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, so can’t say how the different treatments performed. We are grateful to our friends at On-Farm Research for their help drying all the corn plant material for us! We can confirm harvesting 48 trial plots was a big job and appreciate the extra effort of Alan Palmer from Massey University who came to give us a hand.
Next Steps
We are arranging cover crop establishment and will have some different options for viewing at LandWISE23. We’ll do a post on that soon.
2023-2024 is a “Heinz-Watties year”, and we are working with their team to organise the planting of process tomatoes in our three farm systems – conventional, hybrid and regen. We met Tobi Euerl from live2give who is trialing a vegetable transplanter designed to establish seedlings through thick cover mulches. That will be presented at LandWISE23 as well, and we hope to use that in our regen treatment.
Carbon Positive is a partnership project with the Hawke’s Bay Future Farming Trust. It is funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries, McCain Foods, Heinz-Watties and Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.
