UPBEAT MUSIC Captions by Ashlee Scholefield. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 Hello, and welcome to Rural Delivery. In a relatively isolated country such as NZ that relies so heavily on its primary sector export earnings, biosecurity remains a concern, as unwelcome pests and diseases are provided with numerous opportunities to reach here through tourism and trade. While many threats are effectively stopped at our borders, inevitably some get through. This week, we find out about efforts to control guava moth, a recently arrived pests that's badly affected NZ's feijoa export market and could threaten 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, and pay a visit to our oldest rural manufacturer, Donaghys, to find out how it's surviving as agricultural practices continue to evolve. The guava moth is a native of Australia and arrived in NZ in 1997. Since then, it's halted feijoa exports out of Northland. In addition, it could threaten a range of other commercial crops, such as stone fruit, citrus and nuts, as it moves further south. Tracey Bain is a Kerikeri-based grower with 1800 feijoa trees on her property. The guava moth affects us quite badly with the early varieties in March, especially Unique ` they get a lot of premature drop. Then it seems to get itself better. But I would say from the whole crop, we probably lose about 10% to the guava moth. Oh, here's our, uh, trap. Here we go. Let's see what we've got in here. Whoa. You've got a good catch there. CHUCKLES: Haven't we just? Some of these, um, aren't guava moth, obviously, but, yeah. No. I've caught everything. Mm. We spray Calypso, but it hasn't really worked. Nothing has worked so far. The problem is you're never gonna get rid of it now, so a control would be the way to go. For the last few years, there's no exports coming out of Northland. Um, as it gets further down south, I think the growers down south will start feeling the pinch a wee bit more. But, yeah, there's no exports coming out of here, because I can't guarantee that no guava moth is gonna go past our checks and balances. A moth lays an egg on the surface of the fruit, and sometimes around the calyx end, and the first-stage caterpillar, or larva, just comes straight out of the egg and burrows straight into the fruit, and, uh, you can see a wee, uh, sort of, like, we call a sting or an indentation. Very hard to detect, uh, at the initial stages. And then the bruising can appear as the larva grows bigger. We can just see the entrance where the early-stage larva has come in. You get this little, sort of` little bit of damage here in the skin, and from there, it will move as it grows ` spreads right into the fruit. This is just as the fruit is starting to ripen. The guava moth times her egg laying perfectly so that the fruit ripens as the larva develops. Then it causes the fruit to drop to the ground early, prematurely. And the development continues on in the fruit. And you get an exit hole when the grub, or the larva, reaches about 10 mils. It will then move from the ground, where the fruit has fallen on to the ground, moves into the debris underneath the tree and forms a loose cocoon, where it gathers up loose leaves and sticks. So you get a little cocoon like that underneath your fruit tree, and then the moth hatches out from there and, um, is ready to go again. The moth is very small and insignificant. Very difficult to tell from just many other moths you may see around your orchard. This is a monitoring tool so that we can tell where it's spread to. If we have a suspicion that it's in a new area, then we will hang one of these up and then determine whether guava moth has been caught. It's not a control option. The best option, if you're wanting them identified, is to wrap the sticky base in Glad Wrap and send it to an entomologist for identification. Once it's finished with the guavas and the feijoas, at this time of year, it will move on to lilly pilly, infest a lot of these fruit ` and there are thousands produced by trees. A lot of alternative hosts are just our roadside weeds, including feijoa hedges, lilly pilly hedges, loquats ` feral loquats ` and these will all host the guava moth, and so basically the guava moth can just move on to the next, uh` the next available crop. Up here in Northland, they're breeding all year round. They will slow down over winter because of slightly cooler temperatures, but otherwise they're just moving on. We don't know how far they fly. Research needs to be done. Here we can see where the larva has got right into the fruit. Brown chewing material where it's chewed. You can also get some added fungal pathogen associated with it. You can get the excreta ` the frass ` coming out its rear end. But, basically, these are inedible. They spend their whole life inside the fruit, once they leave the egg and burrow into the fruit. So they're well protected from insecticide. The best option, especially for home gardeners ` it's not really going to happen for commercial orchards ` but if you put, um, a fine covered mesh over your fruit just as it's ripening ` uh, just curtain mesh ` and secure it to the top of the branch, you can stop the, uh` the female coming in and laying eggs on the fruit, cos she lays her eggs actually on the fruit surface. So that's your best option. Other options can be just making sure clear away all your fallen infested fruit off the, uh, ground around, uh, your, um,... uh, beneath your fruit trees. But there are no insecticides registered for use against guava moths. Oh, yes. There we go. You're getting your eye in now for detecting the little` the bruising` the` It's that pinprick, and it has a wee bit of a dimple. The hardest thing is teaching your workers to spot them when they're going over the grading machine. We also need all of the sectors to come together and all contribute to where we go next, because at the moment, we are struggling as far as what options we've got. Personally, I think its biocontrol is, uh` is the way to go ` bring in, uh` try to redress the fact that the guava moth's got here without any predators or competitors or parasites, and if we could find a parasitoid in its home range back in Australia, um, that we could introduce safely to NZ, then I predict that would be the way to go. But also there has been` I have done some work with mating disruption as well, using pheromones, uh, in an orchard situation. We'll be back soon at Outram in Otago to meet the supreme winners of the 2015 Dairy Business of the Year. 1 Welcome back. Duncan and Anne-Marie Wells hold 50% of an equity partnership in Huntly Road Dairies, and in 2015, the Fonterra suppliers were the supreme winners of the Dairy Business of the Year. Duncan trained as an electrician and has a background in dairy. UK-born Anne-Marie had never been on a farm before meeting Duncan. The land area we're farming here is 181 effective hectares, and we're milking approximately 620 mixed-age cross-bred cows, spring calving. We're very fortunate here with the strengths of this farm and its location. It has some very good quality recent silt loam soils. So we have some very fortunate soil types, and I think that attributes to some of the production levels we're able to achieve. At times, it can get quite wet. We're, uh, not a great deal above sea level, and this farm isn't` isn't as, um` as low as some others on the Taieri. But, yeah, that is one of the weaknesses, I guess ` is its ability to get wet and stay wet. But climate's been pretty good the last few years, and we've been pretty fortunate with the regular and reliable rainfall. The background for us coming here ` we've been through the sharemilking, uh, me in particular ` lower-order sharemilking and then 50/50 sharemilking ` and then we were fortunate to move to an equity partnership here and form Huntly Road Dairies to operate here. The farm itself, it's been in dairy for some time. More recently, it was run as a self-contained dairy unit. Um, when we were fortunate to take on the property, we changed that round and decided to run it as more of a milking platform and remove all young stock, and chose to do a lot more of the wintering off the farm. So that allowed us to go in with a higher stocking rate and elected to buy in bought-in feed, and early on in the project, we built a new dairy shed to accommodate the extra cow numbers. We do have a philosophy around our policy, and it is with a smaller, more compact, cross-bred cow and really being driven off the back of grass, and more of a grass diet, the better. We're heading around about 1500 milk solids a hectare, seems to be where we're sitting. Per cow, it's around about 450 to 460 milk solids a cow. Cost of production is around about $3.80 a kilo of milk solids. It is a challenging environment at the moment. I guess, having spent a lot of money on infrastructure to date, we're able to really just focus on our feed costs and keeping our production levels where they are and not spending money. So what we've installed here is a flow meter to measure the milk leaving the platform and heading towards the plate cooler. And that has given us an idea then of the required water flow for the plate cooler. So that was the first bit of the kit we installed, and then I got an alarm system here which identifies the water temperature and then the milk temperature leaving the plate cooler. Helps us in several ways. It means that our water use is bang on our milk use, or two and a half times the milk flow, so that's made a savings in water, and then, in turn, when we've now moved to chilling our water down, meant that we're only chilling the required water and no more. The effluent system we're running here is pretty basic. It might look flash, but it's pretty basic. First port of call for the effluent's into the stone trap here, where at times we need to, we hook it out and put it in the sludge bunker. Effluent then travels into our impact pond, where it's mixed and pumped from. The effluent's pumped out through underground pipe to hydrants in different parts of the farm. At times when we shouldn't be applying effluent, we've got storage ability across the track there. The storage pond ` we've got a concrete Hynds Hypond, and it's a million cubic litres of storage. We are sitting with a, um` a proposed plan, or implemented plan, there for` for nitrogen, and we used computer modelling, or` or, you know, information through Fonterra actually to help us identify our nitrogen leaching in our farming systems. Soil's had a major impact on that leaching, and we're fortunate here with our soils that they are very good for that aspect of it. Um, and also our reasonably regular and reliable rainfall is another key thing for that leaching. The lights give us an indication of the level of effluent in our impact pond. Green's good. That's the zone we like to keep it in. Orange is indicating that the pond is two-thirds full and that we need to think about what's happening here. And the final zone, the red zone, is showing us that, um` that it's getting close to something needs to be done. It either needs to be applied or stored. My role in the business is mainly in the office. With the children being the ages they are, it's been more useful me being in here. So I've been looking after the accounting side of things and putting processes in place, try and help the business run a bit more smoothly. My background is in, um, computing, so I was a software engineer before I came here, and kinda moved into project management and, um, was working in, sort of, a large corporate business doing that. I knew nothing about farming before I came here, so that was a steep learning curve, but essentially it's a business, and you can bring a lot of that business practice in, which I think's been useful. Duncan was running the business really well before, doing everything on his own, but I've been able to come in and let him concentrate on being outside and bring some of my experience and apply it to the farming. Winning the Dairy Business of the Year award was really good for us. It gave us a lot of confidence in what we were doing. As a process, it's been very important just to look at what we've done, why we're doing things, and you really dig into your business and work out where it's working and maybe where it isn't working. It can highlight those things. We've personally got quite a lot of confidence from entering it and winning. Um, you kind of hope you're doing well, and things are pointing to you doing well, but to win an award like that just really does increase your confidence and make you think you're on the right track. We'll be back in Otago to find out how business at Donaghys has changed over its 140-year history. INDICATOR CLICKS RHYTHMICALLY (GASPS) SILENCE (EXHALES SLOWLY) Mate, I'm so sorry. I thought there was time. You just pulled out. I don't have time to stop. It was a simple mistake. LOUD RUMBLING Please. (VOICE TREMBLES) I've got my boy in the back. I'm going too fast. I'm sorry. (SOBS) SEAT BELT CLICKS EERIE CREAKING HARSH WHOOSHING 1 Hello again. NZ's oldest rural manufacturer, Donaghys, has been doing business for 140 years. The company has evolved from making rope to manufacturing products for a range of applications in animal health, pasture and crop management, and farm infrastructure. Donaghys is largely an agricultural company today. Our mantra is that we're committed to being the most innovative company in agriculture, and we commercialise science to add value to farmers. It's about new products and it's about science. We're involved in things from dairy rubberware to shed-cleaning chemicals to herbicides, insecticides, fungicides to anthelmintics through to minerals and digestion enhancers, and then we've got our nitrogen booster as well. By the mid-'90s, Donaghys had 2000 staff and turned over $400 million. It was a public company. I joined Donaghys in 2001. It had been taken private in 1999. And quite frankly, the company was in trouble. The key thing that had happened in the prior 10 years is that Asia had loomed as a manufacturing threat ` the quality was getting there and the labour was cheap. And Donaghys at that stage, they still had 700 staff when I joined, and paying 700 staff, you've gotta be doing high-tech stuff, and a lot of the things that we were doing in 2001, we're not doing them any more ` they're made in Asia, made in India, and funnily enough, made in Europe, because the euro is that weak these days that Europe has become a competitive exporter. Most of our competitors are multinationals where their managing directors are maybe placed in Germany or States or wherever. We're a, um` a small organisation. Most of our senior management are either off farms or familiar with farms, and what we do is we make products that are relevant to NZ. Donaghys' got about a hundred staff now. Our strength is our commitment to innovation and our R & D team. We've got a great bunch of people. The strength of this business is the people with all sorts of different backgrounds and expertise. A huge part of the business is R & D, and we've got 45 products in development right now, of which about 20 of them are in the registration phase. We've got four PhD scientists. In the past, there've been a number of people through, so there's been about 12 different scientists, most of them PhDs, through the business in the last 10 years. R & D comes from the market, um, so we are trying to make things that farmers want. And then there's a whole team involved, from the sales end of the business to the marketing to the distribution part, and then of course the scientists who make it all happen. There's no one simple formula, because a farmer doesn't know about a product that hasn't been developed yet. So some of our products are cost improvements on what's been available; some of them are delivery improvements; and some of them are just straight out discoveries, where we've discovered that something can be done better, and that would be driven from the science end. We've got a couple of absolute crackers. Firstly, there's the sheep pour-on, which, uh, takes away the need to drench sheep, and it'll kill both internal and external parasites. But perhaps the more exciting thing about that ` we've worked out how to take actives that kill parasites through wool of any length, through lanolin, through the pelt and into the blood very quickly. The next exciting thing is the world's first triple-acting cattle pour-on. Now, firstly, nobody in the world has ever managed to put the three main actives together in a triple-acting cattle pour-on, so it's a white drench, it's a clear drench, and it's a mectin; but we're using the delivery system from the sheep ` pour-on ` in cattle. So we're gonna come out with not only the world first triple-acting cattle pour-on, but a new way of delivering cattle pour-on, which is a new generation. So we're standing in a building that's about 140 years old. We've got our brand-new aerosol and tail paint manufacturing line. The base product of it is Donaghys Sprayline stock marker, which sheep farmers have had for over 40 years. We're now making it ourselves in our own aerosol factory. We're also making Alert liquid tail paint and Alert spray aerosol tail paint. The rope machine you're looking at there is well over 50 years old. But some of the tweaks in it that have been involved with the patents are brand new. But the base gear has been around a very long time. This piece of machinery's only three years old. It fits in a very small space. Back in the old days, we would've perhaps taken up 50m2 to have the same number of weaving heads, and we're doing it at five times the speed. So this is a great piece of gear with very little labour. That's where we make N-Boost and the probiotic extract. Effectively, that's a microbrewery, but that's only the first step of the process. The magic and the patented parts of the process is what we do after we've brewed the microbes. So it's the extracts from the microbes that either enhance the efficiency of nitrogen, or they improve the feed utilisation when livestock are being given the products. Some people are cynical about some of this stuff, and rightly so. With Donaghys', uh` For example, with our N-Boost technology, we've had 43 organisations around the world testing the product, and there's been over 320 replicated trials. And all of those trials are on our website, and all the peer reviews are on our website. I don't think there's a more tested product in the world. But there are plenty of people that would like that product not to work, because it halves the amount of nitrogen that is used, and people make money out of selling nitrogen. As we go forward, nitrogen restrictions are being introduced ` rightly so ` to improve water quality, and the N-Boost product, when it's tested through the Overseer package, will take 15% off an average Canterbury dairy farm's nitrogen-leaching footprint. So farmers will want this type of product more and more, because they're running out of options to reduce their nitrogen footprint. For more information on these and other stories we've covered, visit our website. Get there via tvnz.co.nz You can also watch this and previous episode on TVNZ OnDemand, using the keywords Rural Delivery. Next time, we learn about a groundbreaking study underway to identify dairy genetics that result in reliably efficient animals at converting feed to milk solids. We meet Neil Heather, who's being recognised for his advocacy on behalf of farmers in the Bay of Plenty. And we join scientists on the search for a clean, green antifungal agent produced by feijoas. Thanks for watching. We hope to see you again next week. Captions by Ashlee Scholefield. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016