te Taiao. Containing the land, water, climate and living beings,…
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…
Focus on Agritech
Examples and discussions for horticulture and cropping Sustainable production through technology has been one of the key themes through the history of LandWISE Inc. We started with minimum tillage and strip tillage equipment, then rapidly adopted RTK GPS and autosteer, which we saw unlocked many opportunities for financial and environmental gains. We’ve looked a precision…