Captions by Imogen Staines. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016. UPBEAT MUSIC Hello there. From the 1950s, the delivery of fertilizer and seed across farmland from the air was responsible for the rapid expansion of hill country farming in NZ. Aerial top dressing continues to be an important part of agricultural work today. This week we find out about the business of Aerospread, an innovative company developing top-dressing plane components and software applications; we see what efforts have been made at Spy Valley Wines to reduce power-and-water consumption; and we spend some time with the Piper family at Cloudy Bay Clams, pioneering the harvesting of native surf clams in Marlborough. Aerospread managing director and pilot Bruce Peterson runs a top-dressing operation. He's continually developing ideas to streamline his business and reduce costs for his customers. Many of his system improvements are in software and aircraft components. Well, we're a unique aerial top-dressing business. Anything that's dry, we'll put through and spread. Our job is basically whatever our customers require. We're really customer-focused. We're really cost-focused, and with an agricultural background, it's all about the customers and the whole agricultural big sector, at the end of the day. We've got two Crescos going, and we've got another one in the hangar that we're rebuilding with a maintenance programme, going forward. We've got a staff of pilots based in Waipukurau and Napier. And with all this health and safety stuff that's coming along, I'm actually the part-time pilot now. There's a lot more administration and paperwork, so we're, sort of, trying to do all that and do as much of that stuff as we can for the farming. You'll see on the website how we've put hazard IDs and stuff like that and made it all easy for them. I'm really passionate about the whole agricultural sector, and, uh, we've gotta keep our costs under control. And how we do that is by innovation. The costs just keep going one way, but our customers are price-takers. At the end of the day, they've gotta exit their stock and they've gotta take what they get, and it's where the money-go-round starts. And so we're really focused on anything that we can do to make it more efficient ` the better it is. I, uh, started flying in Gisborne for Fieldair and then moved on to Farmers Air, who's been one of my mentors for a long time. It's helped us away. And then, uh, in 2002 I bought my first Cresco and went as owner operator, and, uh, from there, we've bought businesses and dovetailed them together. We're servicing the central plateau and right down to Dannevirke, Pongaroa and, um, anything in between. Yeah, so... It's interesting country. Part of being, um, Aircare accredited operator is you actually got to know what your gear's doing. It's part of the process. It's independently ordered. So, we've set these up to fly across these traps. Each trap captures individual particles, and from that, we send that away to a lab. It all gets graphed, and we can work out exactly what our pattern's doing. We can manipulate our spread pattern to get it as even as we possibly can and then grow more grass for our customers. With the GPS and the other technology that we've got in there, uh, we can actually start off and know exactly what's going on from the word go to the word finish. And, uh, it'll wind up very very even, and` and it also makes it more efficient for us and more productive. The boys have been out there, and we've put a 30m row of waratahs along there and want them in, and then we've got these metre-round rings, and each one's got a funnel that goes down to a plastic bag, and so we've flown across that today. We've done 150ft ` 120 knots. We've taken barometric pressure, and so we've got a bit of science behind it for the conditions. I got the wind off the tower and what have you. So we've got a known quantity coming in there, and then from there, those plastic bags are all labelled and named which one they've come off. And then that goes to a lab, where it's all worked out ` the exact` the coefficient ` and we can` the humps and hollows of the spread pattern, if there is one there. And then we can manipulate our gear to take all those out to make it as even as we possibly can. There's things coming into play, like prop wash and other things, so there's a quite a` it takes a wee bit to work it all out. But then we know exactly what our gear's doing, and that's the whole point of it. This is a new carbon-fibre hoverbox that we've used Aero Design and Aero Composites to manufacture for us to produce the weight on the aircraft. It's, uh, means that we can actually bump up our productive load, uh, another 50-odd kilos and, uh, therefore we don't` You know, we` That's another 750 kilos an hour, roughly, on` on what we're doing. Uh, which doesn't sound a lot, but it's another way of absorbing $50 an hour of increased costs. So we've gone to a fair bit of trouble to get this right, and we've come up with the final thing now, so we can put these on. Because of the health and safety and other bits and pieces, we're trying to refer them to the website. They can just click on aerospread.co.nz, click on, um, 'map my farm', and they just type in their address. That'll pull 'em up on their approximate area. We hook into the, uh, LINZ data, which gives us your white boundary round the outside here of a block. If we use that property for example. And, uh, it gives them an approximate idea of where they are. So then they can zoom in a wee bit, and it's really simple, really. They just click on 'draw a shape'. They start on one corner of the farm, and they can just work their way round ` hold and drag. So if they wanted to do that area there, that's an inclusion rate. They can type in here the application rate, so, say, 250kg. This will give them the` the hectares of that block. And they hit save. It comes up in this colour. We use this because this is all transposed into the aeroplane, so` Colour's not everybody's choice, but it shows up really good in whatever light in the aeroplane. Then we click on, uh, if he's got a portion that he doesn't wanna do, like, it might be, uh, a strip across here, a block in here that he's gonna crop out. He can just repeat the process again, click on the drop-down, and that is an exclusion. Hit save again, and that comes up in a bright red colour. If he had some wires or something running across the paddock here or a hazard of some sort, same thing again. He just clicks on 'draw a shape'. He can run across the farm to wherever those wires are. Same thing again ` click on the drop-down. Uh, hazard. Now, he can write in here that it's wires or whatever that hazard might be. It might be a cell-phone tower or something like that. So now that map's all pretty straightforward. All he does is he comes down here and ` 'I confirm all the hazards are marked as described on the map.' So he can` He's done that. He can just drop on there. He's now gone to quite reasonable steps to be compliant with all this new health and safety legislation that's coming in, and we've got an electronic record of it. It goes into the aeroplane, it's in the office, um, and the guy's gone a` a long long way to identifying everything. When we return, we go to the Waihopai Valley to take a look at some energy-saving approaches to winemaking. UPBEAT MUSIC Welcome back. In addition to good terrain, sunlight and expertise, a lot of resources are used in creating the conditions required to produce quality wines. Many businesses seek ways of reducing these resource inputs, and Spy Valley Wines, located in Marlborough, has been doing this with great success. Water is always on our mind, and measures to decrease water use are always something we're thinking about. Power, likewise. Prices are always getting higher. Bruce Walker, who's our winery operations manager, he's been, um, really behind, um, getting power efficiencies in, um, and doing a great job. So he's` he's been following solar like a hawk, um, and as the` as the prices for the panels have decreased, um, it's actually become feasible. The biggest power usage in the winery, and in our building in particular, is refrigeration. The wine that's in these tanks, uh, we keep it inside, keep it in insulated tanks. Before we got solar, we'd run refrigeration at night for the cheaper rates. Now, with our own power, it's the opposite. We run it in the day, when it's sunny, when there's the most heat load. And so our refrigeration costs have plummeted. The power that we're using in a normal day, depending how busy it is, it can be as low as 10 kilowatts, if there's not many people here, up to over 100, if we're in the middle of harvest, but typically it's somewhere around 40. Um, so the solar panels are producing 50 kilowatts an hour. So, uh, for a reasonable proportion of the time, we'll export power back to the grid if it's a really sunny day. The bottling uses a fair chunk of power. We estimate it's around 20 kilowatts total, and then we add on to that the refrigeration. So it works out pretty well. It's quite a nice balance. Initially we were told the payback was around eight years. We're figuring it's probably closer to six and a half, seven now. We're generating more power than we thought. Our constraint in putting the amount of panels in was our roofing material. In retrospect, we'd use different roofing material and we could put as much solar as we liked on. Water efficiency is a business we, sort of, tackle on two fronts. There's the vineyard, which is by far the most important and biggest area for water efficiency, and then there's the winery. We do everything we can to minimise usage. We're using, um, around 2 litres of water per litre of wine we produce, which is, uh, quite a low figure in` in terms of the industry. Um, we` we monitor it. When we started monitoring, we found big discrepancies between our intake and our waste water. We discovered we were using more water to keep the lawns green around the winery than we were in the winery, so we changed practices. We started to use a little bit of our waste water to water the lawns. So we're cutting down on our lawn-watering, which has actually made more of a difference than anything we do in the winery. A lot of that is simple common sense and not using large amounts of water to do things. We're in the middle of January. It's been an extremely dry El Nino season ` one of our lowest rainfall records in the last 85 years. So, yeah, water conservation has been of our utmost priority this year. This time of year, we're moving into bunch closure, which is where the berries start to close up and` and grow size. And then from here on in we are looking to dry the soil moisture out to aid in the ripening and lessen the vigour of the canopy. We were very fortunate in the owners, and the original viticulturist, Pete Masters, uh, planted drought-tolerant rootstocks, and a large variety of` well, of varieties of grapes, so we weren't solely Sauvignon Blancs, so all the other varieties ` Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Riesling, Guwerz ` uh, all benefit from having a lower water, uh, levels and` and less water, so therefore the vineyard naturally requires less soil moisture. We also feel that those varieties are aided in their flavour development by having a little bit of water stress. We've got seven bores on-site, which have A-class water rights. We're also members of the Southern Valley Irrigation Scheme, which is, uh, live-pressure-fed water on-site, and we're also shareholders in the Lower Waihopai Irrigation Scheme and Lower Waihopai Dam Company. We've taken the motto during the establishment years of the vines of, uh, trying to restrict water to the vines to allow them to search deeper into the soil profile, uh, so that they have a larger root mass and have the ability to tolerate dry years on their own without us constantly topping them up with water. We use a consultancy service by Fruition Horticulture. The use neutron probes, and they monitor six sites for us of different varieties. And we also have a live telemetric probe, which gives me live data every 15 minutes. We've been going through a programme of systematically replacing drip line with new technology, which is obviously a lot more efficient in delivering the water to the vines. We get a report at the end of the year from Fruition Horticulture, uh, and on our light soils, we used approximately a third of the average of their clients for the year. Uh, and on our medium soils, we used approximately 50% of what the average for their clients for the year used in the 2014-2015 season. Yeah, we're pretty pleased with it. Sort of took us a wee bit by surprise. Just going about our normal work, and we've achieved that good result. A few years ago we were trying to minimise our environmental impact. We wanna be here for a long time. So we joined up with the ISO Standards environmental accreditation, which is the ISO 14001. We found that to be a really good system. So we'd get around as a company ` different areas ` meet up, go through things we could do to improve our efficiencies, decrease our waste. We've implemented a large number of things. One of the best things about the ISO system is that it, um, prompts you to keep finding further efficiencies. Um, so we're finding it` We're finding it more and more difficult to come up with ideas, but, um` but it's great. It's a good` great system for us to` to keep using. After the break, we head offshore to find out about gathering surf clams at Cloudy Bay. UPBEAT MUSIC Hello again. The Piper family is based in the Marlborough Sounds and runs a business harvesting native surf clams from coastal NZ. The company focuses on four commercial clam species ` Diamond Shell, Tua Tua, Storm Clam and Moon Shell. Most Kiwis know clams as the cockles or the pipis you get in estuaries. The clams we get are on the open water, right in where the surf breaks. A lot of people get, um, small Tua Tuas when they go down and do the shuffle on the beach as kids. But, yeah, it's a Mollusca bivalve, and our clams grow in the surf zone around NZ. The market for our clams is both domestic and international. We've seen a large increase in domestic sales in the last five years but also equally as large, uh, in terms of export. We export about 90%. All clams came in under the Quota Management System in 2004. We've developed a few areas in terms of increasing the Total Allowable Commercial Catch. But everything is managed under the Quota system, and it is still a developing fishery, so total, uh, catch has not been achieved yet. Our goal is to be at 5000 ton in three years. We currently do about 600 ton. Uh, we'll do about 1000 ton this year. We have lots of threats in this business. We have environmental, political. We're always at risk of having pollution events. Uh, the Christchurch earthquake, all the uh, sewage pipes got broken, so we couldn't fish there for 18 months. Um, any` any pollution that happens on land can directly affect us, but also we're` we're open to biotoxins or` or anything that may happen in the water. So to overcome this, we have a` a regular testing process. Every week we're testing flesh and water. And, uh` And we also do biotoxin testing weekly. That's a nice-looking fish, Andre. Yeah. Some, um, big MMI that are in here. Yep. Those Diamonds are lovely. Look at the lovely colour on that. We have had to develop our own technology. We worked on the concept of being able to winnow the fish into the basket. What we've done is we've developed a... hydraulic winnowing clam rake, for, uh` for a better description. We prefer the idea of it being a clam rake rather than a dredge. The connotation of dredge is always hard ` gives the concept that we're creating a lot of benthic damage, and genuinely don't believe we're having any impact on the benthic quality out here. We're creating a change to the habitat that allows us to float the fish into the basket, essentially. The density of the fish is` is significantly less than the gravelly substrate they live in, so the gravels fall through a trap, and the fish float into the basket. The reality is we don't catch everything that's there. The juveniles go through the mesh. We make sure we've got really good Venturi flows of water. It takes the juveniles directly back into the substrate, where they rebury very quickly. And there will be some adult fish that escape capture, but the good news is they're there for next time. In order for the minister to allocate annual catch entitlement, we need to be able to prove scientifically that there is sufficient biomass there to fish down and that the recruitment in growth rates are adequate to replenish what we've taken on a year-by-year basis. So we have our own purpose-built vessel. It's set up for survey work. It's jet-powered, so we can access beach easily from river mouths. We have a purpose-built dredge, and we use that for biomass study. It is, like everything else, a work in progress, but statistically we've been able to show recruitment, growth rates and parent biomass. We have areas that we dedicate to, uh, non-fishing activities, so we make sure that we've always got a` a parent biomass to reseed the beds. We are pleasantly surprised at the rate at which they recruit and recover. We're here at the Cloudy Bay Clams wet store facility. All of our live product, once it's wild harvest, is brought to this facility, where we retank it. We put it into essentially the same water as the clams come from. It's drawn in from the ocean. Once through the tanks and in this environment, they desand. Here at the wet store, it's, uh` it's a very integral part of our production, because what we do is we keep a very close monitor on quality control, which is paramount to our` to our productivity. Um, the desanding process is also very important. All of the clams, all the different species, no matter where they're harvested from ` up and down the country ` at this stage are all brought down here. They all go into the tanks. They're all monitored very carefully. Everything's sorted by hand, everything's created by hand. Our market's domestic, but internationally, which I predominantly focus on, all across Asia ` the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, the Americas. We also send as far afield as to Europe. Um, Australia is also one of our large markets at the moment as well. So, we've got the Tua Tua, which a lot of Kiwis will be familiar with, because, as I was mentioning, at a low tide, you go out and shuffle with your feet and you can harvest them in that manner. They're very unique individuals, is clams. They all have different water depths, um, quite specific to them as well. The Tua Tua will be in 1m to 3m of water. Then next out we have the Diamond Clam. The Diamond is one of our most popular for the Australian market. Incredible meat-to-shell ratio, beautiful taste ` salty, sweet, crisp. Um, they're at about 3m to 5m of water. So, a little bit deeper water than the, um` than the Diamond Clam, we've got the impressive Storm Clam, which is the largest of the species that we, uh` that we harvest. Um, and also up next to them, we have the Moon Clam. And all the species again are within` in the surf zone ` right in the very nutrient-rich, turbulent surf zone of the beaches around NZ. They all have slightly different flavour notes. The Tua Tua, as a lot of Kiwis will be familiar with, um, very good for, like, your Tua Tua fritters. Also very good, uh, raw ` raw-shucked. The, um, Diamond Clam ` the application, it's very popular with, sort of, spaghetti and clams. Sort of, you know, similar to the` the Italian dish with the spaghetti vongole. Um, the Storm Clams in Hong Kong, which is our largest market for the live Storm Clams, because of the size of it and the impressive shell, what they'll do is they'll open it, put it in the half shell a lot of the time, remove the meat, dress it as they will, put it back in the shell and then present it on the plate as a single shell per dish. For more information on these and other stories, you can visit our website via tvnz.co.nz. You can also watch this or previous episodes on TVNZ ondemand. Next week ` we take you to Cable Bay, near Nelson, where we meet a champion of public access to farmland; we discover the extent of the task facing those battling the spread of wilding pines throughout NZ; and we find out how a move to the outskirts of Blenheim by a couple of ski instructors turned into a passion for organic plums. Thanks for watching. We hope you'll join us again next time. Captions by Imogen Staines. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016.