1 Captions by Faith Hamblyn. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016. Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery. Forestry in NZ has had its share of turbulent times. But for those in the business of creating better genetics, it requires constant attention, regardless of short-term market variations. This week ` we meet the people who are creating improved varieties and genetics of pine trees for the forest industry. We learn about the NZ Ewe Hogget Competition, which identifies excellence in sheep farming and shares how that's being achieved with other farmers. And we visit Cross Hills Garden And Nursery. It's been open to the public for over 30 years. ArborGen provides genetic tree stocks to customers in NZ and Australia. The trees are bred through open and controlled pollination in nurseries or orchards throughout the country. Among the challenges is being able to provide the planting stock that customers need to continuously improve their forests. Uh, each customer has their own needs, depending on their forest site, depending on their silviculture or their forest regime that they're growing and what their end products are. This orchard produces all the controlled pollinated seed for our company. So we are self-sufficient as far as possible in controlled pollinated seed, and that enables us to then work with our customers and be able to stock the orchard with the parents that best meets their needs, um, and we're able to collect the pollen from those orchards that also meet their needs. Uh, in addition, the orchard provides the base for our varietal programme, which is effectively selecting the best of the best. We're only about a kilometre from the sea here, and so it's a good flowering site, which is critical, and it's also close to a source of irrigation from the Awatere River, and, again, irrigation is important to be able to grow good seed. Controlled pollination is about isolating the flower that's on the tree, so no external pollen can get to that flower while it's receptive. A flower is only receptive for a short period of time during July and August, and so we put a bag over the flower, isolate the flower so that no pollen can reach to it, and then we'll able to introduce pollens that we require. So that means for a control pollinated tree, that we know both the mother and the father. There's an ongoing breeding programme in NZ. There are new genetics coming through all the time, and so for genetic improvement, there are five traits or characteristics of the tree that are bred for, and they are growth, straightness, branching habit, uh, Dothistroma resistance and for wood density. And there are breeding efforts going on and trials in the forest. And from those trials, new parents are coming up all the time. So those parents are then introduced into the seed orchard, and then we have to remove the lower-ranked ones and replace them with the better genetics. We also are now introducing our varietals into the seed orchard, so these are ArborGen varietals, and they are bringing in the next level of tree improvement into our seedling stock in the future. All these trees have been tested in the forest, so we know how well they grow in terms of straightness and other wood properties. So we're not worried about what these trees look like; all we want them to do is to produce as many pine cones and as many seeds as possible. This site here is 14ha, and we have 20,000 trees ` when fully stocked, we have 20,000 trees on site here. We're constantly changing, upgrading the genetics, depending on what ArborGen want us to do, so at any one stage, there'll be trees which we're not pollinating, because the genetics has been improved, and we'll go through and mulch them, remove them, and then replant them the following year. The trees that we're growing here are grafted root stock. Um, the material on top is quite old physiologically, and the root stock is young, which gives them the vigour to grow. It means that the trees will start producing flowers within two to three years after we've planted them. These cones here were pollinated in July last year, so these are about six to seven months old. And these'll be harvested at the end of 2017. And on the same tree, we've got the crop here, which was pollinated in 2014, and we'll be harvesting these in December of this year, 2016. What we're doing here in terms of pruning is we're trying to keep the tree as low as possible, so we can do everything from the ground. You'll see on here this is last July's pollination up the top here, and this is the year before's. So the first thing we do is we make sure we've cleared around those, so we don't accidentally cut them off. And then what we're looking to do is create as many fingers coming up or potential growing tips for flowering in July of this year. So it's the complete opposite of forestry, if you like, where you want one straight stem ` we want as many stems as we can coming at a height that we can work at. Every tree in the orchard is irrigated, so it's more akin to an orchard, as opposed to a forest. We also do foliage sampling every year to identify nutrient status and apply fertiliser accordingly. And with our irrigation, we have soil-moisture probes which we monitor the, uh... the soil-moisture status and adjust the irrigation accordingly. So we can fine-tune things and make sure that the trees are as healthy and as vigorous as possible, because we are giving them a bit of a hard time with the pruning that we do. We harvest the cones by Christmas, and we bring them into the shed, and we stick them into crates, making sure that we pick them so that the genetic integrity is still intact, we know where it's come from, and then we leave them in the shed to air-dry. And then April, May, we start cone processing, where we'll put them into a kiln and dehumidify them for a few days, until their moisture content is down to a level we can crack them. And then we put the cones into a kiln and crack them at a fairly high temperature for about eight hours, and they crack open. So that's the unopened harvested cone, and once they've been through the cracking process, the tines open up. And you end up with the seeds in there. Obviously, we can't do that with every cone, so we have a machine that we put them through, like a concrete mixer, where they go in. It spins them, and it has slots at the bottom, and the seeds fall out. The cones travel on through into a bin and are disposed of, and then seed goes through a cleaning process. The first stage is to remove the wings. Each seed has a wing, which in nature helps it fly and disperse. So we use a concrete-mixer-type machine with a little bit of water, dampness, which the wing sticks to, and the seed comes away. So that's the first process is to separate them. We then take it to a sizing machine, which will sort the seed by size and also remove any twigs or branches or anything left in it. And then finally, we ended up with seed, but we had a problem with dead seed and live seed. So we have an air-blowing machine, which sorts the seed based on its weight. And the final product is that we end up with seed like this, which is basically our finished product. We bucket it up and send it away to ArborGen's Te Teko headquarters, and then it's sent out to the nurseries, where it's sown in the nursery, and 12 months later, you have the wee seedlings, which go into the forest. So, 1kg of seed that we produce from here would produce anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 seeds, which is enough to plant 20ha to 30ha of forest out on the hillside. So you can see the crop's doing really well here. Oh yeah. They look good, don't they? Forestry is ticking along at the moment. And I think the future is really in focusing on genetic improvements, so that the product that does come out of the forest has a wider range of applications. And because we're looking at it on a 30-year timeframe, then the investment that's being made now in genetics won't be seen for 30 years. But if you don't invest in those genetics now, then, um, in 30 years' time, you may have difficulty selling your log products or whatever. So it's quite important. When we return, we find out what it takes to win the NZ Ewe Hogget Competition and what it means for those involved. 1 Welcome back. The NZ Ewe Hogget Competition is held every year. It's the premier sheep award for the country, identifying the sheep farmers with top breeding, feeding and selection programmes. Bevan and Wendy Hopcroft farm in northern Southland and had entered the competition four times before winning the title in 2015. The NZ Ewe Hogget Competition started off in southwest Otago 25, 26 years ago. And it was introduced to try and encourage farmers to evaluate their own stock, and then take advantage of the judges' comments and improve their own production and profitability from that. 19 years ago, it became a national event. There's different criteria within the judging scoresheet, and 50% of those marks go to production. Um, 20% go to the phenotype, the true worth of the breed of the animal. 15 points go to the selection criteria breeding objectives of the entrant, and 15 points for wool quality. So you put all those points together, and you get a fairly good cross section of what a sheep flock is all about. A great example of where we are today are Bevan and Wendy, as this year's national winners. Whether they like it or not, the rules state that they should be prepared to have a field day, which has just been completed, 240 people there. Out of those 240 people, everybody would go home with at least one idea of how they could improve their own, uh, business; and obviously, not the same point, but they will pick up from, uh, a field day such as that things that they can take home and fit into their business to which best suits them. So that gives you this information-sharing-type thing. Sheep-farming-wise, we try and get as many lambs on the ground as possible and get them away as quickly as possible. We start late November. We split wean ` start with singles, and on their birthdates, go right though to... to early January weaning on birthdates. And we try and have half them killed... by about the 20th of January,... is our aim, so that we're well and truly ahead of the dry. In the four years we've been in the competition, our bottom line has lifted quite a bit. And a lot of it's to do with the competition ` just learning things off other farmers, the judges will say a comment. I was getting second or third there for the first three years. And I thought, 'Wouldn't it be quite nice to win my breed section?' So I hung in there till the bitter end and managed to win my breed section as well as the overall one, which we were rapt with. A few things I've probably done differently ` hogget lambing, I leave the ram out a bit longer. Instead of 18 days, we've gone to 24, which has taken... We probably get another 100, 150 lambs out of the hoggets, which is quite financially rewarding. It's stressful at lambing time, but just financially rewarding on a small place like this. We've changed fertiliser practice ` we're probably growing close to 10% more grass just by tweaking our fertiliser budget a bit more. Um, so everything's getting fed that much better, and it's flowed right through to scanning. You know, our scanning last year jumped up 17% ` same breed of sheep, uh, just more feeding. These are the Textra hoggets that won the competition. And they go to a Textra ram and Dorper rams. So they put out at 60:1. They scanned 112%. Everything went to the ram. All of them, the 650, scanned 112%, and we got 90%, so we're rapt with that. That's about as good as we've got. Ram only out for 20 days, so the hogget lambing's done and dusted by the time the ewe lambing's finished. They went to the ram at 53kg. We don't breed from any of the lambs. We wean them after Christmas, in the New Year, 5th of January, and normally would get around that third of the lambs off mum out of the hoggets, so, yeah, just by leaving them on mum an extra 2.5, three weeks, we can get a weaning draft out of them. We have a pick out of the singles, take anything that's over 34.5, kill the lambs, and any works ewes go out of them too, and then the rest run back with their mothers till the last day of kill, just before Christmas. And then we officially wean them then. We normally get about 250, 300 out of them this time round out of 650, 700. And then just before Christmas, we get another couple of hundred. So we end up killing about 500 lambs out of the singles, so there's only 250-odd left after that. We're missing out tailing out the singles ` speeds up the tailing quite a bit. And, uh, we find very little less dagging. We're killing 75%, 80% of them off mum, so you're dealing with 20% after Christmas with tails on ` not too big a deal. Tall fescue, we've found that the great thing here ` grass grub don't like it, deep-rooted, likes the drier climate, so we've gone a more tall fescue way. Wintering time, we winter on swedes. But upping the new grass, we're now putting 10% of new grass a year. That's made a huge difference to lambs gone off mum. So, yes, yeah, tall fescue's a big one. Bevan and Wendy have made it a goal of theirs to succeed, in which they have obviously done very well, and not only score in one of those criteria that we were talking about, such as production ` they have scored extremely well over the whole point-scoring spectrum, so very strong right across. And they've adjusted their business to ` in some degree ` to suit the competition or to try and get a little bit better, the benchmarking thing, and they've finally succeeded in what they set out to do. When we return, we'll be in the garden at Cross Hills. 1 TENSE MUSIC (SIGHS) BEEPING, INDISTINCT SPEECH LOUD CLANGING CLATTERING CAR ALARM CHIRPS TENSE MUSIC 1 Hello again. Diversification is a path taken by many farmers in an effort to survive economic cycles. This family business began as a sheep and beef operation. Three decades ago, the grounds were developed with exotic trees and shrubs, and the garden at Cross Hills was open to the public. Today the business incorporates the farm, the gardens covering 7ha, a rhododendron nursery, a cafe and an annual fair attracting thousands of visitors. We've started off with a bare palette, really. Our farm's 500 acres, another 100 acres added to it from way back in the '30s, quite intensively farmed. We've got about 18 acres in the garden now, and all that started from Dad going on a trip overseas in 1969 and coming home and saying to my brother and myself we need to diversify, cos farming's not gonna be good forever. Originally, just the homestead garden, which was planted in the '50s, and then we planted another garden where there was an old orchard, opened it up to the public for the first four years, five years, and then slowly increased the publicity. It probably follows on from the fact that Dad was an avid inventor and liked to do things first. I dunno, just an uncanny knack of being first with things in the district. And, uh, um... And we believe that we were probably the first private garden to open in NZ. The main part of the garden was planted in 1972, and then, sort of, probably every three years after that, we added a new dimension to it. And the redwoods behind me was planted in about 1985, so they're a bit of an indication of how well things grow here. And then they're still going. The sculpture is made out of Oamaru stone, and it's called The Knot. I got it from a gentleman in Whanganui, Keith Grinter. He was reluctant to part with it, put it that way, and when he did part with it, then I had the problem of getting it home and had to put it in the ute, on a rubber mattress and handle it very carefully. And just straight away, it was a good fit to go with this Mondo grass that we've got here. There's a few dollars' worth there. We're milling timber from trees that our father planted in 1970, and we're getting some beautiful timber, clear timber, and we're selling that on Trade Me and other sources. Most of the buildings on the farm have all been made from macrocarpa. Visitors numbers ` about 2500 now,... and I think a lot of people are holding off, waiting for our fair now, for our country fair, which we hope to get into the thousands this year for fair number seven. We go up to these ones over here? I've got the other map, that tells me about 6m gaps, and that's the 18m. Yeah, probably that far off the fence, yep. We're getting ready for our annual Cross Hills Gardens country fair, which is on the third Saturday in November every year. So we're busy just here marking out our sites. We've about 180 now from all over the country, so a pretty big organisational job. The fair probably was generated ` um, our elder son, Henry, was born in November, and so between breastfeeding, I used to come out here and walk through the garden, um, and I was off work, obviously, at the time, and so was looking for perhaps something to keep my mind occupied. And we'd always, sort of, talked about perhaps using the garden for something else, and so that's, sort of, where the fair was born. But the idea is to promote the gardens and utilise it and perhaps bring in other people that, you know, you don't have to just have a passion for gardens; you can actually come to Cross Hills and enjoy it for something else for that day. We were quite overwhelmed. The first year, I think we got 1700 people, and we're up to about between 5500, 6000 now. The first fair, obviously, it was one of the challenges is trying to, you know, convince stallholders to come to what they think is the middle of nowhere. Um, but, no, yeah, we just, sort of, worked with people on that, um, and, yeah, now, I mean, I've got six stallholders trying to get in today, and we're four days out, so it's very popular. We're in the nursery at the moment. Shade houses here popping out behind us here. This is where we grow them. So these are taken as cuttings in January, February and grown here for a year. Then they go down to the nursery in Kimbolton ` we've got 10 acres of nursery down there. And they grow on for another two years, and then that's how we get our saleable plants. So three-year-old plants, we start selling them. We grow varieties that other people don't grow. And we graft as well, which a lot of people are still doing, is grafting. Ones that don't grow by cuttings, we graft, so, yeah, just a bit trickier to do. We're prominently growing rhododendrons, deciduous azaleas and evergreen azaleas. That's what we specialise in. Did used to grow a few other things, but we just specialise in rhodos and azaleas now. It works in well with farming. Propagating's done in the summer, just still gotta shift the sheep and that sort of thing, but wintertime's quiet on the farm, so that's when the nursery side of things takes off and you start digging and freighting out, so mail-order side of things. In terms of the rhodos, mail-order side, we do a catalogue, print that in May, June each year and send it out to all our customers, and then mail-order website, that's getting huge now, we've built a big website. So we grow about 350, 400 varieties of rhodos and azaleas, so they're all listed on the website. We've got a good search engine on there, so people can pick out whether they want a 2m-growing rhodo or a 1m-growing rhodo, what colour, that sort of thing, so that's the main way we sell them now and the plant centre. That's this time of year, October, November. We start selling in June, and we finish in the end of December, basically. And so everything's grown in the open ground, so we grow them in open ground so we don't have to be potting up. We've got really good soil as well, so we are able to do that here. We spread it between the family, and then we've got Jerry, who's four days a week, and Margaret in the office. She's been with us 40-odd years, so we share it all, do it all ourselves and, yeah, get a bit of outside help when we need it. But apart from that, yeah, it's just all manual work, and I enjoy that. For more information on these and other stories, you can visit our website, which you'll find at... You can also watch this and previous episodes you might have missed on TVNZ On Demand. Next week ` we find out about efforts to combat an invasive tree pest, the giant willow aphid, in Hawke's Bay. We visit Broadlands Station in Manawatu, of which was said is an excellent example of multigenerational farming for environmental stability and success. And we find out about the production of lavender oil at NZ Lavender in mid-Canterbury. Thanks for watching. Please join us again next time. Captions by Faith Hamblyn. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016.