UPBEAT MUSIC Captions by Imogen Staines. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016. Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery. There are many farmers who experience stress through circumstances beyond their control, such as weather events or unstable international markets. While most get through these times of pressure, there are a few who use the opportunity to completely rethink their approach to farming. This week ` we spend time with Marlborough farmer Doug Avery and learn about his very personal experiences in readjusting to succeed in his dry-land environment. We also hear how those experiences opened up a new venture helping to encourage resilience in farmers around the country. And we find out about work underway at Plant & Food Research that could bring about a revolution in pipfruit orchard management. Marlborough farmer Doug Avery's journey has seen him change from feeling like a victim of his environment to thriving in it. For many years he struggled with low rainfall, but he successfully adapted his management practices to suit an increasingly dry climate. Bonavaree's 1500ha, about 25% of it planted in lucerne or lucerne-mix pastures. A lot of, uh, dry ` very dry ` Marlborough hill country, which is, sort of, on permanent environmental watch. Few nice native gullies. Our son, Fraser, runs the business. I'm just a director in the company now and, uh, got a stock manager, a shepherd general, tractor driver, and, um, we, uh, employ a lot of contractors. Uh, the business is based around about 50% sheep, 50% cattle ` breeding lambs and, uh, selling prime, fattening Friesian bulls, fattening steers that are produced from our own cows. A big component of dairy support in the winter time. We, uh, can bring up to a thousand cows in here in the wintertime from dairy farms, and we do, uh, dry dairy cows to put back into the market. So pretty wide base, yeah. Big change from being just a pure breeding property to, uh, having a lot of options, so we can always be moving that around. There's a saying ` 'If you look at things in a different way, 'the things that you look at will be different.' And, uh, we started to focus on drilling down into really what happens in farming. So we used to think that I was a farmer of Corriedale sheep, and we ran them. Today we are farmers of water, so our whole focus is on ` 'We get very little water here. 'How do we use that water? What is the highest return that we can get from that H2O?' And we've got it going so well now that we sort of look at it as H3O. We're getting a bit of extra out of every, uh, litre of water that falls on this property. Resilience is a word that I like to focus on now, because when you actually start to thinking about how resilient you are, you start focusing on the things that matter to that concept. Uh, we used to get knocked around every time Marlborough got dry, like it's been the last two years. Uh, now we have a system that returns high profits even in those times. So, uh, resilience is about learning to bounce forward from your troubles. So in the old days, people used to say to me, 'Oh, Doug, you know, we've had a terrible drought, bounced back.' Uh, what we like to do now is to be, um, so conscious of where we are in the game all the time that we have the ability to suck it in, to hold through these tight times and then to leap out and bounce forward and be better than we've ever been before. And, uh, we're just experiencing that wonderful feeling again now. Lucerne is a big part about it, but also we've got other plant systems ` like, we've got fodder beet; we've got subterranean clover; we've got, uh, fallowing systems, where we transfer water from one season to the other. And we use plants like Omaka barley and dry corn and triticale and things like that to, uh, produce high-quality feed in other times of the year. But greater than that even still was to change our systems so that they're more flexible and to have computer systems which manage those processes so that we are way ahead of the game. So we run here the, um, FarmIQ model, which is basically a history` a recording process of what we've been doing ` paddocks and all that sort of stuff. And that is blended with Farmax, which is the most important tool that this farm uses in terms of farm management. That allows us to constantly be months ahead of ourselves on the viability of the programme that we've got running forward. Last year I (CHUCKLES) embarked upon a crazy roadshow venture right across NZ. Uh, Wendy and I ` my wife and I ` set up a company called Resilient Farmer. And we realised that what we'd learnt here has had a relevance to pretty much every other farmer in NZ. And, uh, last year I did 66 presentations in NZ, Australia and Argentina and spoke to about 6500 people. It's the most valuable year's work I've ever done in my life, um, and individual farmers have, uh, responded to it in an incredible way. Um,... it's a very very satisfying feeling to be able to share your own personal journey from basically failure was ` what we were facing here 17 years ago ` uh, to the incredible successful business that we have here today. DOGS BARK, WHISTLING There's one thing that's as certain as life and death is the sigmoid curve. Every business grows, and every business will fail if left unattended. And, uh, when you're feeling that your business is doing incredibly well, you need to be introducing new thinking and examining what's going on and looking around you. And the word is 'building your resilience'. Resilience isn't a thing that, uh, you get out of bed on a Monday morning and think, 'By Friday I'm gonna have this business resilient.' It's a state of mind; it's a mode of operandi. I spend most of my time now as a storyteller, so we've built a beautiful team of incredibly competent people here. And I` I look back on my life with a little bit of sadness in that, uh, I spent most of my life doing $25-an-hour work. Uh, but if I can spend an hour or two with a farmer today and help him learn how to double or quadruple the economic returns that he's doing without infecting the, uh` affecting the environment or without requiring a hell of a lot of money, uh, I think that's a higher-value work than anything I've ever done in my life. When we return, we'll hear more about Doug's farming strategy for Bonavaree. UPBEAT MUSIC Welcome back. In January this year, we visited inspirational Marlborough farmer Doug Avery. Doug is using carefully selected crops and plants to get extraordinary results from his land and his livestock. This crop back here is fodder beet. We've got 12ha of that this year. We're always looking to try to find better ways of utilising water and also techniques of transferring water from one season to another. And, uh, fodder beet's around NZ. It's turning out to be one of those amazing crops which we've known about for years. I grew it in 1971, as a young man leaving school for pigs. Um, and, you know, I understand why we didn't carry on growing it, because we didn't understand that we could actually do it in a dry-land situation. So, that crop there was planted in October, and it's had virtually no rain since, and we've achieved that. In the last few weeks, we've had quite a bit of rain, and, uh, that will now kick on. So some of the, uh, seed hasn't even germinated in that crop behind us. But the simple fact of the matter is it is more efficient at converting water to usable feed than probably any other plant that we use ` even more efficient that lucerne maybe. What grass tends to do is it has a` a bit of a cycle. If you've got irrigation or if you've got consistently good water, uh, you can really rely on reasonable quality. Uh, but the crops and the plants that we use don't have that as a backing. We have to go to stuff that we can grab hold of water and use it as a high-value feed at the times we need it. So we're not about creating high-value feed all the time, but there's certain times, like, sort of, at mating, and then in the springtime when we're growing lambs, we absolutely need high-quality feed. Now, a crop like this may fit into our winter, where we can utilise it to feed an awful lot of animals on a very small part of the farm for a, uh, specific period of time. So Fraser always describes our system as being like a, uh, jigsaw puzzle, and you need to learn how all the bits fit in so that the picture that you've got in front of you, which we're always looking down the road at ` that we wanna create ` we understand how the bits go in to create those results at that time. So the long game of that is that we now understand how to manage our difficult times without coming to a stop. The way it works is that's still got a sizeable taproot, and if you look at a lucerne plant, or if you look at that plant out there, it's got what I would say was the equivalent of a solar panel hanging up at the sun. So the sun's full of energy, and that, uh, big leaf that each one of those plants has got is capable of converting energy into usable material for us at a rate that makes, uh, other plants, like grass and that, just pathetic. Grass has a got a little, skinny thing like that. When it gets dry, it gets all waxed up and it doesn't perform particularly well. The plants that we use have a got a` yeah, they've got horsepower, they got energy, they are energy suckers, and they turn in into opportunity. So, there's a lot higher costs in these systems, but, uh, in the year that just finished, we had the highest net profit that the business has ever recorded in a year where didn't get 400 mils of rain. These are our ewe lambs, I suppose you'd still call them here now. There's about a thousand out there. Uh, they're up with the best we've ever had, which is kinda cool given we've had one of the most severe years for 17 years. We'll push them like hell until just before the ram goes out, and with hoggets, it pays to plateau them then, so we'll get them growing. Should be able to get them up round that 52-, 53-kilo mark by mating time. Then we plateau them. When you plateau hoggets, that tells their little insides that, 'Oh gee, I'm a fully grown young lady now. I'm ready to think about producing babies.' Uh, and that's the great thing about a crop like lucerne ` is we can grow them from birth to weaning so well. Uh, it's easy now for us to, uh, finish that job. So that way you, um, give yourself a really good chance at high fertility. We had to find a crop that could survive without dying when it got dry, and, um, lucerne uses, uh` If you grow just pure grass, uh, 1mm of water will convert into, um, 13kg of dry matter per hectare. If you add clover to the grass swathe, the nitrogen effect of the, um` of the cl` that clover produces will accelerate the conversion rate to about 18kg to 20kg of dry matter per hectare per millimetre of rain. Uh, lucerne, uh, does 28kg per hectare per millimetre of rain ` over double. That's where the, um, support processes of our computer software come into it. We have a, uh` an understanding now of the soil moisture levels that we have at any given time and the kind of response that we can get from a plant like that. This area's the highest evapotranspiration of anywhere in NZ, and so when you get to this time of the year, we lose, uh, approximately ` if we've got it available ` 5mm to 6mm of moisture a day. So we got 35 mils the other day, and that's huge for a crop like this, but for a grass crop it really means nothing, because by the time the grass starts to think, 'Ooh, I'd quite like to grow,' it's all gone again. So you just live with this ever-lost opportunity. What we did, uh, was set out to create settings where no matter what the weather gods throw at us, we can turn it into profit. I, uh, describe that often to people as being like peaks and valleys. So when we have wet years here, the peaks are really easy to achieve, but historically for my` our family, which has been nearly here for 100 years, the dry patches, which have occurred ever since we've been involved, are frequent and debilitating. So they were constantly causing us to have to stop and then rebuild energy again, and we missed the opportunities. So we call those bad times our valleys. And what our energy sources are all about is making it so that we can manage the tough side of our business, uh, and go through there without it affecting us too badly. We'll be back soon to look at research underway into what could be a radical shift for the pipfruit industry. 9 LAID-BACK MUSIC PLAYS DING! PA: A message for Michael from your wife ` remember, get the screw base. For brightness, get about 1100 lumens, and warm white colour. When switching to energy-efficient bulbs, there are three things to remember ` base, brightness and colour. How you remember is up to you. Visit energywise.govt.nz to find out more. UPBEAT MUSIC Hello again. NZ already has some of the highest yields for apple production per hectare in the world. Now Plant & Food research, along with key NZ fruit industry organisations, is trialling a new way of growing apples that will potentially double the yields for our top varieties. NZ orchards are considered the most productive in the world, from world benchmarking, and they, uh, have something like 60 tons per hectare average productivity, but our best producers currently produce around 100 tons per hectare ` some of them even 110 tons per hectare. But the physiological theory around utilisation of sunlight tells us that if we can capture the majority of the sunlight, we can actually increase productivity probably to somewhere between 160 tons and 200 tons per hectare. That's the scientific question that we're trying to attack. This project actually involves more than just apples and pears. It does involve cherries and apricots, and there's a dimension in kiwi fruit as well, but here we're talking about apples, predominantly. It's the model system that we're using. It got underway two and a half years ago, uh, with a` a major grant from MBIE ` from the government ` and a lot of co-funding support from our industry organisations, in particular Pipfruit NZ. We got a lot of interest. We do have some orchard companies now who are planting trial plantings of something like a hectare. Um, we've got one orchard with` with one of our new pears, who's actually planted four hectares, uh, on the basis of two years of data and, uh` (CHUCKLES) and, uh, being reasonably courageous, um, and interested in this. Um, we are getting very important biological information every year. Um, and I can say from that information ` particularly from our measurement of light relations in the canopy, light interception, light distribution ` that, um, even at only` our oldest trees are only 3 years old, but we know we are on track physiologically for where we're headed for, so so far so good. What we're trying to do is to take our productivity potential up towards the biological limits. We're here in a typical intensive dwarf-tree orchard. We've actually spent quite a lot of time developing this tree structure. It's called a tall spindle. It's a simple central leader with uncomplicated branches coming off up the tree ` not too many of them ` about six per metre of canopy. These, um, are very good for capturing light and also distributing light within the tree, which is really important for fruit quality. There's quite a wide grass strip, and these trees, they'll grow to 3.5m tall but we planted about 3m apart in the road. And that's, um, partly because of the tree design but also, actually, for vehicular access. We gotta get big tractors, um, large bins, more particularly, um, mulches for prunings and` and crop sprayers. And this is a reasonably complicated canopy for spray penetration and for things like that. So we need to design the tree in a way that is practical to work with but also can increase the amount of light that we can capture into the apple tree and grow the fruit. The biggest single thing that's gonna change that is bringing the rows closer together. Here at the new system in its third year, so it's the second cropping year. And here we're also looking at a row-spacing of 2m between rows, uh, which is actually a wider spacing than we're using, and we're looking at the light rig. This is how we take measurements of the amount of sunlight that the trees are using. We actually measure not the light that the trees are using but the light that the tree doesn't use. We measure with that array of sensors, uh, the light that misses the tree canopy, and we compare that to above-canopy sensor, which is measuring the total amount of radiation coming in. We can't extrapolate to a full mature tree yet, but we're at about 50% canopy fill now, and our` our closest spacings are running at about 42% to 45% light interception. If we do the arithmetic, that means that at a full canopy, we could be up as high as 90%. That would be exceptional. (CHUCKLES) We're in the new planting system. These are 3-year-old trees. We've designed our tree into a two-dimensional tree ` almost like a grapevine. The first thing that a grower would notice coming in here is claustrophobia, (CHUCKLES) because there's only 1.5m between the rows. This is the most extreme close-spacing that we're using. It is a type of espalier, but it's an espalier designed with a lot of physiological knowledge and information. There's a lot of discussion around ` 'Is the whole trellis system and the tree system strong enough 'to carry the kind of crops we're talking about?' That's a very good question that the growers are asking, and, um, we will find out. Uh, we think that we're going to have enough structure and enough strength within the tree and within the trellis system. We got very big anchors that we retrofitted when we realised we needed to put some serious support in there to maintain the tension on the trellis. There is a surprising amount of strength in the cordon structure itself. It acts like a` almost like a fishing rod under tension, so it has a lot of tensile strength. We have some ideas of some supplementary support in here, which would be very cheap if we actually needed it in the distance farthest from each of the tree trunks. But we're reasonably confident that we will be able to carry the fruit load. The other thing that growers immediately say ` and it's a very good, practical question ` 'How do I get my bin down here to pick my fruit into?' 'How do I get my tractor and sprayer and mower down here?' And, uh, they're good questions, because they won't fit here at the moment, so when we talk about a whole system's change, we do include needing to rethink some of the equipment and how we do jobs. Um, we would like to think that we could move to lower horsepower equipment, because it's much smaller. Our spraying technology can change, because our target is very close and very uncomplicated compared to a tree. We're about to move into` into getting advice on that from our spray technologists. So lots` there's lots and lots of things other than just the tree and the fruit to worry about. As we move forward with the scientists in developing the system, we'll be asking, 'Have we got data on how we need to manage these trees, 'what we feed them, what we give them for water, their water requirements and everything?' But in a way, the tree is still the tree; it's just we're changing the way it grows. So it still should` The requirements should be similar, but we just might need to tweak it. The interest in the industry is quite immense. They're not running out and saying, 'This is the way we have to go,' but they are interested in looking and learning about it. The tag groups that we set up ` we started with a number of invites just to get some people in and get them going, and then other people have approached us and said, 'Can we come along?' And it's definitely open-door policy; anyone can come who wants to. Right now we are currently ranked as the most competitive industry in the world, uh, for` in global means. We're in the top 10 exporting nations for pipfruit, um, and we're very innovative. So everyone else is trying to catch us up. We're doing very well at the moment, but we know we can do better, and this is gonna help us do better. If we just, uh, sit back and kick our feet up and say we're just simply the best, before we know it, we're an ageing rock star and someone else has gone and singing a new tune and doing it better. For more information on these and other stories, visit our website, which you can get to via tvnz.co.nz. You can also watch this or previous episodes you've missed on TVNZ ondemand. Next week ` we look at work underway that's measuring root-zone nutrient losses across arable, vegetable and forage systems; we visit the Harwood family's multifaceted farming operation in Golden Bay; and we meet a couple who've spent over 30 years developing their commercial almond business in Marlborough. 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.