www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello and welcome to Rural Delivery. We often hear about the need to add value to our primary sector in order to drive economic growth. There are now a number of avenues being created for producers to explore in order to do just that. This week we visit The FoodBowl, a support system for innovators in food and beverages. We meet Gray and Marilyn Baldwin, who are working with industry partners to showcase a wetland restoration on their Waikato dairy property. And we discover how an English couple produces award-winning cider from their Nelson apple orchard. The FoodBowl is an incubator for NZ-based food and beverage companies. It's been set up to enable innovation and product development. It provides technologies for companies to undertake research and develop ideas. It also connects them with experts in product development, food science, packaging and export and regulatory requirements. The FoodBowl is the Auckland hub of the Food Innovation Network. It's a semi-commercial, larger-scale pilot plant. The FoodBowl is set up to help companies commercialise products. So we've got seven different suites, different sizes ` four large suites and three smaller ones ` and a lot` over 200 pieces of equipment. And most of it's on wheels, so we can change it in between the different rooms to set up for the particular type of process that a company may need. In 2006, the then Labour Government put together a task force to discover what the barriers were to exporting food and beverage products in NZ and getting more high-valued products made in NZ. And the task force identified a number of factors, and that was pretty low productivity, low-skilled workforce, and no access for smaller companies to the places where they could produce the products. So The FoodBowl and the Food Innovation Network was set up to help companies to reduce those barriers by getting access into equipment and suites where they could produce product to then sell directly to the supermarkets and also export. We work with a range of companies. So for the smaller start-up companies that come in, they generally have a product that they're already selling, maybe at a market, and they need to upscale. So they would come to us with their product and their current recipe and formulation and development process, and we would then work with them to increase the scale of that so that it's large enough that they could supply supermarkets and potentially to export as well. So we help to identify the gaps that they have that's stopping them from scaling up at the moment. And that could be a range of things. The equipment and access to the manufacturing space is generally only one of them. We would also look to connect them with our wider network of capability providers to help with other types of business development, be it finance, marketing, IP, legal help. The clients tend to be self-selecting because there is a reasonably high compliance barrier to get over as well. So we need to make sure that each of the products that are made here, before they are released to the public, meet a really high and strict criteria in terms of compliance. When Samuel came to us, he was producing his product out of a different kitchen, but that was quite a small one, so he was pretty constrained on how much he could produce. And so when he came to The FoodBowl, he was really, I think, in awe of the different types of machinery that we had here that could help him to produce his product more efficiently and then also be able to upscale as well. It's called Pucka Products Ltd, so we make a ready-to-eat Bircher muesli product, and we sell that into a bunch of cafes, gyms, into some schools, and into Foodstuffs, Progressive and the Nosh group just in Auckland. I used to make a similar product to this when I was doing triathlons and so on. Um, and I'd just sort of grab it as I head out the door to do some quick training. And then we shot overseas, my wife and I, and travelled around Europe for a bit, and I saw some commercial versions of what I was already making. So I was like, 'Oh, this could be quite cool.' So I, sort of, developed it while we lived over in the UK for a bit, shot back to NZ. And we were getting married, actually, at the time, and I notice out the corner of my eye as we're going in for a kiss and saw a kitchen that could be a commercial opportunity for us. So we commercialised that kitchen. And then probably a month later we jumped in there and started making the product and getting it out to cafes and stuff. So we've got low-fat probiotic yogurt. Then we pour in some wholegrain jumbo oats. So those are the big, juicy oats, and they give you that low-GI energy. We chuck in a whole bunch of fruit, so there's real fruit that goes into it, and NZ honey. Coming up to The FoodBowl's been great cos I was basically in the church kitchen, and then I got called from Foodstuffs and got called from Nosh, and I was just like, 'Oh my gosh. What the heck?' I'm getting all these forms coming at me to fill out for food safety and so on. And I'd heard about The FoodBowl at a presentation I'd been to. So I was like, 'Oh great. I'll get out there, chat to them, see if this can sort out my capacity' and then all, like, the food safety around the whole thing. Came out here, got started, and instantly we could clean up the whole process we were putting together and made it much more efficient, streamlined. Working with the process engineers and so on, we've been able to bump the shelf life out and get more consistency out of the product. So just, like, every time it comes off the line, we know it's the same product that we always put out. The shelf life's been a huge one for us. When we started off with this product, we had just a week shelf life, and now we've been able to, working with these guys, bump it out to much longer than that. Um, so that's a huge one, just because we're kind of contained to the Auckland market at the moment. We've got people screaming at us from Wellington and Christchurch and Tauranga. I keep apologising to them because we just can't get it down there quickly enough, um, unless we put it on a plane, but obviously that means we're in negative margins straight away. So that's a big one. And because we've achieved that lately ` a good extension in the shelf life ` we're gonna actually be able to tackle the south of Auckland this year. And then we're working on a dry product at the moment that should be definitely throughout NZ, and we're hoping to export that as well. So, yeah, it's keeping us busy. When we return, we visit a Waikato wetland that's in the process of being reinstated on a dairy property. 9 Welcome back. A lot is known about the biological processes that make wetlands effective in reducing nutrient losses from farms. But there's still much to learn. A DairyNZ research project is underway to help discover how best to create new wetland areas and to restore former wetland areas on farms. A showcase has been set up at Gray and Marilyn Baldwin's Waikato dairy farm. Marilyn belongs to Dairy NZ's environmental leaders forum, and the Baldwins won the supreme Ballance Farm Environment Award for Waikato in 2009. The business is based on two farms being side by side. We milk 850 Jersey cows once a day on our larger block. We've got a winter milk project going on our smaller block, which is 450 cows. We're probably around about a System 3 on the DairyNZ category. We'd probably be preferring to be a one lower than that, but we've had some very dry summers in the South Waikato, and that's meant we've had to buy palm kernel in to keep the cows milking over the summer, and that obviously elevates your use of supplementary feed on the scale of intensity. We have nice flat land, we have some rolling land, we have some steep land. Now, on the flats you should be planting crops, working it really hard, lots of fertiliser, growing lots. The rolling stuff's great for dairy cow grazing. The steep stuff` It is a nonsense to try and put dairy cows, heifers, on steep country. So when we won our farm environment award, we had about 20% of the farm steep bits planted in exotic trees and native trees and riparian trees. So that's been our deep-seated philosophy ` match the land use to suitable uses. I guess I've been in an interesting and a privileged position in some ways through directorships, particularly Ballance; I've been involved with Fonterra elections, had LIC directorship. It's obvious to me the rules in the Waikato catchment are going to change. The upper Karapiro, here where we live, is a very sensitive area. And so what we're trying to achieve out of the wetland is being proactive. We wanna have a wetland project with good data which says, 'Hey, look, we're actually doing something 'about our nitrate release to waterways before the real change has to come.' It started many many years ago, actually. We had Gordon Stephenson, who's known to many, came out to visit our farm and we asked for his help to put riparians in and thought, 'OK, we've got wonderful Gordon Stephenson, who's a local. 'He could come and give us a bit more advice of what he thought would be good 'for in our riparian planting.' And as he drove past this area, he just pointed over and said, 'You know, that would make a great wetland,' to which my father-in-law said, 'It was a wetland.' And that's where the idea first kicked off many years ago. It has been quite a project, and that is thanks to the partners that are all involved. I guess if we did it on our own, we would have to do it very gradually ` perhaps do one or two of the ponds at a time and just get a digger in and do a bit of work. And then perhaps the next year it would be a bit more solid fencing. So we have been very fortunate in having the partners. And it does mean that that science can be involved and we can get that monitoring happen, put a website up, get some information that comes out of this for others to see. Our involvement really has been to lead the project and get the various parties on board together with the Baldwins. And of course, the Waikato River Authority also heavily involved, as are the Waikato Regional Council, NIWA and Hill Laboratories. And the real aim here is to measure the nutrients that are being removed. And as part of that we've got an extensive monitoring programme, which we hope to do for at least 18 months, if not longer. In terms of the actual location, it's ideal. It's right in the middle of a farm. We've a central farm lane coming all the way down, so we've got a lot of sediment loads coming off that. We have power lines, we've got a central gas line as well running through the site. So I guess the location itself is a really nice case study for other farmers to learn from. I think the biology is well understood, but what we don't really understand well is what are the total removal rates in terms of mass of contaminants removed over different environmental timescales. So in terms of the nutrient limiting space and what we're trying to achieve here, it's all about understanding on an annual basis and also under different flow conditions ` for example different temperature conditions ` how much nutrients, or how much contaminants, are actually removed and what is the treatment potential in these sort of systems. How can we enhance that, how can we optimise that and how can we make these systems more affordable for farmers to install, practically, themselves? This study is really made up of two components. The first is the protection and the enhancement of natural seepage wetland areas that you see up here on the hill slope. So we have lots of areas where we have groundwater which seeps out of the landscape. That groundwater is quite high in nitrate concentration. And these sort of seepage wetland areas we expect to see on many dairy farms, particularly in the Waikato area. Our feeling is that these seepage areas can achieve a lot in terms of nutrient reduction potential naturally. So what we've done there is simply protect them by putting a fence around it and planted them out to restore them. And part of the study is really understanding how those natural areas that many farmers already have actually function, particularly when they're protected and restored. The second part is much larger, and that's the constructed wetland that you see down the bottom here. So the idea here has been to create a series of basins, almost like rice paddies, and the concept is to really slow down the water and allow the water to have sufficient contact time with the plants and with the bacteria to do their thing. What you're seeing here is the flow sensors to measure water level and also a weir to measure the discharge going across that. We've got a water quality sampler, and that water quality sampler can be triggered by cell phone or by water level or by rainfall. And the idea is to let that automatically capture samples as it moves through the inflow and the outflow of the wetland during these rainfall events. For wetlands, we know that they're very good at removing nitrate, in particular. They will also remove phosphorus which is bound to the sediment material. And we're also interested in faecal coliform bacteria. So those are the key parameters we're looking at assessing here. It's quite expensive to install and construct a wetland, and we're still working through some of the final costing around that, particularly around the construction part, the maintenance part and the planting. We are also looking ways of optimising that, making it more affordable. At the end of the study, we'll have much better guidelines around how these wetland systems can function on the farm landscape, how much nutrients can they actually treat, under what sort of conditions, and how can we make these systems more affordable. So the intention here is to use it as a showcase to bring farmers out here to show them the learnings of how to set up a wetland, how to design it, and also how they can best make them affordable and optimise them to remove those nutrients. We'll be back soon to learn about the process of making award-winning apple cider with Caroline and Alex Peckham. 9 Hello again. Caroline and Alex Peckham are an English couple who converted a berry farm in the Upper Moutere Valley into a cider apple orchard to make traditional English cider for local and overseas markets. In 2015, Peckham's Ice Cider won the NZ Champion Cider award. It's a cider-making business, very similar to a small winery. We grow fruit for purpose on the property and we turn that fruit into juice, which we then ferment into cider, bottle, label, do everything here on site and sell it. We've got 40 acres in total. Not all of that` We've got a few empty paddocks, so we've got room for growth, room for planting more cider apples. When we first came here, well over half of that was planted in boysenberries, and we grew those for the first three years to keep us going. That was eight years ago. And during those first three years we started experimenting with cider apples. We grafted the varieties that were here, which were the traditional dessert, export fruit ` Fuji, Royal Gala, Braeburn, etc ` grafted them over to specialist cider varieties. We collected budwood from around the country, old orchards that we knew had heritage fruit. It takes three years for the first fruit to come on board. We now have built up a collection of around 30 different specialist cider apple varieties, and we have got around about 6000 trees on the property. We're both from the UK. We love drinking it. I'm not a keen beer drinker. When we were in the UK, we couldn't really afford wine ` we were younger. And we came here 12 years ago and we just sort of struggled to find what we recognised as cider to drink. So we started off for a few years just outside of Christchurch, and we planted a few cider apple trees there just for fun, made our own cider at home. And when we found this bit of land with its beautiful Moutere clay and it grows beautiful-tasting fruit, um, we thought, 'OK, let's give this a go,' and we started grafting over to cider varieties. Our first year of production was tiny ` 3000 litres in the first year. I was selling that at the local farmers' market, just word of mouth, and we sold out before we could make any more. We doubled that to 6000 litres the following year. And now, five years on from actually producing a product, we're sitting at around 100,000 litres. Not massive in terms of volume, but all really high quality pure-juice cider, and that's what our passion is. That's what we're interested in. Point of difference is that we grow the fruit for purpose on the property. We're simulating a traditional cider-making operation in the UK or Europe, where the fruit would have been grown on the farm as part of a mixed-farm policy, probably. And they would've made the cider on-site. Some of the larger, more industrial players, for example, will be using packhouse-reject fruit that hasn't been grown for purpose, that isn't tree-ripened, or they will be buying in juice or even concentrate to make cider from, so this is` We like to think that we make cider with integrity. That's what it's all about. We've got over 30 varieties growing in the orchard. So we just picked a sample across the range. Kingston Black. Harry Masters Jersey. Tremletts Bitter. So, this is the famous Kingston Black. It's classified as bittersharp, so it's got a certain amount of acidity and quite a bit of tannin. This is a different categories. That's called Harry Masters Jersey. It's got a distinct Jersey shape, which is that conical shape. They've all got different shape` That's an oblate shape. Um, so that's a bittersweet. So it hasn't got the acid that the Kingston Black has, but it has the tannin. So that will be a low-acid contribution. Then we've got this, which is a Sweet Alford. Quite a well-known apple as well. That's just the sweet. That's just contributing sugar. In our orchard, it does have a little bit of a tannin. This is one of my favourites. It's difficult to grow, very small. That's, again, another bittersweet, but I just put it in because I like it. It's called Knotted Kernel. So what we're looking for is enough acidity to keep the product stable during fermentation. So we're fermenting the juice` keep the juice stable. So when we ferment the juice, we've gotta have a certain amount of bacteriological control. We don't want the wrong things taking over. And in order to achieve that, you need a certain amount of acid. It's a balancing act, and you're dealing with the apples that are coming on in the orchard, so you've got a shed with only a certain number of varieties at a time, and then you're trying to blend the varieties that you've got to make the most balanced juice for ferment at the end of the day. The fruit gets picked, stored in a shady, cool place, and we'll bring the fruit to the cidery. We design the blend according to the fruit. We'll put it through a washer. We'll grade out anything we don't like the look of. The mill will chop it into small, pea-sized chunks. That then gets pumped directly into our press. That type of press, we chose it because it give us a lot of control over the way in which we can make our cider, and it allows us to macerate the fruit. Sometimes when you macerate the fruit overnight, you get really great tannin softening and extraction at the same time. So we're taking it from the press, pumping it directly into a tank. There's a tiny bit of sulphite involved to kill things that we don't want to take over in the ferment. A large proportion of our ferments are wild, so in other words, we don't even inoculate, we just keep them cool, give them time and let them do their thing, and they slowly tick away. At that stage, exactly as with wine, we rack it off into another tank and then we let it sit there and monitor it carefully. But we let it sit there. And with most of our ciders, we're talking about a minimum of eight months in the tank before we take them out and start to bottle them. A big challenge when we're making the kind of cider we're making is trying to explain to people what the difference is between a cider that is made from real fruit, real juice and is therefore more expensive on the shelf compared to some of the bigger, more industrialised ciders. Um, and there is a huge difference in how they're made and what's inside the bottle. And really, you can only do that by going around and doing tastings and talking to people and getting people to taste the product. Cos then they can really taste the difference. For more information on this and other stories we've shown, you can visit our website. Get there via tvnz.co.nz. If you missed an episode, you can watch it again through TVNZ OnDemand using the keyword Rural Delivery. Next week, we find out about a crowdfunding project aiming to plant a million metres of streams around NZ. We spend time at Kaitaringa Farms, producing grass-fed Wagyu beef for domestic and export markets. And we visit Southern Paprika, the largest single-site glasshouse grower of capsicums in the country. And that's it for today. We hope to see you again next time. Captions by Tracey Dawson. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016