Captions by Kate Parkinson. Edited by June Yeow. 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, the primary sector has become a testing ground for a number of technological applications devised to improve various areas of production. Today we look at the advances being made in robotic technologies at RoboticsPlus, designed to aid in the horticultural sector. We go to inland Otago to see how value is being extracted from plantation thinning and pruning, and from wilding pines as well. And we visit one of the longest-standing agricultural tourism businesses in NZ. There are a number of challenges for NZ's horticultural sector. Among these are finding and retaining seasonal labour, ensuring consistent pollination, guaranteeing quality in picking and packing, and safeguarding traceability. Tauranga-based company RoboticsPlus is proving that automation in horticulture can be engineered to improve systems and reduce cost. My interest in robotics, really, was, um, I had vertical ownership right through the chain, from owning orchards to leasing orchards to orchard management company, all the way into ownership and post-harvest, and what I like to do this really look at where we're gonna be in five to 10 years' time and what sort of things would impact us. So in terms of the kiwifruit sector, I could see labour is obviously going to be a threat to all of us, whether it's kiwifruit or apples or any of the horticultural crops. Labour costs will keep rising; people today don't want to do those hard, physical jobs. Um, so we are becoming more reliant on RSE workers, um, and anyone that's run large horticultural operations know how difficult it is to get consistency with staff. So we sort of saw robotics as a, sort of, future way of mitigating some of that risk. I guess it really started around our pollination company, and we were looking at how we could automate pollination. During that process, that's where I met young Alistair, who we then hooked up with and helped him through his PhD. But when we started looking at pollination, we thought that the goal post of robotic pollen application was too far stretched, and we decided that maybe looking at kiwifruit harvesting was actually a more attainable opportunity. So being a, sort of, entrepreneur-investor, I decided to hook up with that and have a crack at that, and we started that journey, I think, in about 2009, as part of Alistair's PhD was actually to build a prototype kiwifruit robotic harvester. Obviously now, with the resurgence of G3 in the industry and the increase in crops, and we're now` this will be the biggest kiwifruit crop ever harvested in NZ. Uh, you can start to see the pressures that are coming on with labour, so the level of interest is starting to ramp up. So we've probably been harder to get that interest in terms of kiwifruit, but in terms of what we're doing with robotic apple-packing technology, I'd acknowledge Compass Packhouse for being someone that was thinking forward as well and allowed us to form a relationship to actually test robotic apple packing, and as a result we've got six commercial machines going into their packhouse very shortly, which will be a great result. MACHINE CHUGS, WHIRRS SPEECH DROWNED OUT BY MACHINERY We're at Newnham Innovation Park. We're a park that's set up for fostering innovative companies. A lot of it's around that food si` agricultural, horticultural industry. We're in our development space, as part of RoboticsPlus, where we are building our first commercial run of our apple-packing machines. The design to drop on to a standard grading-sorting machine that the industry has really widely adopted, the likes of the compact sorting equipment. Uh, so these machines take pre-sized and sorted apples. They run them through the machine, and all the apples get oriented. So we rotate them, and we control their rotation in a very specific way so they lie horizontally. Once they lie horizontally, our machine comes forward, picks them up, up to four at a time, scoots them back and then places them nice and gently into the trays. They're all in the same orientation. There's a lot of positive feedback around the concept and around the ability we've got now. They're sort of saying that we are equivalent in performance to about two and a half people from our throughput, but we're getting a better presentation, so our packing quality is better, and our handling is better and more consistent too, which is a really` really promising, nice little step for us for that commercial deployment. Well, we've had one unit running in a packhouse in Nelson for` we had it running in there for a couple of months, where we just` one machine doing a small trial. We were pretty happy with that. We've packed about 1.4 million apples through one machine. It's not their peak time of the season, so it wasn't getting some of the throughput it normally would, but that's quite a promising start. Within about an hour of them seeing the machine running, they were like, 'When do our next nine or 10 machines come on? When are they available?' type scenario. So it was a really nice step to really see that fast adoption of wanting to utilise the technology. SOFT, RHYTHMIC CLICKING This is a mark-two version of our harvesting arm for kiwifruit. We developed our first prototype a few years back, which we trialled and had a lot of learning from, and we've now taken that learning in developing the new technology. We've still got a little bit to go with some of the picking hand and bits and pieces. We're refining that and narrowing it down to make it suitable for harvesting kiwifruit in the commercial operation. About a year and a half ago, we were fortunate enough` RoboticsPlus is the commercial partner in our MBIE ` which is Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment ` high-value manufacturing round, where we put in a bid with Auckland University, Waikato University and Plant & Food Research. So we are driving from a commercial standpoint, making sure there's a commercial focus to that research, making sure there's end-user engagement in that research. The other part with that is Callaghan Innovation ` another government agency ` has been fantastic in sponsoring that project from an early stage and allowed us to really ramp up our development process to get to market faster. You know, without that, we really would've been a lot longer, and I think bringing more expertise into our team, which that allowed us to do, has really refined our development, because, you know, my skill set's rather broad, and the same with the other team members, so being able to get some sort of defined, precise skill sets in behind some of what we're doing has been really valuable. SOFT, RHYTHMIC WHIRRING One of the hardest things is getting people to adapt technology. So if we were to build technology and then go out and sell it, we'd have to sell it at a price that most people would go, 'Mm,' question whether they` whether it would work, whether they wanna invest that sort of money. So, essentially, the model we're looking at is if you take apple packers in a packhouse, we have an install cost, and we service and maintain it, and you just pay per apple packed. But that model is based on what it costs you currently to have labour packing. So it's` in fact, it's not costing you any more, um, but you've got a 24-7 reliability. And then the same would go with harvesting. If, currently, growers pay $30 a bin to pick a bin a fruit, um, our target is that that's what they'll pay for a robot to pick a bin a fruit. So everything we work on is from the ground back up to look at those business models. Um, and by doing that way, it takes away that angst of buying a very expensive piece of technology. Um, so if they don't` if it doesn't work, they can remove it. It-It sort of just takes away a lot of that, um` that sort of, um, decision-making process out. And we've trialled the model. Um, we've got our kiwifruit QuadDusters that we do pollination services with, um, and that's` again, what we did there was we produced pollen. We created some application technology so our growers can subscribe in to have their application done for them. We currently apply pollen to about 25% of the NZ kiwifruit industry with the QuadDuster system. And that's proven that service model, um, works. They don't have to buy the QuadDuster; they can just dial and let me know at 3 o'clock today that they want their application tomorrow, and the bike arrives, does the job. They, um` So it just makes it really simple. We'll be back soon in Otago to find out about a business extracting value from pine trees. 1 Welcome back. A career in the forestry industry was radically changed for Paul Greaves after he suffered a brainstem stroke. While in recovery, Paul worked on an idea he'd had about a sideline venture for forest owners and operators. That idea has become a business called ForestPlus Oils. We make bulk essential oil for a company in the US, which is marketed through another NZ company. There are some very good companies in NZ selling aromatherapy-grade materials but not very many making them. Most of our product goes to a big US company, and they bottle it into 5ml bottles and put it out on the shelf. I started in 1972 as a woodsman and worked my way up through to a management position at Wenita Forest Products, in Dunedin, and I've done 42 years. CHAINSAW WHIRRS I've always been thinking about that we could be getting something different from the waste residue, and about eight years ago, we looked into oils. But my job meant that I couldn't actually get into that part of it. Eventually, I had a brainstem stroke. (CHUCKLES) Uh, took a year to recover and then met up with some guys that were quite interested in getting oils out of the wildlings at the Wakatipu Basin. And we've progressed from there. We are interested in manuka and kanuka and about seven or eight of the exotic species that are grown here in NZ that have been tried by the government and other agencies for timber. We go in and take the wildlings and chip them up and bring them down here. Forest estate ` we'll do road edges for nothing, but if we have to go into the stand itself, then we negotiate different packages with the different companies we're dealing with. Distillation's been done since the 1700s, or before, but we use vacuum distillation, and the reason we have gone to vacuum distillation is that it runs everything at a lot colder temperature. It runs at about 80 degrees. And we tend to keep the top notes. The other side of that is we needed to have a system where we could change the load and keep production up. When you're dealing with Douglas fir with, say, 0.25% oil yield, you've gotta have throughput, and we can't afford to be standing there waiting for things to cool down or to load it, so we've set up a system where everything's bagged in the field, comes to the still, loaded into the still, still in the bags. We can reload a pot in 12 minutes. And you're way below the threshold of people getting burnt or having issues. Everything's mounted on trailers. We can actually go out on the field and do it right on the side of the road. The only key is to have water. We need cooling water. The still can only do 80 bags a day, so if we're in very good material, the guys can do that in half a day. So you've got four guys standing on the hill doing nothing. So what we do is we do three days cutting, if we can, and then they go away and do other silvicultural work or` So we can manage the manpower coming in and out, and that's why we do silvicultural work. This is young Douglas fir, been cut off the tree branch and chipped down to a fine level so it can pass through a distillation system. It's premium material and yields the sweetest oil that we produce. We try and keep the wood content down to the minimum we can, and we target the youngest trees, sort of around about that five-year to eight-year age class. We can take them down to, you know, two-year-old seedlings or wildlings. Once we get up to about age 10, the oil is not` its chemical make-up slowly changes. Once the guys have brung the material back off the hill in the bags, we then process it through the still. We generally run eight bags at a time. Um, the bags are run for around two hours, depending on what the yield and flows are like. Once it's been cooked, after that two hours, we then change all eight bags, a single pot at a time, and then we will put it out in our mulch pile outside. We use a 30-kilowatt diesel burner with a specially designed element, that we designed ourselves also. Generally with the vacuum system is that you can pull oil off quicker. Instead of running, say, a three-hour cycle, you could knock it back to a two-hour cycle. The rule of thumb, it's` for every 100kg of material we put in is 250 mils of oil we get. This is the product that goes into the distillation system, and this is what comes out. This is a really inert mulch. It's done two hours at 80 degrees Celsius. In the middle, we've got four litres of oil, which is equivalent to about US$16,000 retail price. These trees are a specific type, and we are looking at cropping these now. We're looking at planting specific providences of Douglas fir that have come from certain parts of America that produce the highest quality oil and the best yield that we can get. And we're partnering with a few farmers now to have these stands grown specifically for the essential oil market. The timeframe we're sort of working on is actually age five to age eight, so it's a short-term rotation crop, high-yielding off a small area, and the returns are high. We only supply one essential oil to the US. We've done testing in six or seven others, and we are always looking to market those in other ways. And as far as the still goes in NZ, we've been approached by a couple in Rotorua that are interested in looking at something, and we're partnering with a company in the North Island to do manuka. We'll return soon to take in a show at the long-running Agrodome in Rotorua. 1 TENSE MUSIC (SIGHS) BEEPING, INDISTINCT SPEECH LOUD CLANGING CLATTERING CAR ALARM CHIRPS TENSE MUSIC 1 Hello again. The Agrodome in Rotorua is one of the most successful and long-lived agricultural tourism ventures in NZ. As well as animals on show in the auditorium, the farm has a range of livestock classes that tourists can view from their farm tractor tours or by four-wheel drive. The Agrodome was started back in 1971 by Godfrey Bowen. Decided to take sheep shearing, and, um, they set up as a sheep show. From there, they started adding things into it, so they put dogs on the sheep show. Then they brought a milking cow into the sheep show. From there, they decided one day to take some customers, who were late for a show, round the farm. They loved it ` couple of Americans. So they said, 'Let's get the trailer and start doing farm tours.' Little did they know it's now one of the biggest parts of the operation. 350,000 to 400,000 people per year, so it's a lot better than (CHUCKLES) average farming. Guaranteed customers there. Just to give you a bit of an idea, in the peak of the season, between 1000 to 1500 alone just on the farm tours. We've got 350 acres here. Half is leased off the A&P Society of Rotorua, and the other half, of course, we own. Building up now, we've got LUV bikes, where we take tours on those. We've got the Clydesdales here now from Devonport, uh, and they're our new product we're moving into. So we're keeping everything from the old farming and showing a little bit of modern farming. We've got 60 staff on here at the moment, but this season we will be bumping that right up. So I would say a rough guess would probably be 70 by the time the peak season starts. A lot of people now don't even know what a farm is themselves. So we're getting a lot of Kiwis bringing their family here ` the first time they've seen a lamb, uh, which is pretty amazing for our generation to think it's got to that. It's just grown, but we've gotta grow with it, OK. So our biggest challenge for us, just like any farm there ` the production's going up; how do we keep the production? So it's just like farming, but we're farming tourists. So we've got to make sure that our plough gets big enough to keep growing with it, but also we keep growing different things on, and that's why I say we've taken on these bikes now, which we take people on bit of a more one-on-one tour, and they go and see right round the back of the whole farm. So we just got to keep growing and keep growing to what the customer's after. Biggest challenge ` like every farm, it's the weather. Believe it or not, we've just had one of our wettest winters, and the tracks have really taken a hammering. In fact, we've got a digger in here at the moment trying to keep the tracks right. And, also, just with the amount of people coming through. If Mr Key is right, (CHUCKLES) tourism's supposed to be, you know, going up another 20%. So we've gotta make sure that we still give them that same experience whether we had one person here or a thousand people. PEOPLE CHATTER IN KOREAN APPLAUSE What we do for every different culture there, we actually have our own interpreters, which are from that country is well. So they've gotta learn the Kiwi slang when they first get here, and they've got to be able to put our jokes or our humour across to their people as well. METALLIC CLICKING Got 19 different breeds of rams here. So we bring them up ready for the show, and what we do, we just quickly go over them there, make sure they haven't got any wool hanging off them or little bit of fighting marks, cos we're proud of our rams, and we actually get them from breeders, and, um, we've got to do them proud as well. INDISTINCT CHATTER APPLAUSE (MAN SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY) Go! RHYTHMIC CLAPPING Gangnam style. Now, what you came to see ` 19 different breeds of sheep. This is the Romney. This is NZ's number-one sheep breed... When it first started in '71, there was sort of a lot of farmers coming, but now they want entertainment at the same time. So they don't want too much information on the sheep. They just love seeing sheep, of course, so it's entertainment more than information. Oi! Get up there! LAUGHTER Go on. The Agrodome itself, it's commercial but more for the tourism side of it. But we do run an actual farm, so we're lambing sheep here, shearing sheep. So everything to do with farming, they get to see. AUDIENCE EXCLAIMS How I ended up at the Agrodome is I was working at another farm show. Um, they asked me to come up here. My background then is I used to be a shearer, fencer, and, um, yeah, apparently got a lot of sense of humour, and from then on, I was sort of involved here, did the bottom levels, worked my way up, and about nine or 10 years ago, um, they gave me the role of being the operations manager. Health and safety's big here. Ngai Tahu, which now own the company, they want to be the leaders of it, which is really good. So we're forever making sure things are right there, checks on everything. The bikes have got to be checked over; helmets have got to be worn. It is a big process. Any near miss has gotta be documented. Part of my role is to make sure those animals are all good animals, and if they start playing up ` we do get an odd one ` they get taken off straight away. So their show days sort of come to a bit of an end, or they have a rest for a little while, and we bring them back in and see how they go. Animal welfare's huge for us here. You know, we've got some great vets that we get in, but we also` you'll see we feed a lot of extra food out to them. They're forever monitored. Even when I feed out, we check the cows, make sure they're all OK. We go around the farm every day to check on everything, really. ENGINE RUMBLES We've got to have cute lambs all year round, so, um, our rams are pretty lucky here. They get to go out a little bit earlier, and we leave them out there till they've made sure they've got every one. So we have lambs at the start of the season, end of the season, and we do just do one lot of out-of-season breeding. Settle down, Jimmy. The secret is is to stay natural, be ourselves. People come to see real NZers, or Kiwis as we call ourselves. That's the key to success. They love the hands-on. Um, you know, being able to get up close to animals is a key as well. So, realistically, the animals do the work for us, and we just fill in the gaps. For more information on these and other stories we've covered as well as other useful primary-sector information, visit our website. Get there via tvnz.co.nz. You can also watch this and previous episodes on TVNZ On Demand using the keywords 'Rural Delivery'. Next time ` we learn about efforts to control guava moth, a recently arrived pest that's badly affected NZ's feijoa-export market and is threatening a range of other crops as well. We meet Duncan and Anne-Marie Wells, the supreme winners of the 2015 Dairy Business of the Year contest. And we pay a visit to our oldest rural manufacturer, Donaghys, to find out how it's surviving as agricultural practices continue to evolve. Thanks for watching. We hope to see you again next week. Captions by Kate Parkinson. Edited by June Yeow. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 MELLOW, FUNKY MUSIC BIRD TWEETS