Our two big projects – the Winter Crop Establishment Trial & Understanding Our Land to Drive Change have been a huge part of over lives over the last few years.

The Winter Crop Establishment Project was a cross sector pilot study to gain real, practical on farm information about different aspects of winter grazing (e.g., cultivation, crop, soil condition and animal welfare), to support farmers in Southland and across New Zealand meet the Essential Freshwater Regulations.

Working with the Southern Dairy Hub, the group extended the Hub’s Winter Crop Cultivation Pilot Study onto ten commercial farms across Southland. They tested whether utilising alternative crop establishment methods vs conventional cultivation (e.g., direct drilling, strip tillage, air seeding, precision drilling etc) for fodder beet, swedes and kale, improved soil structure and strength, thereby reducing pugging and improving animal welfare during winter grazing.

With the help of farmers and volunteers (and the wonderful Independent Agronomist Natalie Sutton (nee Stocker)), they gathered a huge amount of data, and gained real practical on-farm information in Southland conditions.

The learnings from the project can be found here on their Project webpage, including a short video, easy to read Project Summary, Technical Summary and Project Reports. The group hope that this work will be expanded and become part of a fully controlled scientific study.

Special thanks to go to Natalie Sutton for all her hard work and leadership on the commercial farm element of the study, and also to the army of volunteers, rural businesses and Southern Dairy Hub Technicians who helped make this project possible.

Our second project Understanding Our Land to Drive Change saw us work closely with Environmental Consultancy Land & Water Science, to help people better understand our catchment and how variations in landscape can impact water quality and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.

By helping landowners understand their properties landscape susceptibility and resilience, it helps them work out what mitigation options to invest in and where they should be put on their property to get the most out of them.

We used state of the art technology to map the landscape and its interactions with water quality and GHG emissions, including airbourne radiometric data to improve and refine existing soil maps, drone survey data to create high-resolution hydrological layers, ground truthing to validate the accuracy of the radiometric data, and studying four case study farms to show how this information can be used at a property scale. These farms were a cross reference of the land-use and elevation/location within the whole catchment.

To help people access the information in a really easy to understand way, an online platform was created displaying the information in seven sub catchments, and linking to information on possible mitigations  - Online Mapping Platform

We also ran a field day on two of the case study farms so they could share how they had used this information to benefit their properties, spoke about the project and its findings at two Southern Dairy Hub field days, and ran three workshops for landowners and rural professionals to help people learn how to use the online platform and turn the maps into action. Making the data accessible, relevant, easy to view and understand has been a very important part of our project.

This was a really exciting and cutting edge project. It gives powerful information to local landowners to help them make great decisions on future mitigations for their properties and where to target them, and ultimately helps make great outcomes for our land, water and community.

More information on our project can be found here, including a short video, case study summaries and the link to the online mapping platform.

Alongside these projects, the group worked with Hedgehope School and Hokonui Runanga to have a community hangi and planting session at the school. Meat and veg was kindly donated by the Alliance Group Limited, So Sweet and local Catchment Group members.

We hosted a pre-lambing and calving community pot luck lunch catch up, which was a great chance to get together before things got super busy on farm, and included very quick updates on our two big projects. We also took part in a nationwide eDNA (environmental DNA) water quality monitoring programme (along with the other Southland Catchment Groups), to provide valuable information on the plants and animals found in and around New Zealand’s waterways. Our sample was taken from the confluence of the Hedgehope and Makarewa Rivers.

In 2022 we ran a Grow Your Own Native Trees From Seed Field day at Sherwood Forest supported by Jesse Bythell from QEII, and have supported Hedgehope School with the stream health aspects of their study on Sherwood Forest. And in 2023 we teamed up with the other six Oreti catchment Groups to host a Mid & Lower Oreti bus trip to help understand our catchment better and all the great work that is being done to look after it.

All this work came together in 2023 when we won some awards for our work.  Southern Cross Produce (SO Sweet) won the Horticulture New Zealand 2023 Environmental Award for their work as a case study farm on the Understanding Our Land to Drive Change project.  We were showcased at the Southland Ballance Farm Environment Awards, and won the Environmental Improvement in Water Quality Award at the Environment Southland Community Awards for our work on helping locals better understand their catchment and how to make great decisions to look after its land, water and people.