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….
Category: soil health
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…
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…
LandWISE 2023: Normal Practice Revisited
Havelock North Function Centre 24-25 May 2023 It has been two years since we gathered for the last LandWISE Conference. We were unsure in 2022 what Covid was doing and chose to not add to its possible spread. With that more controlled if not fully behind us, we were feeling hopeful of a return to…
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…
The Future of Weed Control
By Invitation Workshop Friday 26 May 2023 – Green Shed, LandWISE MicroFarm, Hastings Given the calibre of people who will be with us for LandWISE 2023, we are running a special workshop the day after the Conference. It seems an ideal opportunity to let farmers, researchers and industry get together to workshop where we are,…
Cyclone Gabrielle response update
We all know that many people in the Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne and Northland Regions were hit hard by Cyclone Gabrielle. For many it came on top of a very difficult spring and summer, and some have little left. Houses, sheds, machinery and crops were damaged or destroyed. Some blocks have metres of sediment deposited, others…
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,…