Going to the Vegetables Big Day Out in Pukekohe was an amazing opportunity for me to meet people and to learn more about the research and innovation taking place in the vegetable industry. Being able to see the biodiversity strips, native plant pods (insectaries), and cover crops that are a part of “A Lighter Touch”,…
Category: soil health
2024 McCains Pea Production
Peas were planted for McCain Foods on the 3rd of October as part of our Carbon Positive trial. This was a week after the target planting date due to wet soil conditions at the end of September. Planting Winter cover crops in both the Conventional and Hybrid treatments were sprayed out early, and the soil…
2024 Pea Harvest Results
Our McCain Foods peas were harvested on the 26th of November, one week ahead of schedule. The dry spring meant the peas were ready sooner than expected. You can read more about this year’s pea season here. Ahead of the machine harvest, in each plot we hand harvested all of the pea vines from four…
Biodiversity at the MicroFarm
Earlier this year we learnt of an interesting project focusing on increasing biodiversity on vegetable farms. The aim of this joint project between A Lighter Touch, Vegetables NZ and Onions NZ is to reduce pest insects in crops by increasing the abundance of beneficial insects on vegetable farms, therefore reducing the need for insecticides. Two…
Earthworm eDNA at the MicroFarm
Hill Laboratories announced a new commercially available soil test for earthworm eDNA this year. The new quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) test quantifies the amount of earthworm eDNA for the New Zealand’s most common earthworm species, Aporrectodea caliginosa. The current approach to assessing earthworms is through field visual assessments, which can be labour intensive and…
Cover Crop Update
In the above picture, you can see our McCain Foods pea crop planted into cultivated (Conventional treatment) soil on the left, and into sprayed our mixed cover crop (Hybrid treatment) in the centre. The golden patch is mixed cover crop residue in the Regenerative treatment plot that was mulched on 1 October. Some of the…
September 2024 at the MicroFarm
As they say, spring has sprung here at the MicroFarm. It has been a busy start to the 2024-2025 cropping season. With the help of McCain Foods and Mike Kettle Contracting our early peas were planted on the 3rd of September, six days after our target date. Pea Planting The Conventional treatment, which was planted…
Lessons from two years of winter cover crops
When the Carbon Positive project began, most of the Operations Advisory Group probably thought “six years = six crops”. Certainly, the focus for the operations group has been on the summer crop(s). A lot of energy has been put into getting the operations right for each treatment. Our winter cover crops, initially thought to be just…
More questions than answers – Regenerative Ag
LandWISE Project Manager Alex Dickson discusses some of her thoughts on Regenerative Agriculture after her trip to Europe in June. As I grapple with my own understanding of Regenerative Agriculture (RA), a trip to Europe was just the thing I needed to provide me with more questions than answers! EU Green Deal- Farm to Fork…
Carbon Positive
June update Most of June has involved watching cover crops grow! but we also completed a series of soil measurements including visual soil assessments (VSAs) and worm counts, and we have sampled for labile soil carbon. To monitor the cover crops’ development, we have made weekly ground cover measurements since germination using the smartphone Canopeo…