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…
Category: Research
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…
Ultralow energy electric weeding
Micro electric shocks control broadleaved and grass weeds This is the second post with details of Dan’s electric weeding research. It is a bit “sciencey” because it is a formal research paper, but there is interesting information in it! The research was published in the Journal of Agronomy and is published Open Access, so anyone can download…
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…
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: 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…