UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC Captions by Alana Drayton. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello and welcome to Rural Delivery. In recent years, wool has become something of the neglected child of NZ's primary sector, but there are still those who are championing its many attributes. This week, we discover how high-value materials are being created from NZ wool at Texus Fibre. We take a tour around the vast glasshouse and orchard enterprise of Southern Belle and find out about the journey from traditional dairy farming to artisan cheese and milk production at Wangapeka Cheese. Texus Fibre is a business that's been set up to create high-value materials out of wool. They're using technology to build on the unique characteristics inherent in wool to create textiles for industrial use. CEO Nick Davenport explains. We're focusing on, initially, respiratory filtration. It's filtering the air that you breathe. We've identified a need in the world where there are millions of people who have a problem, and that problem is they don't have a choice, when they step outside, what to breathe. There's only the air, and the air is polluted, and it's hurting them, and it's killing them. And so the World Health Organization in 2015 attributed over 5 million deaths annually to atmospheric air pollution. So it's a big problem. We started looking at this about 2010, thinking of the possibilities in contracting AgResearch to do it. For the last four or five years, we've been studying wool and what the differences are and what contributes to the differences in performance in our filters of various types, various treatments, on the wool. And what we've decided is that the only way to get the best possible product is to control the genetic supply that we receive. For the last few years now, we have been actually manufacturing filter elements for regulated air filters in the workplace health and safety field. And those are being exported into South Africa, into Australia. And out of that technology, out of that learning, and out of that qualification in our system, we're taking it to the next level. We started it off on a shoestring budget within another company and spun it out three years ago. At the point in time, we got support from, uh, the GD1 investment fund, um, and then we went through an investment round last year ` an angel investment round. And so we have about 20 investment partners, uh, NZ Venture Investment Fund, Sparkbox, GD1. And a number of other, um, investors, both in NZ and offshore, have come on behind us. This process here is roll-stock of wool-felted material as filter media which has come off our plant in Christchurch. So we ship it up here to Auckland, where the plant is, to convert it and it's cut here into individual filter pieces. I guess the special thing about this is the electrostatic performance of wool. So, it has an amazing propensity to be a virtual dust magnet. So it's highly chargeable, positively chargeable. In fact, it's the most positively chargeable natural fibre that exists. And what that does is it enables it to capture the very very fine, harmful particles but without putting a lot of breathing resistance in the process. So, we create a product which is very light and lofty and very easy to breathe through, but at the same time, very very effective at capturing dust. And not only that, there are additional properties which just naturally exist in wool which will remove other toxins and also make it naturally bacteriostatic. We card it in our lambswool carding machine. We take the carded batt, give it some slight precompression and then run it between two plates, which are perforated, and through those perforated holes run barbed needles, and those needles intertwine and lock together the fibres, and that's what gives us that densification and creates a needle-punched felt so we can go from thick to thin. We'll take that into the line, and we can make a very simple sample of a filter at an early stage which we can then take and test immediately. This process here replicates what we can do on our production line. What this device does is it tells you what the breathing resistance is and the particle capture at the same time and gives you a graphical representation. The particles we're filtering are the ones that are actually harmful to health. You can't see them. In actual fact, the size is between 0.2 and 0.4 of a micron. That tiny. So it's very very important to be able to measure that, and that's why this device is very useful. This is a Palace 1000 HEPA Filter. So it's a high-efficiency particle-analysing machine which lets us know the efficiency and the pressure drop ` that's the particle-capturing efficiency and the effort of breathability in one device but at all levels of particulates and all ranges. And it's a certified piece of equipment. They're part of our research and science programme. And, for example, the absorption of formaldehyde is a very very topical subject in interiors and for people's lives. And we know that wool is a very good absorber of formaldehyde. How well that works in a face mask is what we're quantifying now. We started off manufacturing filter elements for health and safety in the workplace canisters. So, these little things are little devices which fit into a respirator mask as a disposable canister. So that's where we` we learned our trade. So the next thing we've looked at is what we called the anti-pollution mask market for those people in environments that have difficulty breathing the air. So how are these results going, Sean? We find ourselves, uh, matching the competitors in filtration efficiency, but we always beat them in, uh, the breathing effort. Spot on. Hitting the result. Yes. What we found by researching in the market is people have taken standard filter media out of air conditioning or other markets and just put it into masks, and, uh, it's created a number of problems, we believe, for the users, because it's very hard to breathe through, and that's where we saw the opportunity. So what we've done is we've designed our media to be the most easiest to breathe in, and what that means is the designer can completely redesign the mask to make the most breathable mask that's available. Now, these masks are not on the market yet. We are working with people at the moment who are designing masks ` the next generation of masks ` which are anticipated to be in the market next northern winter. The very small sector of respiratory filtrational protection of individuals outside of the workplace we estimate at around US$1.8 billion, growing in excess of 5% to 7% annually. We're excited. It's a huge journey. We don't underestimate the tasks that we're taking on. But we are taking on the world with new products and taking on synthetic materials and replacing them with the functionality of a natural material. That won't be to everybody's liking, but it will be to some, and that's what makes us really excited ` that opportunity and that chance to really make a difference. And if` if this works, it'll really make a difference to sheep farming in NZ. When we return, we meet Frans de Jong, chairman of the NZ Feijoa Growers Association, at his business, Southern Belle. UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC Welcome back. Southern Belle Orchard is owned by the de Jong family. It has around 3000 feijoa trees and 3000m2 of greenhouses, growing mainly capsicums. The company was the supreme winner of the 2015 Waikato Ballance Farm Environment Awards. Frans de Jong is also chair of the NZ Feijoa Growers Association. Uh, growing up in Friesland in the north of the Netherlands and after a career in agricultural chemistry, we moved to NZ when I was 45 because I wanted to go back and get my hands dirty. And so we bought this place in 2003, and it was a business which had a whole fruitcake, you could say, of fruit. When I first bought it, I thought, 'Oh, we've got all these crops nicely coming behind each other,' but, actually, they were coming across each other, and it was a bit of a nightmare, really. So we decided to cut it down to only two main things to concentrate on which is the feijoas and the greenhouses. It became my little baby to see if we can get these feijoas overseas. A lot of challenges. One is the shelf life. You can actually get four or five weeks out of a feijoa. The other thing is the insect problems. So we're working with Massey University. We worked with Plant & Food to get these things sorted. We put our feijoas on espalier. We prune it back hard all the time. We get good light levels in it. We get excellent fruit set. Birds can go through it to pollinate them. So, yeah, I believe it's a really good system. We've always been quite forward with trying new things. We've been working with, uh, a company in Waharoa for a while, and then we started to move on to the Kinsey method, which is really focusing on the microelements in the soil. What we do ` we touch-pick the fruit, which means that we feel if it's ready. We tend to take the fruit when the jelly is just starting to clear. Even though that same fruit might be ready within a week and fall on the ground and then only last for four days, when we take it off premature, then it will last for four or five weeks before it gets ripe. It is a big challenge, because the pickers, it might take them three days to learn what has to be done, but it takes them two weeks before they actually get a bit of speed. We have four different coloured buckets. We've got 1500 of them. We use the red one for the fruit that has actually dropped on the ground. So that doesn't go into export, because that would be really dangerous, of course. So we have red buckets to pick the fruit off the ground. and the colours ` green, yellow and blue ` are for the touch-picked fruit. Two main challenges for the feijoas to get 'em into the export market are the insect problems you might see. There's, uh, quite a deep calyx on the feijoa which can contain the mealy bug, which is not a problem for the fruit at all, but it is a problem when it arrives in the US or Australia. Uh, the other challenge is to get a decent shelf life out of feijoas. The first one is addressed by blowing the calyx. We've got airguns hanging there to actually blow the little corky roof out of the calyx stem. It also takes care of the mealy bug. Uh, before that, we actually dip with a pyrethrum solution ` a natural pyrethrum solution ` uh, to kill insects that are on the surface of the fruit. After that, we do a final check here in the boxes as well to see if we see, still, some insects running around. So it's a quite finicky process. When there's a problem at the other end, that's usually an insect problem. Then if that happens in the US, for instance, it can be destroyed, which means we have to pay the bill for that. We've been exporting since the time we arrived here ` basically 13 years now. And we've had all of these things happen to us. So that's why we actually came up with the solutions like dipping with pyrethrum ` to be more secure. It is always still 99.5% that you, sort of, get it right, I think. Uh, another option that we're looking at at the moment is with water-blasting, uh, with Plant & Food. So we're going to do a little trial this year and do a more extensive trial next year to see if we can get` if water-blasting can get rid of all the insects. We plant in August, and it takes another two-and-a-half months, and then we get our first capsicums by the end of October, early November. And that carries on for another eight months. This is mainly local market, and that means about, sort of, 85% of the production goes into the wholesale, mainly to Auckland. The 15% that's left is being sold on the farmer's markets in Tauranga and Hamilton. We use predator insects in the greenhouse, which is not uncommon, but there's another thing we do. We use` Instead of a sterile root zone, we use compost extract in there to get more microbes ` soil microbes, if you like ` into the root zone, and we feed that with seaweed and humic acid and sometimes a little bit of molasses if it needs to. And that helps to create a very healthy soil environment which then means that we don't use fungicides at all, already, for eight, nine years. Now, see, Talbert, these small ones, they look pretty good, eh, for the` for the time of the year? We have had a succession plan, uh, in place since three years ago. Our son, Talbert, and his Emily are part of the business now. We are working ourselves into the ownership of the business and a 10-year plan, and, hopefully, Mum and Dad will be able to slow down a little bit and, um, we'll take on more and more responsibilities. We've had a, um, succession planning consultant helping us out with that, and that's, uh` that's been really good. It's really hard to find, uh, a right path to go` to go for and, uh, he really helped funnel us into that direction we wanted to go, and, uh, from both sides, from Mum and Dad's perspective, and from me and Emily as well, and it's been really helpful. We make sure we communicate properly, and we have our weekly team meetings, and, um, as long as we have those, everything seems to go all right. The future will be ` uh, if you look at, let's say, volume first, so we produce about 80 tons of capsicums a year, which is something that doesn't change, because the greenhouse is what it is. You got your yearly production. Feijoas, probably 80 to 90 tons in about, um, three or four years. That's` That's the future we're looking at. We'll be back to find out how the Trafford family has been adding value to the milk they produce on their Nelson farm. UPBEAT ROCK MUSIC Hello again. Wakefield farmers Daryl and Karen Trafford have moved from traditional dairy farming into artisan cheese and milk production. The Traffords began producing their own brand of gourmet cheese under the Wangapeka label after noticing a ready market in Nelson for good locally produced food. We've got 190ha here in total, and we milk between 50 and 60 cows through the summer and 35 cows through the winter. We rear all our own progeny and take that through` either sell them as yearlings or as 2-year-olds. When we first came up here, we started off with cross-bred cows. Then we delved into the longhorn. Good cow, good milk, but just didn't get the quantity. So we had a young French guy working for us ` a cheesemaker ` and he put us on to the Normandy cow, French, and it's a French, uh, Simmental, basically. It's a cousin to the Simmental. Really good milk for cheese, and the upshot of it is being a beef cow, we rear all the progeny. So that's what we're looking at ` we need to get value out of the progeny. We'll carry all that progeny through to 2-year-old and then send them off from there. We do a bit of grazing just to fill the gap, really, but our core business is making cheese. We manage our whole product right from the pasture, right through to the end product that goes out the factory. We're in charge of it all the way, which is good and bad, you know, but it's a great feeling to put a really natural product out there. And the feedback you get from it ` we don't get negative feedback. It's all positive stuff. It's not all beer and skittles, though. You know, you're marketing your own product. So to come from a` from a cow cocky and` and be doing this, we've` It's been a really huge learning curve. But, you know, we've had some good help along the way, so, yeah, it's, uh` it's good. Yeah, it's really good. We are biodynamic. We don't use any fertiliser treated with acid. We don't use any nitrogen. Basically, RPR and dolomite are our key, and our pasture is a herbal lay. It's not your rye clover mix. It's rye grass, white, red clover, coxford, plantain, chicory, yarrow, and we try and steer clear of the real flashy ryegrass. You know, we want something that's gonna stay in the system. When we built our factory, we thought it was huge, and now it's not big enough. Some of that cheese is cellared for 12 months. So, yeah, we will grow our business more yet. Probably, export is the next thing for us. I went along on a cheese course, and I just, sort of, took note of the people there, what they wanted, and I looked at what we were doing. A big thing for me is sustainability of our future. It's developing something that my grandchildren can enjoy. And going to those courses was to see that you could develop a business within our domestic market. People's availability to` to what we produce in NZ is so exported that they don't that availability to it, so I just saw that thing there where if we could bring something in underneath and talk to people about it, how we produce it, where it's from. It didn't have to be huge. It didn't have to be a thousand cows. It was just boutique. And that's really where the idea came from; it's people's passion to be able to get my product. Uh, this is our cheese factory. We're about 20m from the cow sheds. Every morning, the cows come in. We milk once a day. We start milking at 7 o'clock. The milk's pumped directly into the factory, and we start production fresh. Hi, Sylvia! Hi. (CHUCKLES) Hi. How's it going this morning? Good. Um, the milk is pasteurised. Some days, we make cheese; some days, we bottle our milk; some days, we'll do a different product. But our whole thing is about using that milk lovely and fresh and getting a top-end quality product with it. Our current volume through the factory at the moment is we're milking 50 cows which is giving us around 500 to 600 litres a day. Our range of products is quite diverse. Starting within this industry, you've gotta develop a cash flow if you're making cheese, because it is does take time for cheese to be developed. So our range of products to develop our cash flow was in fresh bottled milk, yoghurts, kefir ` lots of things like that. So we got that constant cash flow while we were developing. A bit like winemaking ` you develop your cheese, and you fine-tune it and then take it to market. We're not big enough in here to` to be able to cope with our range of products. We've found now that we've got to separate out our fresh and, um, with the growth that` that we incurred with our fresh, we couldn't do both cheese and fresh, so we've had to, unfortunately, cut right back on our growth in fresh and concentrate more on the cheese. It is a very fast-growing industry, artisan cheese in NZ, and I think a lot of people are aware of where their food's coming from, and, no, we couldn't keep up with both, so, unfortunately, we've cut back. Getting and retaining good staff is fine. There's a lot of people interested in NZ in the industry, but we don't have the IP, the intellectual property, as in cheese-makers. We do in commercial factories, but in an artisan level, we don't have the IP, so we do source IP from overseas. It's a lot easier for us to bring in that IP. They've got hundreds of years of intellectual property in what we can bring over. Our cheesemaker today is Sylvia Ferretti. She's from Italy, and she's been with us 12 months, and she's an absolute whizz. We've learnt an awful lot from Sylvia, especially to do with cultures, which is amazing for us here. We go have apprentice cheesemakers, and it really puts them on the right foot from the beginning. I'd like this sort of model to be looked at as, maybe in the future, to` to export. I think we've got, um` but more as a co-op, joining up with other people within the industry and exporting a top-end product. Um, maybe the concept being taken a little bit further and dotted throughout NZ or talking to farmers who are struggling and having an added-on value into their dairy operation. For more information on these and other stories we've covered, visit our website... if you missed an episode, you can also watch it at TVNZ On Demand. Use the keyword Rural Delivery. Next week, we explore the FoodBowl, an incubator and support system for Kiwi food and beverage innovators. We meet dairy farmers Gray and Marilyn Baldwin, who are working with industry partners to showcase a wetland restoration on their Waikato property. And we visit an English couple producing award-winning ciders from their Nelson apple orchard. Thanks for watching. We hope you can join us again next time. Captions by Alana Drayton. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016