1 ROCK MUSIC 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. Automation has played a huge role in improving efficiency in a number of primary sectors, and horticulture is no exception. This week we go to a seedling nursery in West Auckland that incorporates automation to efficiently produce a wide range of seedlings, from lettuces to manuka trees. We discover the gains made for Northland dairy farmers Alister and Lyn Candy after signing up for a Dairy NZ Focus Farm experience. And we visit Mamaku Blue, near Rotorua, a blueberry orchard that's expanded into a blueberry experience. Nga Rakau Nurseries is a specialist contract seedling producer based in West Auckland. They're using technology to grow and track production of a wide range of seedlings, from redwood, pine and manuka trees to lettuces. Nga Rakau Nursery's a contract growing plant nursery. And we grow vegetable transplants on this property... and manuka. We grow on our other site, um,... annual seedlings, reveg seedlings, cut flower seedlings, uh, herbs, um, and, um, some other veg production over there as well. This is the newer site, and it's on a 50-acre block. We've got 60m by 70m... plastic house and a similar or slightly bigger area of growing outside, and the other, um, is 10km away, and it's the original site and is about twice the size. BELT WHIRRS Staff-wise, we have 18 regulars, and it varies with the contract people from about six to up to about 25. My grandfather started it up. I'm a third generation. The idea of automation probably came from my grandfather. He was always keen to kick the horses off and get the tractor. And I think that's just sort of carried through, really, so it's always been looking to make a job a little easier, so, uh, it's a little bit less back-breaking and less physical, and, uh, streamline things and work a little easier and more efficiently, really. The challenges in agriculture or horticulture are always seasonal variations, really. When you're growing anything, it's reading the weathers and trying to find out how you can best grow the crop in the conditions that are in front of you, really, and all the usual things, like bugs and stuff like that. With our protected crop and our systems, it does make life a lot easier as far as that goes, but those are still the prime challenges, really. We're now growing a lot of manuka for the honey industry, and who would have ever thought that, um, my grandfather cut it down off the original farms, and now we're growing the stuff, so it's always pretty interesting and always challenging. With the redwoods, um, that we contract grow to, um, clone or pine for the forestry market, all of the veg production ` all of those seed lines all come out of Europe and, um, all with the whistles and bells as... as far as, um, vigour and disease resistances and tolerances and things like that go. The contract growing evolved quite a long time ago, when we were doing the original trees and shrub and hedge and shelter and that side of things. So when we started contract growing seedlings, that again was growing for what the customer wanted themselves. And some of the seed prices actually probably set the ball rolling, because they're fairly expensive. You can pay well over $1 for a tomato seed, and even the newer lettuce seed is fairly expensive, up to a few cents a seed or more. So it was part of our thing that we would, um, grow what the customer wanted, when he wanted it. And that's our driving philosophy. The hardware side of things here is common in the States and in... Europe and to some in Australia, although I think we're beating the Australians now. But it really was just a case of, uh, adapting it to the NZ situation, and our market's, um, not as big, obviously, and so it's just a case of downsizing it, uh, a little and fitting it in with our growing systems a little better. This is where our vegetable production is. Most of the lettuce, the silver beet, fennel is grown here, along with a whole lot of manuka. We fit a thousand trays on a row, so that's 140,000 on a row like this, so that's 24,000 trays can fit in a house like this, and we're about 80 trays to 10,000 plants. Between the two nurseries, we're growing somewhere about 30 million to 40 million seedlings a year. Most of that would be lettuce. A lot of our growers have plants ordered for every week of the year. So 52 weeks of the year, we're sowing; 52 weeks of the year, we're watering every day, obviously; um, feeding and delivering plants every week of the year. So a lot of it is about timing, but there's really only three key things that we're trying to achieve here, and that's trying to get the right numbers, on the right date for those customers, and at the right quality. So we try and keep it simple, although there's a lot of factors that all influence the quality, the numbers and the timing. Water management is huge. We say it takes a year to learn to water plants, because you've got summer right through to winter. Seedlings require different quantities of watering, depending on what stage of growth they're at. So with good watering practices and management, you can control germination, for a start, and have an influence on the strike rate. Um, you can control the root-to-shoot ratio and root-to-shoot growth. Um, you can keep out pests and disease, cos if they're not wet or moist all of the time, then, um, it's less likely that fungal diseases are gonna get in and insects. And you can, um, control the, um, hardening off process. So you provide, um, too much moisture to the plants, then they can grow stretched, soft, um, have too much top growth and not enough roots, so watering is everything. It really is. (CHUCKLES) When we return, we meet dairy farmers Alister and Lyn Candy to find out what happened when they signed up to become a Dairy NZ Focus Farm. 1 ROCK MUSIC Welcome back. Four years ago, Northland dairy farmers Alister and Lyn Candy signed up to be a Dairy NZ Focus Farm. They admit they didn't know what to expect. What did happen was an improvement in farm performance, productivity and profit through better pasture and stock management. We've got 103 effective hectares that we milk on, 320 cows, all Jersey cows, 3.1 to the hectare. We rear 80 replacement calves. It can be very very wet in the winter. Half the farm's Wharakohe ` you just can't get on with it. We just tie the tractors up and use quads. We don't even car on the Wharakohe. We off-on graze. Like, if it's really really wet here, we'll put them on there for an hour, might be two hours, then back into the yard or under some pine trees or on a race, stand them off. We haven't got all the cows here ` the 320 are split up into different mobs. The fat, uh, late cows are down the run-off. We have our 2-year-olds here and the closed calvers. And it's not a huge mob of cows, so we can handle them pretty well. But you've gotta be on to it if it's Wharakohe. Where we're at are Fieldays, and our neighbour's Terence Brocx, one of our committee men. Then they said to us, 'Hey, you wouldn't mind being a Focus Farm?' When we first started, we didn't know what to expect. But once we had the committee come here and interviewed us and walked around, we could see then they were looking at, like, the calving. Chalking up calving. One of our worst things is the condition score on cows wasn't very hot. Dairy NZ have been up here, and now it's a thing that we look at is the condition scoring cows. Veteran calf rate, I think the calf rate this year was 4%, and it's usually around 12%, it can be 13%. So we've really improved on that, uh, and condition score. We weigh our young stock every month, both calves and 2-year-olds, and regularly drenching them. And so, you know, there's a better lot of stock coming through. Grass metering, condition score, weighing cattle ` it's a bit of extra work, but, you know, you just take a day off and do it. Pasture renewal ` we haven't done any this year. We're just saving money ` we're not doing it this year. Cows are still eating 10 ton or 11 ton of grass, so, you know, the grass is still coming off the paddocks to the cows. I think our production has changed. The cows are getting better fed. They're getting the best grass they're going to, and for $750 or whatever they are, you know, we made, I think, nearly 150,000 bucks one year. And I think this is what it is ` measuring your paddocks and feeding the cows better, knowing where the grass is. In 2007 we did 96,000, I think, or 90-something thousand on grass and silage. And now we're up to we did 120,000, I think, the third year. And we're hovering about 105,000, which is... I think it's a good place to be. We dried the 2-year-olds off early on, and anything now that's looking under... well, it'd be under 4, have been dried off. Yeah. 'The key step for us here, that drove a lot of the success, 'is having successful farmers as part of the management group. 'So there were five farmers that were associated with this farm. 'The farm-management committee was chaired by a farmer who was very successful, 'So that got Alister and Lyn actually quite open, 'and they were trusting of the information that came out from the farm-management group.' So that really was probably the first trigger. The second trigger was that we had the support of the science and the development tools from Dairy NZ. And given that some of the farmers that were on the crew used those tools and verified that this was something that Alister and Lyn needed to do, that really drove the complete package home. The real important bit for people that wanna go down this track is really, they need to escalate pasture management as a non-negotiable in their business. And that then sets the tone that it always happens regularly. And then they need to have a process that sits behind that, where once they've gone out and plated the farm, they actually sit down and digest the information and say, 'What does it mean in terms of how we're gonna manage the farm tomorrow?' That is, where are the cows going to? When do we need to be putting on nitrogen? When do we need to be shutting up paddocks for silage? That's the informed decision-making that'll make a difference. One of the key challenges is just having the confidence of going and doing it. One way in which that confidence was helped in this farm business was Alister and Lyn knew that the management crew was going to come back the following month and come back and review the decisions that had been discussed the previous month. And I think that's really one of the key things all other businesses can do ` have a team of people that you work with, um, not only on a one-off basis, but have them come back again. And if you know that you're gonna be accountable for the discussions that you had previously, I'm sure it'll drive a lot of change. Got 'em all? Yep. All in! BIRDS CHIRP This is our support block. It's all part of the original home farm that was divided into three, and then home farm is still operating, as a beef unit now. Then we've developed the dairy unit, and then purchased this run-off support block later on. It's improving in value all the time too, but it's allowed us to, um, increase our stocking rate on the home farm, cos we can raise off down here our young stock, rather than` We couldn't put them out grazing, then they'll graze down here instead. They felt the cattle were too small. We were quite happy with the size of our cattle, because of our wet farm. But they said no, we were missing out on production, because of the size of the cattle. They were still having to grow too much in their first year of calving, so if we could grow them better up to 2-year-old stage, then they were that much further ahead. So we've worked quite hard on that, supplemented them when it's got dry and not enough feed down here, so we'd cart feed and that down to them. We've put on an average, I think, of around 50 kilos a head more. So that's quite a big lift. I had to go on a course and learn a bit more about how to operate my books, but I've got a good, um, system now with Cash Manager. And I'm learning more about budgeting, keeping the finances under the control, getting some more reports out of the accounting system that are of benefit to us ` just keeping tabs on it. Our expenses were getting out of hand and that. Production's lifted by 30,000kg or 40,000kg,... and expenses have come down $2.50 a kilo. So yes, it's been big savings. All with a bit of sensible thought. We thought everybody was very similar, you know, but once you have a look into, or get someone else to look at your books, no, there's big savings to be made. We'll be back soon at Mamaku Blue's blueberry experience. 1 ROCK MUSIC Hello again. In the early 1980s Anne and Harry Frost began establishing blueberry plants on their property, located in the Mamaku Ranges, near Rotorua. It was a time when little was known about blueberries in NZ. Anne explains. We actually hadn't heard of blueberries until our friends said that they would grow here, so we did a lot of research. We found there was plants for sale in Cambridge and went over there and did some more research, found a person that actually knew quite a bit about blueberries. We had half a blueberry each, bought $10,000 worth of plants, and we planted them in our first block. All through the 1980s up till 2004, we exported most of our crop. Cyclone Bola picked up our export crop off the trees and threw them on the ground. So that was a bit devastating. And one of our pickers said, 'We could make something with these. We could make wine.' So we had never made wine, so we went to the library, got a book, came back with the ingredients, and we started with 10-litre paint buckets and a potato masher, and we made blueberry wine. Well, there's a huge range, actually, of blueberries. Worldwide, I believe there's over 500 different varieties. In NZ, it's around 100 different varieties that blueberry growers grow. Uh, we've got eight different varieties here. The big challenge is the weather. Mother Nature just throws all sorts of things at you. Through the springtime, late winter frosts, um, are a big challenge for us. Um, we've done a lot of research and a lot of, um, trials for different frost-protection methods. Um, just putting the net on increases the temperature by a couple of degrees. Cyclones and storms through the summertime when we're harvesting ` a couple of years ago in the harvest season, we had 400mm of rain in the middle of our peak season. There's plenty of challenges. Fungal diseases; root diseases, all those sort of things, insects ` uh, they're all a challenge that we have to combat. Blueberries like a more acidic soil, so 4.5 to 5.5pH is the ideal. Um, and if you can keep it around the 5, it's ideal. Ours is around the 6, so we do lose a little bit of our production because of the, um, pH being a little bit high. Um, but I think we gain that in a lot of the taste that our blueberries... Um, our customers have told us that the taste is quite different to other, um, blueberries. Um, so what we lose in,... uh, quantity, we get in quality. Process probably is our biggest market. Um, so that's the frozen berries and the preserves, jams, chutneys, wines, liqueurs, juices. But we do also do some fresh berries at farmers' markets, so we head off to Auckland, um, each Saturday in the summer with a truckload of fresh blueberries. In the summer period, we need a lot of casual pickers. We employ around 20 people. We have a harvesting machine as well, so when they get a little bit behind, we can put the harvesting machine in and clean up a bit that they can't get to. But we predominantly try and pick all our fresh berries by hand. We've just started our pruning season, so we've been pruning now for about a week, which is a little bit earlier than usual. Um, as you can see, these plants here have lost all their leaves, so we're into them as soon as we can. Orchard management maintenance; a bit of pruning, weeding; any, sort of, fertiliser sprays ` just a general maintenance. About 10 years ago when we were wanting to go more organic and green, environmentally friendly, and we came across this machine. The probe, it shoots down into the ground about 600 mil, and then a shot of air blows down through those probes to the bottom of the probe and shoots out sideways. That there explodes the ground, so it puts a heap of air under the ground. On a wet winter's day, you can actually see little geysers from the previous holes that he's made before, which is really quite interesting. That is a huge benefit, getting rid of problem weeds, but it also puts fertiliser down into the root zone of the plants, breaks up the hard pan, so that the roots can then get down, um, into the subsoils. And, um, it, uh, releases a lot of the nutrients that have been locked up in that hard pan as well, so, um, there's many, many advantages. So, you can put many different types of fertiliser or organic material down through the probes, so a bit of lime, a bit of fulvates, humates and things like that can go down it as well. This is our complex that we opened in October 2000 as Mamaku Blue Winery. We changed our name in about 2004 to Mamaku Blue Blueberry Experience, because people weren't coming, because they didn't drink alcohol, and also the fact that blueberries became far more world-renowned for their health benefits, and people were looking for blueberries. And we find now, yes, people come, because we're a blueberry experience. They buy a bottle of wine when they come, but they come because we're a blueberry experience. We have a lot of products. We make our own blueberry chutney, blueberry chilli, gooseberry chutney, gooseberry chilli, blueberry jams, gooseberry jams and many other products that you can see in the shop from the blueberries and gooseberries that we sell. These are our frozen berries. We take them to the markets and sell them in the shop in 1-kilo containers, and these are all ready for sale. These days, a lot of people put them into the bullets, make juice drinks. Many of our customers just warm them a little bit, put them on the cereal in the winter, which is really nice. You can put them into your porridge, and it makes purple porridge, and children love it. You've got the blueberries and you've got purple porridge for breakfast. We have gooseberries. That's a secondary crop, but it does come first. Gooseberries are ready just before Christmas. They're an old-fashioned fruit. A lot of people haven't heard of gooseberries. But it's like one of the old-fashioned fruits like rhubarb ` they're actually coming back in. It's been a very exciting journey. It's definitely had its ups and downs. And sometimes, you think, 'Oh, my, why did we do this?' But we could have gone into all sorts of other things and lost money completely, and it's been a very interesting journey over the years. For more information on these and other stories, visit our website. You can get there via tvnz.co.nz If you've missed an episode, you can watch it again on TVNZ On Demand using the keyword Rural Delivery. Next week ` we find out about a company based in Kaipara that's rearing dung beetles on a commercial scale for pastoral farms. Still in the Kaipara catchment, we learn what Fonterra and the Department Of Conservation are doing under the Living Water partnership programme. And we go to Nelson to look at the work being done to add value to green-lip mussels by Maclab and Pharmalink. And that's it for today. We hope you'll be able to 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.