www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery for 2016. All around NZ, our farmers, businesses and organisations are adding value, improving procedures or developing new consumer goods or services to support a diverse, growing, sustainable primary sector. And over the coming months, we're looking forward to showing you what's being achieved in many of these areas. Today we go to Queenstown to meet a couple who've committed themselves to rebuilding Otago's native plant stocks through a community nursery. We meet a new generation of farmers in Manawatu, who are embracing all that modern farming has to offer. And for those interested in home-brewing, we find out about the production of malt at Gladfield Malt in Canterbury. At the end of 2015, the Minister of Conservation, Maggie Barry, announced that a Queenstown couple were the recipients of this country's oldest conservation award, the Loder Cup. For decades, Barbara and Neill Simpson have worked in conservation and education, and two years ago, they established a native plant nursery. In addition to fundraising, the nursery and building were the result of hundreds of hours of volunteer work carried out by locals. Barbara explains. We were heavily involved, and we still are to a lesser degree, in the Wakatipu islands up the lake. There were big fires up there, and we were doing replanting up there, and then we realised we really need to look at our own space in the Wakatipu. It's maybe 5% native, if that, in the rural landscape, so we thought, 'It's time we started doing some planting here.' So we thought, 'Yeah, we'll have a nursery.' Vanessa van Uden, our mayor, um, was very wonderful at saying, 'Yes, you can have this piece of recreational ground,' and, um, then we went from there saying, 'Well, we need some money,' and our first fundraiser was Maggie Barry. We got our first $1200 because Maggie spoke at the golf club, so that was really great. And then we started looking` Well, we need more, because the potting shed facility is obviously costing more than $1200, and we came across the legacy of a lady who died of cancer, who had been really heavily involved with this area. Her photo's actually in the nursery on the wall over there. When you put it in, you gotta have just enough stuff at the bottom, so this is just below the top surface ` not to stick up like that. I've come out of education. I've been at the high school teaching for years and years, and I'm still involved with outdoor education with them. And I just think that the best way to educate the future is to take the small kids, and we have a wonderful, um` two preschools in Arrowtown, who just love for their kids to get out and play and be out in the weather and everything else, and so they came to us first to see whether they could bring the children here. So I decided if we could have a programme where Susie at DOC, who's the education person, could visit them in schools. They could come here and pot up, and then they go and plant on a site, then they visit the site later. I mean, that's just awesome for me. OK, welcome, and thank you for coming along to the planting day today. My name's Susie, from the Department of Conservation, and I think I've met most of you before... 'Neill and Barb have been part of conservation in the Queenstown area for ever.' I mean, what they do in the district is incredible. They've done so much planting. They've got so much passion, and the people that they bring along with them, because they've got` They do everything. You know, they're real doers. They'll get involved. They'll bring people with them. Um, so, yeah, I don't think we could do without them, basically. Neill worked for DOC in a previous life, so I've always known of their work, and when they set up the trust, there was a new fund come out of the department, the Community Fund, and we saw a great opportunity to help fund them, to grow revegetation in the district, so we work with them very closely. I'm the conservation coordinator. So, Ange, who's the lovely lady who's helped organise today ` we work together with them for planting days. They're just a great group of people that we really wanna support. It's financial in as much as we employ Ange or their behalf. We do supply plants for the Project Gold sites that we manage in the district. So there's places like Lake Hayes, which is our flagship site for Project Gold, and we supply all the plants for that. Um, and we also supply` Through the Department, the Community Conservation Fund funds Anne's role` Ange's role, basically. We're on Peninsula Rd on the Frankton Arm. When we came on to this site, we saw all this wonderful rock, and we thought, 'This is a place for us.' And so that's where we started, and we've planted it up from scratch. So these trees ` 33 years old, which shows beech don't grow that slowly. Um, and we're mainly native. Although we started off with all sorts of plants, we've gradually moved into natives only. The garden's not big enough for anything else. And we've got a lot of rare and endangered plants here as well. We've always been interested in nature, both of us being long-time trampers out in the back country. In Whanganui, I was, uh, honorary botanist for the Whanganui Museum and did quite a bit of work around there. I started the Whanganui Botanical Society` the Museum Botanical Society. Um, so, you know. And from there, um, I seem to have a bit more knowledge than other people at that time. (CHUCKLES) And it's grown. We joined the Wellington Botanical Society, and that was a major step forward. We've been planting around the district and advising people about native plants from, uh, a couple of nurseries, and Pukerau Nursery we knew were sourcing plants from this district, seed and cutting material, so that's where we've been getting our plants from ` eco-sourced as much as possible. We've probably got a core of people left over from the` from the, um, uh, Pigeon Island days, where we got a lot of volunteers out on that. Going to Pigeon Island was something special. Um, here, perhaps, it's not quite as special, but we still got a core of people, and we're gradually bringing more in. Certainly seeing an increase of interest in planting natives, and there's some big properties being planted around Queenstown area. Through the Arrow Basin, there's virtually no natives at all, and we thought we'd like to get patches planted through the area to bring the native birds back, so particularly with native birds that we're interested in, and we have a lot of tuis and bellbirds around here. And we're both fairly fit, um, and this` this seemed like another great project to get started on, and I think I've still got a few years left, and certainly Barbara has. We'll be back soon when we visit Morrison Farming ` a multigenerational enterprise that's involved both on and off farm in building gains for the sheep and beef sectors. 1 UPLIFTING MUSIC The people of New Zealand have a unique opportunity to decide the future of our flag. In the final referendum, your vote counts. Help decide which flag we stand for and how we're represented to the world. It's time to decide, New Zealand. . Welcome back. The Morrison family has been farming on their home farm near Marton since 1864. In addition to their involvement in the family business, Richard Morrison has been Meat & Fibre section chairman for the Manawatu-Rangitikei province of Federated Farmers, while his brother William has been on Beef + Lamb NZ's farmer council since it was formed in 2010. We farm on two locations. All up it's 1500ha. There's a home property here, which is primarily the finishing farms. Morrisons have farmed for 150 years here, and we have a newer property that's 10km away ` the breeding farm, straight hill-country property ` and they really work in well together. So all up it's 16,000 stock units ` 50/50 sheep and cattle split. Myself and my brother, William, uh, John, our father, and Graeme Morrison ` uh, so we're the four directors of Morrison Farming. So we actually, uh, amalgamated with Graeme Morrison, uh, four years ago, and that actually reunited the, um` the original blocks from 150 years, and it's working really well. The finishing country here is a very light loam and very fertile. It's a magnificent soil type, and we're also very fortunate that we have hill country and we're able to expand our business, involving different land types and land classes all in a very close proximity. It's generally a good climate, and generally summer-safe. All things considered, it's a fortunate location. We're always trying new things, and we always love to look at innovation and love testing our thinking and testing our ideas. In saying that, um, you know, we do have a 50/50 sheep and cattle mix, and we don't like any passengers in the system. Each enterprise has to be economical in its own right. We have 600 registered stud Hereford cows, and we focus on breeding bulls for the dairy industry ` Ezicalving bulls ` and we sell 250 bulls a year, but also finishing beef is very important for us too. We do a lot of on-farm records and link our Hereford population to the wider Herefords in NZ and Australia and take records for growth rates and calvings records and all sorts of traits; also a lot of the vaccinations; and have quite strict selection criteria for our females to be the breeding herd; and also a lot of quality control of the bulls that we, um, put out there into the industry. We've been part of the dairy beef integration project in the Waikato. We share the values that there's great potential for beef derived from the dairy industry ` because that's exactly what we do with our clients here ` and try and add value to beef coming from that industry. I've always loved agriculture, and agriculture's given me lots of opportunities, and that's both within the farm gate and also outside. I've been` been very fortunate with a couple of, uh, scholarships and programmes to travel overseas, and by being involved ` it might be projects with Massey University or Beef + Lamb ` in different capacities, uh, it is amazing what opportunities open up for you and what you can do. I'm the section chair for Meat & Fibre for Federated Farmers for the Manawatu-Rangitikei region, so I'm quite new in that role, and, um, we've got` got quite a new, young executive, and, um` and it's great fun. And we're trying to focus on, um, positive things in the industry and positive advocacy and, um, telling good stories, so it's quite cool. The sheep policy at Morrison Farming is we have about 5000 breeding ewes. Most of those are run on the hill-country station. We have an elite SIL-recorded flock of about 500 stud ewes. That flock is non-breed-specific. With our whole enterprise, we're just trying to breed what we call an Ezicare-type sheep ` no dags, no belly wool, once-a-year shearing, prime type lambs to be finished off Mum before Christmas time. The last two years of performance, uh, we've been just a tick over 140% across all 5000 ewes. Um, the aim is to really get that to over 150%. We're developing a hill-country station at the same time. So all of these things are all about to trying to get the extra 1% to 2% to 5% production gains each year. The potential is 5000 ewes lambing 160% plus, and lambing all our ewe hoggets, and only selecting our replacements from ewe hoggets that have had and raised a quality lamb. We're focusing on a number of things with our elite flock, in terms of growth rates, high carcass, high fertility and improving the facial eczema tolerance. The more things you focus on, the harder it is to make gains across all of those things, and, look, the big part of our business is finishing prime lambs, so with staff and a bigger land area now, we actually need to have good systems. So good systems is actually a regular drenching protocol that all the staff and everyone understands. We're now standing on Mangara Station. This is all hill-country property. It is the breeding heart of the business, I guess. This is where we run 4000 breeding ewes and a bit over 400 breeding cows, produce all the lambs that Richie finishes ` Richie, Luke and the team down there ` and, um, the calves as well. I am fortunate that I'm also a chairman for Beef + Lamb's Western North Island farmer council. Um, I spend a little bit of time off that. The farmer council's, uh, responsible for doing the, um, extension programmes throughout each of the regions, so the field days, uh, also overseeing a bit of the, um` the research and things that go on. So the fantastic part about that is I get to do my favourite hobby, which is visit other farms and see really cool stuff, but also it's` it's great to see the leading-edge farming and technology and science and get an insight into the stuff that I might not otherwise know. The Morrisons are also active on social media, using it to champion the activities and opportunities in the primary sector. We'll be back soon to go behind the scenes of the business of producing high-quality malt for the increasingly popular craft-brewing industry. . Hello again. Around 2003, Doug Michael and his Brazilian wife, Gabi, began to look at opportunities to add value to their cropping farm without having to buy more land. They eventually decided to build their own malting operation and are now supplying a rapidly growing number of boutique craft-beer breweries here in NZ and overseas. We've been growing malting barley for five generations now in Canterbury, so we're continuing the tradition. The difference now is that the whole farm's in malting barley, whereas in the past we were obviously mixed cropping, and we used to run breeding ewes as well. The majority of the barleys that are grown here in NZ have actually come from overseas, and most of those varieties at some stage have been bred specifically for malting, and, uh, they've come over here, and obviously we're able to pick them up and use them for that purpose. There's certain things that we do differently than probably with a feed barley. We gotta be careful that we look after the grain. We don't want sprouted grain, and we don't want grains being damaged with the harvester, cos otherwise it will affect the germination quality of the finished grain. Growing good crops is all about timing and management, so you can't afford to let, uh, you know, one thing affect the other. So you just gotta be really on the ball and have good time management and make sure you're organised. Of course, you gotta have a good wife to back you up. (LAUGHS) We didn't know anything about malt as such as a business. We knew the concept of germinating the barley, but the machinery that's used or how you're gonna sell it, it was miles away from us. And that was a challenge. That was where we were interested as a newly married couple and say, 'Let's` Let's grab this opportunity and see where that takes us.' We're the only one in NZ that makes it into the craft market. Now, we produce about 25 types of malt. You could say you can't be successful without having luck. (LAUGHS) Luck is a huge component at Gladfield. It was just perfect timing ` a) that Doug and I met and we were both interested in add value on a farm industry; b) there was a malt house in Leeston, which is only 20 minutes from here, that wasn't, uh` not in operation, so we were able to grab some equipment from there, so we didn't` had a bit of a head start; and c) we heard brewers complaining that they wanted a truly Kiwi product to work with and was in mercy of the importers who were dictating the price. So it would be good to have someone come in and level that price for them and make it fair. So all these stood up for us and say, 'Well, this is an opportunity,' and we like to grab opportunities. All we're doing is germinating that barley, just like it is in the soil, and then we're gonna stop the germination by drying it, and then we're gonna empty it out and put it into bags. That's in a nutshell. So before you get that barley to the germination box, you put it into the steeps, which is giant silos, where you add water to this barley. Basically, you wanna get that moisture, uh, from 40% up to about 45%, 48%, which translating to the barley, thinks, 'Oh, I can germinate. I can grow,' and that's what we want. We want a healthy growth. And the difference is, at Gladfield, what we care about is how good that barley is to start off, and that's what dictates the quality of the malt. It's all controlled by computer ` the temperature settings ` and is basically airflow to get the CO2 out of that germination bed as well as bringing fresh air so that it grows healthy. This is how our barley looks like ` four-day germination. And as you can see, that's the rootlets. It looks just like it will be into the soil. This is where the rootlet is, and right here on the grain, it's where it's gonna come out as a plant. We want the endosperm to grow about three-quarters of the grain` length of the grain, and that means that the protein's been broken down. Basically, you wanna activate the sugars ` the energy that this grain have stored in there ` to be able to give enough energy to the shoot of the plant to get through the soil. So you got the five-day process of the germination, and you get two days of kilning. And how you get an ale` difference between an ale and a pilsner is the temperature that you use during the kilning process. And then you got one step further, which is these malts here. This is a toffee, and that's going to the roaster. Two years ago, we imported a roaster, which is the first one in NZ, and is exactly to make different types of specialty malts, and then you get a bit more towards the colour. It's to put the spices in a beer. How you make that is you germinate the barley, like you're doing with the other malts, and then you add these germinated barley into the drum, the roaster drum, and that's gonna have temperatures in there, depending what the malts you make. So you're gonna get the grain there, you're gonna melt that sugar, and then you go up the temperature a bit more, and then you're gonna crystallise it, which gives a popcorn effect ` as you can see, the grain is really plump and real easy to crunch. And then one malt that we discovered that we can make in the roaster, which is unique for Gladfield, is the toffee malt. The toffee malt is the same process basically as the crystal malt, but we don't give the popcorn effect. So the colour is not built up on that grain, and there's quite a lot of moisture in that grain, so it's not very easy to crush. But given a beer, for, like, in a pilsner beer, which is light in colour, the toffee malt gives a lot of sugar residue, which makes the beer with more body and more head retention. So the beer's a lot pleasure to drink if you add a little bit of this malt. The reason why we have a lot of malts here is we are driven by what the craft brewers want. We wanna develop unique malts so they can lavish` the craft beer can lavish from that. Instead of us telling them, 'This is it, you know. That's the set of malts you can play with,' we say, 'No, tell us what you want. We'll make it for you.' And the classic example is our Shepherds Delight ` is a malt designed for red beers ` that we designed with conjunction with a brewer in Australia. It is really good, especially now that we're into exporting, and, you know, we're supplying so many different breweries. And we're getting a lot of really positive feedback from all around the world about our product, and, you know, it's obviously a pretty high quality product. And, uh, brewers, you know, they are having some really good success with it, and to get that real positive feedback from the customers really does make it worthwhile. For more information on these and other stories we've covered, as well as rural events and useful links, visit our website. Get there via... You can also catch this and previous episodes on TVNZ ondemand. Next time on Rural Delivery ` in Manawatu, Jill Martin has been managing farm practices on her mixed-use farm to take advantages of premiums for early-season lambs. In Southland, dairy farmer Lindsay Lewis has designed a low-flow effluent distribution system. And in Canterbury, at the far end of the consumer chain, Green Fuels Biodiesel manufactures biodiesel from waste cooking oils. Thanks for joining us. We hope to see you all again next week. Bye for now. Captions by Antony Vlug. Edited by Ashlee Scholefield. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 (BARKS, GROWLS)