9 www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello and welcome to Rural Delivery. Alternative approaches to improving the productivity of land and quality of water are increasingly being sought by primary producers. This week we find out about a company based in Kaipara that's rearing dung beetles on a commercial scale for pastural 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 what's being done to add value to green-lipped mussels at MacLab and Pharmalink. Dung Beetle Innovations has transformed from a non-profit group developed for an MPI Sustainable Farming Fund project into an enterprise rearing beetles on a commercial scale. The project began back in 2009. By the time we came to the end, which was in about 2013, it had about $1 million worth of funding poured into it, plus another half-million dollars in kind, so just people contributing their time and resources. So, Dung Beetle Innovations is very much about dung beetle breeding, releasing, obviously, on to farmers' properties, uh, and it's also got a component of research. So once we've got beetles and people have brought them in and understand them, they also need to know some facts about, you know, how do they change pasture productivity, how do they reduce nutrient leaching. So we have a lot of research that also looks at those issues. These guys are all about balancing the system. Ultimately, the dung beetle should have come in 150 years ago, when we brought stock into the country. But they didn't, and so that's why farmers now have the opportunity to rebalance their system. They've got all the dung being produced; these guys will bury it into the ground. The company started in 2014. So, it took a number of years to start breeding the beetles. So obviously, the way beetles breed, you start with a small number and then you need to retain them and you keep breeding them and breeding them, and eventually you get to a point where you have sufficient you can skim off and start selling those. We mass-rear them out here at Shelly Beach Farm in the south Kaipara in large bins, and then we harvest those beetles that emerge and quite literally pack them up. They go into a courier pack. Two days later, the farmer has them and sprinkles them around their farm. Oh, so that's interesting. This tells us that they've already started their nesting, which is really good. Maybe we can pitfall-trap these nesters out, the earlier ones, and get them ready for trial. We've got permission to bring 11 different kinds of dung beetles to NZ that are specific to pastural environments. In terms of their efficiency and what they do for their benefits, they've been well studied abroad in similar pastural habitats. But what we're currently doing here is looking in a NZ context, um, those sorts of findings, how they attribute to what the beetles are doing here. So Dung Beetle Innovations also engages in post-release research and monitoring. The typical life cycle for a dung beetle, there's a lot of cooperation between boys and girls adults. It's probably one of the highest levels of cooperation between the sexes. The male tends to make a brood ball, or a ball of dung, beneath the soil. Female then goes and lays an egg into it, and that egg develops into a little grub. Or we call it a larva, but for all intents and purposes we call it a grub. That's encapsulated inside that ball of manure. Goes through a few stages fattening up, turns into a chrysalis, or a pupa, and around to an adult. And that's the standard process. But depending on the species, that life cycle can be anything from six to eight weeks all the way to six months for some of the species. Even to a year for some of the more long-lived beetles, as well. So it's variable depending on what species we have, but that's the basic life cycle. So, this here is a display which shows a typical soil profile beneath any given cowpat. When there's a fresh pile of poo put on to the pasture or in our containers, boys and girls are both cooperating, creating a tunnel beneath that pile of poo. And into that tunnel, if you think of an upside-down tree with lots of branches, each of those tunnels, or branches, they pack a brood ball. And so these brood balls get formed at the bottom of the tunnel, and successively they add a new one and a new one, a new one and a new one up each of those branches underneath in the tunnels, and each of those has an egg laid inside it. So that dung's being buried for this. What we go through is a series of steps on whereabouts they put them in the farm, typically a centrally positioned paddock within your farm, because beetles do fly. But they don't want to fly far as a fitness thing, so they want to go to where the nearest available cowpat is. So as long as the paddock's stocked with fresh manure, that's where the beetles will hang out. If you're rotating stock to the next paddock over, the beetles invariably will follow where the smell of the fresh manure goes. The other thing is, of course, we have a reliance on various drenches, pour-ons and injectables, for such things as internal parasites. So we have to go through a basic process of double-checking with the farmer what time of the year and which they're drenching their stock, typically know when they're doing it and what stock they're doing. And there's a number of processes and types of drenches which they can utilise that are dung beetle-friendly. There's huge numbers of benefits that are being shown overseas which we want to see here as well. Each cowpat's full of good nutrients, phosphates and nitrates. If it's assimilated into the soil horizon, then it's made available for your pasture, as it is for all the microorganisms and micro-bacteria and earthworms ` everything else that utilises it beneath the soil. So if you've got a lot of manure on your paddocks going in very quickly, that's being uptaken by everything in the soil community beneath it. On average, most cows defecate about 11 times a day each cow. But each cowpat itself is fouling on the pasture surface. But it's not only that, it's a repugnant thing for any livestock animal to want to feed on it or around it. So the area of probably about five times the size around that pile is avoided at all costs to, um` because it's repugnant. No animal wants to feed around that area. It's also an evolutionary mechanism because that zone is the area of uptake of diseases and everything else, so they've learnt to avoid it. If you can get rid of that manure within 24 to 48 hours once you've got an established, abundant population of beetles, then you're increasing your available pasture area to utilise for your stock. The cost of a package of beetles ranges. So if you're a small-block holder, you'll have a package which is $1200, and that starts you off with one species and a small number. For our commercial farmers, there's a couple of different options. They either have a starter pack, which is, again, one species but there's more of them, for $2000. Or ultimately, people buy whole-farm packages. So they really need lots of species. And a whole-farm package is $6000. But for that money, they get four species. And the big thing about going from one species to four is suddenly you've got coverage for a lot longer period of the year. Uh, a dung beetle will operate for about three months of the year. So if you can have different species that operate at different times of the year, then that gives you much better coverage. When we return, we meet those involved in the Living Water partnership. 9 Welcome back. The Hikurangi Catchment feeds into the Kaipara Harbour. It's one of five areas in the country identified as needing help to redress the ecological degradation brought about through years of modification for farming, particularly dairying. A long-term collaborative programme involving Fonterra and the Department of Conservation has been set up to address the particular needs of these catchments. The Living Water partnership is an agreement between the Department of Conservation and Fonterra. It's a 10-year agreement, and it's all about improving water quality and biodiversity. The partnership spans five significant dairy regions ` here in Northland in the beautiful Hikurangi Catchment; in the Waikato we have two catchments, in the peat lakes there; down in Canterbury we have Lake Ellesmere; and then further south in Southland, the Waituna Lagoon. There's absolute recognition from farmers and Fonterra that water quality needs to be improved and there needs to be a focus on biodiversity, absolute focus. At the same time, from a market standpoint, our consumers identify with green pasture and cows on pasture, clean rivers. And that's absolutely a marketing proposition as well. That said, there's absolutely a commitment from farmers in the cooperative to improve water quality and biodiversity. The agreement with QEII is all about supporting them, and it's across the five catchments in the country. It is all about supporting them with covenanting their land, with the costs associate with it. So we'll support them with that process. We can't do everything all at once, so you have to prioritise. And the five catchments that we have focus in are both significant from a conservation standpoint and significant from a dairying perspective. Um, the investment that we've made is significant. It's $20 million over the life of the agreement, which is 10 years. Um, and certainly the expectation is the learnings that we can take away from those five regions can be applied in the future more widely. Looking beyond just improving water quality and biodiversity, we want to be able to demonstrate that sustainable dairying can be part of a healthy ecosystem. And that's really critical. The relationship between the department and Fonterra in relation to the Living Water partnership is really positive. What this is about is acknowledging that there's a problem and working out ways that we can do things to minimise the problem and learn, and share that learning across the industry and across NZ. We are providing scientific staff who know what native wildlife, native plants, what has existed in these places and ways that we can support bringing those back. This area, the Hikurangi Catchment, is 32,000ha part of the catchment. Originally, there was about a 13,000ha wetland as part of this area, and that was highly modified ` drained to make it productive farmland. As a result of that and the straightening of curvy rivers, we've got sediment and nutrient that are now heading off directly into the Kaipara Harbour and affecting that ecosystem. We've worked with the community, using their knowledge to understand what might be some really useful things for us to work on. There's probably a couple of things that jump to mind. They're around riparian planting and around weed control. You'll see that actually we have to do quite a bit of preparation here in terms of we've got kikuyu grass and other things growing. There's quite a lot of preparation that needs to go on so that we can make sure that the riparian planting is successful. The weed pest that we're working on is called tradescantia, or more commonly known as wandering willie or wandering Jew. So alongside Landcare Research, we're supporting them to undertake a biocontrol, so using a set of three beetles that attack the tradescantia and hopefully will remove that threat or make it easier for us to remove that threat from our native areas. One of the things that the farmers of the Hikurangi Catchment have taught me is that they have a passion for the land in which they live, and they really wanna make a difference for their families and the future generations of their families. And that's not just about being productive on-farm, that's about actually genuinely living in this environment and being part of this environment. My great-grandfather, Kenneth McKenzie, purchased 200 acres in April 1878. He had one child only ` John, who was my mother's father. And so the farm's been in our family ever since 1878. My great-grandfather would have dug the drains by hand (CHUCKLES) and cleared land. And then in 1904 the Hikurangi Dairy Factory started. Um, our grandfather was the first secretary there and one of the first suppliers. Just recently I was driving up the road and thinking, 'If I had masses of time and buckets of money to go with it, 'I would love to get rid of all this privet and stuff and willows 'that are on the side of the road and in the drains and everything.' And about three days later, Tim Brandenburg from Fonterra rang up and said how would I like to have some done. He'd been down at` meeting with Whangarei District Council Hikurangi Swamp Working Group and told us all about the Living Water programme. And we'd seen some things` They were doing an oxbow further down on the swamp. And he asked if I'd like to be involved. And here was a chance where people were offering to help. I think it was an answer to an unspoken prayer to get help to get rid of some of this rubbish. Anything that makes NZ a better place all over ` urban as well as rural. And if all the city councils would get in on this as well and have NZ clean streams, not just farmers clean streams, NZ would be a fantastic place. We'll be back soon in Nelson to visit a biotech company producing a highly concentrated mussel oil extract. 9 Hello again. MacLab is a family-owned biotech company extracting bioactive compounds from NZ green-lipped mussels for nutraceutical use. Based in Nelson, it processes selected mussels into a powder and extracts oil from that at Pharmalink Extracts, delivering a product that's marketed throughout the world. Our priority is to make the best mussel powder that we can produce. And from that we extract mussel oil that is a natural anti-inflammatory that is of benefit to all that consume it. The advantage of taking mussel oil is it's much more concentrated. You'd have to eat an awful lot of raw mussels to get the effect of one Lyprinol oil capsule. We market to people all round the world, and we do that through a company called Pharmalink International. They have the worldwide rights to selling our Lyprinol product. They also use another brand called Omega XL. Green-lipped mussels are farmed in the Marlborough Sounds, Golden Bay, Tasman Bay and further afield. We operate with a group of other companies, like Clearwater Mussels, who specialise in farming mussels. They harvest one day and deliver to us that night, and we process those mussels the very next day. It's very important to us that we make sure that the product that we harvest out of the mussels is up to the standard that we require. So we take samples, we test them and make sure that the efficacy is within the mussel before we harvest them. It's important to us to select the mussels that suit the end consumer. These mussels don't have to be a particular size. It is all about the oil within the meat and meeting the specs that we require to have the quality right for our customers. We aren't interested in processing rejects from the mussel industry. We're interested only in selecting the very best quality mussels for the purpose of oil. We receive them here into a mussel chiller, and we receive 1-ton mussel bags of live greenshell mussels. We hold them until we start processing, and that keeps them fresh and alive for as long as possible, looks after the condition of the mussel and stops them stressing. From there, we take them into our first processing room, which has our high-pressure processing technology which we use to pop open the mussels. It's a cold process. One of the things we've found over the years is that heating mussels destabilises or turns the active ingredients off. And so we have to cold-process right through the way we handle the product. The next step in the process is we put them through a cleaning process. We have a very technically advanced process in place to clean all the beard and any fragments of shell out of the mussel meat before we mince it and turn it into what we call mussel slurry. We then pump it on to trays, freeze them down, hard-frozen in a tunnel freezer, ready for freeze-drying. From there we put the slabs into the Cuddon's freeze-dryers. They run around the clock, so 24 hours a day. When we unload them, we end up with what we call a biscuit. This is the outcome of freeze-drying. The stabiliser is in it, and it is very light and very brittle. It's had all the water taken out of it but still stabilised. And from here it goes into our mill room and we mill it down to a fine powder, which is then packed ready for shipping and CO2 extraction. Heat is a most critical part of our process, but also we have to be aware of the time it takes to get from one end to the other. And oxidation of the product is very key to this. So we handle the product very quickly and get it from one stage to the next as quickly as we can. Once the powder arrives on site, we load the powder into our extraction baskets, which are then loaded into our extraction vessels and then extracted using supercritical fluid extraction technology. And out of the separators, we get the high-value extract that is then packed in bulk and distributed around the globe to our customers. It's an oil. It's a very concentrated oil. And, uh, it has wonderful anti-inflammatory properties. CO2 extraction is a non-intrusive technology, low heat, preserves the product and the nutritional benefits and the actives as best as possible. It's very important that heat is kept out of the process and that we keep the product in a very cool state right the way through the process. MacLab have done a wonderful job over the years developing mussel products and mussel extracts, and Pharmalink, our parent company, ended up getting the ownership of the brand Pharmalink and Lyprinol and created the product. It's for conditions around things like arthritis and inflammatory disorders, and also has benefit from a respiratory point of view. So a lot of research is going on into the product, or has been over the years; various clinical studies done to show effectiveness against inflammatory disorders. Lyprinol is the brand name that the oil is marketed around the world in a number of countries, and it's a very complex mix of 90 different fatty acids that give it its health benefits. They all work together synergistically in an entourage effect. We have a strong position in the marketplace. We believe we're world leaders in what we do. Um, we're one of the best-kept secrets as far as the processing facility goes in Nelson, and we are a very busy company making sure we deliver. For more information on these and other stories, visit our website. Get there via tvnz.co.nz Or if you've missed an episode, you can watch it again on TVNZ OnDemand using the keyword 'rural delivery'. Next week we find out about groundbreaking fingerprinting technology developed by Fonterra that's set to add more value to milk. We visit an expanding aquaculture operation in Northland breeding and producing NZ paua. And we learn about the 100-year history of Croatian family wine business Babich Wines. Thanks for joining us. 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 (BARKS)