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Imagine – evidencing compliance differently

Imagine farmers, growers, and food producers demonstrating the attributes of their products.  Imagine them showing how they comply with food safety standards, environmental management expectations, social responsibility, animal welfare standards, product traceability and provenance.  Now, imagine farmers doing this without filling in forms and maintaining binders of paper documentation.  You may say I’m a dreamer, […]

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Powering up the Waka

When it comes to the impact of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, all of us are affected, and that applies doubly for future generations. We will be in the same figurative boat. And if we are to mitigate, offset, and reduce those emissions, we all need to be “pulling in the same direction”, coordinating […]

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What really drives profitability in pastoral agriculture?

Unique, profitable, and complex New Zealand pastoral agriculture is uniquely based around grazing pasture in the paddock while it is growing. In most countries agriculture is relentlessly dependent on diesel, machinery and chemicals to establish forage crops, spray weeds, harvest them, transport them, wrap them in plastic for storage, then fed them out often in […]

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Going round in circles

I’ve just finished refilling my Ecover washing up liquid bottle at work. Here in our shared office facilities our landlord is trying to get us all to go green and so has invested in a large returnable drum of Ecover from which we can all recharge our plastic bottles and avoid yet more plastic into land-fill.

My eco-crusade doesn’t stop there. In the past month we’ve stopped buying milk from the supermarket and I’m now popping into our local dairy farm on the way home and refilling glass bottles from their state-of-the art milk dispensing machine (at twice the price I might add).

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Time to demonstrate sustainable delivery of human nutrition

As the debate about the carbon footprint of livestock farming rages on, I was encouraged to hear a very persuasive presentation from Professor Michael Lee recently. Michael heads up the team at UK-based Rothamsted Research’s North Wyke site, a world leading centre for farm-scale ruminant livestock production research. In the past couple of years, North […]

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Data sharing needed to farm sustainably

Whether its belching bovines blamed for contributing to climate change, stock access to waterways or the diffuse challenge of nitrate leaching, farming systems in New Zealand are under the microscope.