Ample energy and interest at MCC’s farming innovation event
Around fifty farmers, lifestylers and rural land owners and others gathered at the Moutere Hills Community Centre on Thursday 17th April to meet, discuss and learn about smart ways to improve farming and rural land management practices.
The calibre of the speakers was impressive and representatives from a variety of organisations and businesses were on hand at the trade stands to outline different products and services around farming innovation. Pics of some of the speakers and trade stands are below.
Other trade stands not shown here included Carbon Crop, Tasman Bay Guardians, Repost, Tasman District Council’s weed section, Patrick de Jong from Forest Management Group, Susan Moore-Lavo from MPI, and Pumps and Filters.
It was recognised by many speakers that as the slide below points out “many farmers feel under siege and short on options.” But many interesting ideas and solutions to farming challenges were put forward over the course of the day seeking to address this issue. There was plenty to discuss and ask.
There was a sense of hope that these innovations actually could offer ways to make farming cheaper, reduce time on tasks, and tackle environmental goals. Some of the key points from the day were:
- There are many external drivers of change for farmers such as food miles, water quality and supply, food safety, and animal health. The video below goes into a bit more detail on this.
- Emerging responses beyond the traditional response to farming include – automating to reduce labour costs, sensory data for faster decisions, analytical tools for better decisions, diversifying land use / business model, equity partnerships & investors, eliminating waste and inefficiency.
- Farms can provide distributed energy resilience for local communities. Solar energy can provide a much cheaper energy source than electricity from the grid, and payback times are less than you think. Becks farm has a electricity cost of 6-8c/kwh from solar rather than 22-26 previously sourced from the grid with a 5 year payback saving $14,000 per year.
- Digital farm management tools like Resolution can provide a digital filing cabinet for across the board farm aspects.
- Having farm assurance plus can lead to higher premiums for meat. Freshwater farm plans don’t need to be a complicated, long process, and can be a useful way of documenting what’s going on on your farm. This helps with transition/resilience.
- You can register regenerating natives for carbon credits. Carbon sequestration goes up as the forest grows, and this is when the earnings are higher, then drops off once mature.
- Applications for regenerating forest need to be in before the end of the year.
- To do good predator control, you need to find out what your pests are (you can use cameras as well as simple ink tracking tunnels), make a plan and set goals, figure out which traps are best and record catches through trapnz.
- Maintenance of traps and changing things up are important wuch as changes lures, using blaze, calibrating your traps, not setting traps for some of the time (predators get trap aversion).
- Innovations in trapping include AI, remote sensing, toxin and bait advances, game cameras (browning camera – need to get one with a screen), auto traps such as the AT220 (game changer as it catches way more), thermal imaging and drones.
- Make sure you don’t put out too many traps, and also celebrate your successes.
Videos of the speakers presentations will be available on the MCC website soon.
The food was awesome and the facilitation excellent thanks to Scott Nicol. We’d also like to than Melonie Shepperd from Ministry for Primary Industries On Farm Support team for helping pull this event together. And of course thank you to all of our wonderful speakers, trade stand participants, and attendees. What a fantastic day!
The next MCC event on the horizon is for the horticultural sector!