Our Carbon Positive project is comparing conventional intensive process crop production with production applying regenerative farming principles. One of the aspects we are focusing on is the “softening” of the pest and disease control programme. In the regenerative treatment, we are particularly looking at a range of biocontrol agents. In effect, these are also playing…
Category: Projects
Olivia, our 2023-2024 Summer Intern
We are delighted to have Olivia Webster working with us as our Callaghan Innovation Summer Intern for 2023-2024. The Callaghan Innovation internship is intended to enable students to experience research and development in a workplace, so we have her engaged in our Carbon Positive regenerative cropping trials and helping out with some weed electrocution research….
November in the MicroFarm Tomatoes
The end of November marks five weeks since the tomato crop was planted at the MicroFarm. Key challenges include rabbits (which chew the top of the plant off) and soil moisture, particularly for the regenerative treatment. At planting, the regenerative treatment soil was much drier than the other two treatments. While both conventional and hybrid…
Roller Crimper Demonstration
We were invited to attend an impromptu field walk at Villa Maria looking at a Braun Roller Crimper (ActiRoll) in action, hosted by Cam at Villa Maria and Dave Forward from TRS. Alex and Olivia were able to attend and brought back news and pictures. In the vineyard every twelve rows a planted strip of…
Visit by McCain Foods Global team members.
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…
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…