August 2022

Welcome to the third edition of the Hill Country Futures quarterly e-newsletter. We want to update you on the progress of key projects and initiatives across the programme. Please share this e-newsletter with family, friends, fellow farmers and others who may be interested. We’d also love to hear from you!

About the programme

Hill Country Futures is a Partnership Programme co-funded by Beef + Lamb New Zealand, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, PGG Wrightson Seeds and Seed Force New Zealand. The programme, due to wrap up at the end of 2022, is focused on future-proofing the profitability, sustainability and well-being of New Zealand’s hill country farmers, farm systems and rural communities.

For more information, please visit: www.hillcountryfutures.co.nz

Resilient forages for the future

Our farmers farm diverse hill country landscapes across New Zealand. Selecting plants that meet a number of criteria — ease of establishment, animal productivity, environmental challenges — is important. Farmers need data, field trials and modelling to help them make more informed decisions about what to plant and where to create a resilient hill country farming future.

Soil and fertiliser series

Professor Derrick Moot and his team have developed 11 factsheets in collaboration with B+LNZ, which make up the ‘Soil and Fertiliser series’. These factsheets provide guidelines on soil assessment and recommendations on fertiliser use — what to use, when and why.

AgYields database

Professor Derrick Moot, in collaboration with others, has built a national forage database – AgYields. The AgYields database is now live:

The AgYields database provides a centralised location for people to deposit and access NZ wide crop and pasture data in their region for modelling purposes.
AgYields has been updated with all known literature from Northland.
‘The creation of the AgYields National Database – Collation of past, present and future pasture and crop yields’ has been published in the Journal of New Zealand Grasslands.

Modelling legume yield

A key part of Hill Country Futures is answering questions around legume forages’ impact on production and the environment to ensure our farms are resilient to climate change, minimise nutrient leaching and maintain soil carbon. To do this, Prof. Derrick Moot and Dr Edmar Teixeira (Plant & Food Research) have developed two models with different levels of complexity.

Development of a model to be used by researchers and rural professionals

The Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM) NextGen model has been submitted to the APSIM Initiative GitHub repository.

Development of a model to be used by farmers

The thermal time-based (TGM) model, developed to help farmers predict lucerne yields on north and south facing slopes on their farms, has now been published.

The soil and moisture temperature data collected by Maanaki Whenua – Landcare are also helping to inform decision making around ‘what plant where’, including fine-tuning decisions about when and where to sow.

Natives as alternative forages

Dr James Millner (Massey University) and his team are evaluating the multiple potential uses of native shrubs on sheep/beef hill country farms, including:

Assessing anthelmintic properties of select native plants against internal parasites

Parasites recovered from sheep faeces are being used to assess if any anthelmintic properties are present in the foliage of the native species. Parasite species include Haemonchus contortus (barber’s pole worm).

Assessing effects of native plants on rumen function

This work is assessing the potential effect of various native shrubs on rumen function; this can indicate potential health problems for browsing animals as well as indicate potential rumen gas production including methane. Initial results from a very small number of samples suggest that gas production values for native shrubs (leaves) are similar to values measured in NZ pasture samples.

Assessing a low cost and rapid quantitative analysis of native shrub forage quality

Initial results suggest that Mid-infrared (MIR-FTIR) spectroscopy may allow for a low cost and rapid quantitative analysis of native shrub forage (leaf and stem) quality (fibre, protein).

Resilient farmers for the future

Making decisions about plant selection to feed animals and enhance environmental stewardship is not done in isolation. Recognition and understanding of the drivers, challenges and opportunities presented to farmers directly influences how our farmers can achieve and maintain a resilient future.

Increasing farmer wellbeing and resilience

Given the myriad of pressures that farms and farmers are facing, increasing their resilience will be key to future proofing farms and farmers. But what makes one farm or farmer more resilient than the next? FarmSalus — an assessment tool for farmer wellbeing— has been developed to address the current gap in resources available to rural professionals and facilitators who are working with farmer extension and/or farm planning. The tool has been designed to measure and monitor an individual farmer's resilience, but more importantly, it can also be used by facilitators to guide conversations about farmer wellbeing and how this may impact farmers’ decision making and resilience.

Telling the stories of our farmers

Our farmers have an important story to tell that needs to be championed. We continue to tell the stories of some of the farmers and researchers involved in the Hill Country Futures Partnership programme.

Please also visit ‘News and Views’ on the Hill Country Futures webpage to read about more research that is happening across New Zealand as part of the programme.

Katherine Dixon is the co-founder of Nature Positive, a provider of research and advisory services for integrated nature and climate solutions, and a lead researcher for the Hill Country Futures Partnership programme. Her work is focused on the farmers, which are at the heart of the programme. A core part of her research has been a series of 170 in-person interviews, asking farmers about the challenges and opportunities they face and their vision for the future. From the interviews, their key hopes for the future were to achieve sustainable environmental stewardship, to achieve ownership and financial goals and to enable rural communities to be able to thrive — Read more here.

John Chapman and his wife Anne farm the 4,250 Ha sheep and beef hill and high-country property near Mt. Somers, with managers Bert and Kate Oliver who are joining them in an equity partnership. The farm runs to 1500m altitude and carries 5500 ewes, 1600 hoggets (half mated), 700 breeding cows and 400 yearling cattle wintered. Around half of the property is higher and harder hill country with limited useful grazing. The lower hill country is a mixture of improved and unimproved blocks with better soils. The remainder is in a variety of terrains from cultivated river flats to higher glacial terraces. Participating in the Hill Country Futures Partnership programme has helped John Chapman identify and quantify the best pastures for lifting the performance of his property — Read more here.

The Hill Country Futures Partnership programme is a five-year project co-funded by Beef + Lamb New Zealand, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, PGG Wrightson Seeds and Seed Force New Zealand. The programme is focused on future-proofing the profitability, sustainability and well-being of New Zealand’s hill country farmers, farm systems and rural communities. For more information, please visit: www.hillcountryfutures.co.nz

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