Baseline Sampling Project It has been over a year since Cyclone Gabrielle caused devastation to many parts of the North Island, however the impact of the flood is still being felt by many, as people rebuild homes and businesses. As the water subsided, a group of us began a baseline study, sampling soil and sediment…
Category: Research
January 2024 Tomato Update
The Carbon Positive tomato crop has now been growing for 13 weeks. Our estimated harvest date is the 5th March, so just under six weeks remaining until harvest. All treatments have had a good fruit set and are reasonably disease free (minus a small amount of bacterial speck). We are on track for a good…
Mulch Direct Planting in Vegetable Production
Invitation to Manawatu Field Day Thursday 1st Feb 2024 Our good friends from live2give in Palmerston North are hosting a summer field day to discuss mulch systems for commercial vegetable production. The field day will include a demonstration of the MulchTec-Planter in action. You may remember the MulchTec-Planter from our conference demonstration day last year….
Carbon Positive at the MicroFarm – February 2024 Field Walk
Please register at Eventbrite Once again, we are opening the gates and doors to the public for a Carbon Positive at the MicroFarm field walk to view and discuss the Heinz-Wattie’s process tomato crop. We’ve been making nutrient, irrigation and crop protection decisions – come along and discuss our strategies and apparent effectiveness! Please register…
December in the MicroFarm Tomatoes
Our tomatoes have now been planted for eight weeks and we have seen a lot of growth since the November newsletter. Since our last update, the Watties operations team have mechanically weeded the interrow and Andy Lysaght has mechanically weeded in between the tomatoes. We have applied several sprays, side dressed, and irrigated. It is…
Biocontrol at the MicroFarm
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…
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…