Food, Farming & Freshwater Roadshow – Wairarapa

Food, Farming & Freshwater Roadshow: Local scenarios with practical applications.

The team from Our Land and Water National Science Challenge are on the road again, teamed up with Inside New Zealand to bring you a range of speakers to present practical science research for farmers and landowners.

You are invited to join this informative day looking at the role of rural communities in the sustainable future of our primary sector and explore local scenarios with practical applications you can use in your everyday work. This event offers an opportunity to delve into independent research discoveries and engage in thought-provoking discussions. Leading independent researchers will each give a brief outlook of opportunities, some threats, and current (and future) signals in our markets.

Please RSVP below.

Discussion areas and speakers:

Deferred Grazing and Regenerative Farming – Katherine Tozer, AgResearch
Katherine Tozer has worked on a variety of projects in the deferred grazing & regenerative space including looking at the effects of meat taste, summer forage options and how deferred grazing could offer pasture improvement and management advantages.

EU Farm to Fork – Tiffany Tompkins, OANZ
Several areas of focus for the EU Green Deal are likely to pose significant challenges for New Zealand’s export sectors, not only directly in the context of the New Zealand-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) but also due to the potential for the EU’s practices and regulations to become de facto global standards for sustainable trade. The European Union’s Green Deal, especially the Farm to Fork Strategy, presents challenges and opportunities for New Zealand exports into the EU, and into other regions that adopt similar standards in response. What opportunities exist and how are we placed to capitalise on these now and into the future?

Retiring Farmland into Ngahere – John Burke, Pukekauri Farms
Restoring erodible land in New Zealand into native forests can be a challenging and costly process, limiting private landowners’ participation in large-scale projects. However, there is a promising solution – the Tīmata Method. This method has been proven to be more effective and significantly cheaper than conventional methods, reducing the cost of establishing native trees to less than one-third of traditional ‘high-density’/’high-grade’ native planting.

Land Use Opportunities – Robyn Dynes, AgResearch
Information about the land use suitability and production potential of a wide variety of crops became much easier to find, with the launch of the Data Supermarket. The Data Supermarket is a new online storehouse of data about the ingredients, food and fibre we can grow in New Zealand, now and in the future. It includes information about a wide variety of vegetable, fruit, arable, animal, plant and tree crops, plus climate and economic data.

Designing Freshwater Monitoring Programmes – Olivier Ausseil, Traverse Environmental Ltd
Many people are taking action to improve freshwater quality through activities such as stream fencing and planting, wetland restoration, and changes in farming practices. This programme has developed a tool to help all groups involved in freshwater improvement actions to design monitoring programmes that will measure the success of actions to restore freshwater, and to help them select appropriate monitoring technologies that enable early detection of improvement.

Diverse Experiences of Farming – Alice Beban and Janet Reid, Massey University
By better understanding the underlying worldviews that shape perceptions of farming and the agri-food industry, this project will help a connection between producers and consumers. A core component of the project includes understanding, identifying, articulating, and visualising experiences of agriculture among various stakeholders, industry, community groups and others.

Healthy Waterways Register
Healthy Waterways is New Zealand’s national database for recording and reporting the work being done for our waterways. Despite all the great work New Zealanders are doing to improve water quality, these actions are not being recorded and nobody is hearing about them. Healthy Waterways provides a register to record these actions and share these stories. Knowing the extent of the work across a catchment will allow us, eventually, to link the actions done on land to improved water quality outcomes.

Resources will be available and lunch provided. For catering purposes, please RSVP below or call Mark Woods on 027 656 0836 with any queries.

Available on the day will be a range of free guidance and tools to help farmers with freshwater management. Talk to the researchers as they show how they have worked alongside farmers and growers to achieve and identify common goals and opportunities.