All posts by Dan Bloomer

Dan is the part time Manager of LandWISE Inc and one of the small group that established it in 1999. For the rest of his professional life he runs Page Bloomer Associates, a consultancy focused on sustainable land and water management and community development
Agronomy, Controlled Traffic Systems, Precision Agriculture, Projects, Soil

Guide to Smart Farming well received

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A Guide to Smart Farming was published in December 2011. It was widely distributed in January 2012 with complimentary copies sent to LandWISE members, Rural Contractors , Foundation for Arable Research and Horticulture New Zealand levy payers. To date over 6,000 copies have been delivered and feed back has been extremely positive.

A Guide to Smart Farming contains a wealth of information, including case studies of farmers using new technologies, and expert articles explaining how the technologies work.

“New Zealand has a unique ability to supply quality produce to a rapidly increasing global market,” says Hew Dalrymple. “But to do so sustainably requires new approaches to farming and new skills for those on the land.”

The book encapsulates learning which is the result of many years’ collaboration, especially between LandWISE, the Foundation for Arable Research, Horticulture New Zealand, and Plant & Food Research. At its core are Sustainable Farming fund projects, Advanced Cropping Systems and Holding it Together.

View the Table of Contents here>

With orders now coming from across New Zealand and Australia, as well as the United Kingdom and Brasil, we’ve set up on-line shopping. Those in New Zealand and Australia will find the esiest way to purchase is via TradeMe. Search for “guide smart farming” and you’ll get to the auction page. The buy now price is $29-90 plus post. Others should contact us at LandWISE

Those who have already read the book are invited to post comment here.

Agronomy, Controlled Traffic Systems, Precision Agriculture

Can NZ arable farmers profitably adopt GPS guidance Technology?

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Peter Mitchell from Oamaru completed the Kellogg Rural Leadership programme on 2009. As part of his work he asked the question, “Can New Zealand arable growers profitiably adopt GPS guidance technology?”

Peter has given permission for his report to be published on the LandWISE website. It is a good and enlightening read.

You can view a pdf version of Peter’s report here> Can NZ arable farmers profitably adopt GPS guidance technology?

We welcome your feedback!

Agronomy, Controlled Traffic Systems, Drainage, Irrigation, Precision Agriculture, Soil, Tillage, Uncategorized, Water

Smart Farming the Game to be in

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This article first appeared in The GROWER magazine in December 2011

Dan Bloomer, LandWISE

A Guide to Smart Farming

“New Zealand has a unique ability to supply quality produce to a rapidly increasing global market,” says Hew Dalrymple. “But to do so sustainably requires new approaches to farming and new skills for those on the land.”

A book published in December contains a wealth of information that will help. A Guide to Smart Farming has case studies of farmers using new technologies, and expert articles explaining how the technologies work.

The book encapsulates learning which is the result of many years’ collaboration, especially between LandWISE, the Foundation for Arable Research, Horticulture New Zealand, and Plant & Food Research. At its core are Sustainable Farming fund projects, Advanced Cropping Systems and Holding it Together.

View the Table of Contents here>

Advanced Cropping Systems

Advanced Cropping Systems followed twelve farmers assessing precision farming technology. Perhaps not surprisingly, the focus for some shifted in the three years of the project.

FAR’s Tracey Wylie worked with Tim Macfarlane mapping weed infestations with a canopy sensor. Their weed map did not correlate very well with the weed problem, but a soil map did.  As Tracey and Tim say, “We need to take all the information we have into account, we can’t assume a single tool will tell us what we want to know.”

Travis and Nigel Sue fitted RTK-GPS and autosteer for their fresh vegetable operation. Now the rows are dead straight and perfectly spaced every time. They have labour and input savings, and no land is wasted. “We should have had it years ago,” they say.

A half-paddock trial of permanent beds for onions, potatoes and cereals at A.S Wilcox and Sons controlled traffic on the paddock and saved soil, oil and toil. Already expanded to 40ha, they are now focused on rolling the new system out across the business.

Hugh Ritchie wants easy data transfer between GPS devices and computer programmes to avoid double and triple data entry, avoid errors, and increase efficiency. Unfortunately a solution does not look imminent! Sjaak Wolfert is leading a major EU project on this topic. “This is a global problem. There is no single standard for data exchange in agriculture, and manufacturers are slow to use those that are available,” Sjaak says.

In partnership with Keith Nicoll, Hugh has made major advances with precision drainage installing plastic pipe with a gravel envelope. The equipment maps the paddock using RTK-GPS, calculates the drain gradients, and controls the laying machinery automatically, removing costs from the operation.

Holding it Together

Holding it Together focused on retaining soil and soil quality. Plant & Food scientist Paul Johnstone led the Fresh Vegetable Product Group, Potatoes New Zealand, LandWISE project. “There are many practical things we can do to look after this key resource,” he says.

Scott Lawson is one of several crop farmers using furrow dyking in their wheel tracks. “It is normal practice for us now,” he says. “We were getting crop loss after rain or irrigation when water ran along wheel tracks and drowned out crop. The furrow dyker keeps the water where it lands while it soaks in.”

Antonia Glaria worked with Paul on a range of cover crop options for fresh vegetable growers. They found maize could recapture lost nutrients including nitrogen. “We’ve studied maize in a number of situations,” says Paul. “It is a very deep rooted crop, and a great scavenger of nutrients. In some cases, all the nutrients needed can be obtained from deep in the soil – nutrients that would otherwise leach and cause problems down the track.”

“A Guide to Smart Farming is a great publication,” says Hew Dalrymple. “Every cropping farmer should get a copy and read it. It will help them maximise opportunities and make sure our land and water is in the best condition for the next generation.”

Orders

Copies of the book A Guide to Smart Farming are available from LandWISE for $NZ 29-95 plus postage: Click here or contact us via info@landwise.org.nz

New Zealand and Australian residents can order copies and pay on-line by credit card via TradeMe. Search for Guide to Smart Farming

Feedback

Please feel free to post feedback – does the book give good information? What could be added or updated?

 

Controlled Traffic Systems, Tillage

Assess impact of cropping systems: a simple calculator

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To help you consider the impact of alternative cropping systems, we’ve put together a simple spreadsheet calculator. You are welcome to download it here> LandWISE Cropping Impact Estimator.

The calculator flows from our work on precision farming and the benefits achievable from controlled traffic farming or permanent bed cropping systems. Up to threee scenarios can be compared. The calculator is intended to help you consider the savings possible from alternative cropping system strategies, especially changing cultivation practices.

Farmers we work with are saving as much as half their fuel, machinery and labour costs. By not driving on the “garden”, and not ripping up the “tracks”, their cultivation is drastically reduced – the heavy work is just not needed.

The calculator is prefilled with some suggested values for fuel and labour use of different farming operations. You can choose your own operations and use your own fuel use values. Just put in the best numbers you can! It determines CO2 emissions from fuel consumption using a standard CO2-e value for New Zealand diesel.

We put in a sheet to calculate carbon equivalent emissions from fertilisers. We’ve suggested some New Zealand CO2-e values for main fertilisers. These are based on a paper by Stewart Ledgard and colleagues, “Life Cycle Assessment of Local and Imported Fertilisers Used on New Zealand Farms”.

Changing your cultivation might not indicate a change in fertiliser use. But when farmers move to GPS guidance, and especially to controlled traffic or permanent beds, they save about 10% or so of inputs such as fertiliser and agrichemicals. This is achieved just by avoiding overlaps.

A summary sheet draws the results from your scenarios together and shows how much fuel, fertiliser, labour and money can be saved by changing your practices.

Download the calculator, have a play, and post a comment!

Controlled Traffic Systems, Precision Agriculture, Soil, Uncategorized, Water

Water, oil and phosphate

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As published in March 2011 Grower

Dan Bloomer, LandWISE

Farmers are under constant pressure from the community. You hear and see it in the media everyday. “Cut food prices!” “Stop sucking our rivers dry!” “Produce more food!”
We hear of fully allocated water, peak oil, peak phosphate, and rising populations with higher and higher expectations (no observable peak there yet). So what can anyone do?

The last few generations have seen massive increases in agricultural productivity. Often attributed to increased fertiliser, chemical sprays and irrigation, it is often portrayed as negative.  But increased productivity is also the result of increased efficiency and learning compounding on learning. Efficient farmers produce more crop per hectare, more crop per litre of water, per litre of oil, per kilogram of phosphate. So they eke out those finite resources to give more people better nutrition.

Water, oil and phosphate are finite resources. Being more efficient doesn’t make any more. But it gives time to come up with the next great plan. And that’s what we must do with urgency.
Let’s think for a minute about those three farm inputs.
In the case of oil (energy), we ultimately need substitutes. Alternative energy options that may suit cities are not practical on farm. So agriculture is seen as a high priority area for remaining oil supplies (after the military).
Our immediate task is to increase efficiency until viable agricultural energy alternatives are developed. In the medium term, bio-fuel economics will give “Grow your own” new meaning. But more paddocks set aside for tractor feed means less for human feed. Even in the long term, energy efficiency must be a very high priority.
For crop production, the major efficiency gains farmers can have right now come from reduced cultivation. Avoid compaction, cultivate less, improve soil and require less cultivation. A positive spiral up the slippery slope.

Phosphate and water don’t have substitutes. Efficient use and recycling are essential.
Phosphate is lost in eroding soil and in our farm effluent and urban waste streams. It goes to sea. It takes millennia to return to land in mineable quantities, if we don’t remove the fish stocks in the meantime.

The Taupo urban treatment system applies waste to soil and produces stock feed, so the nutrients are rapidly returned to the agricultural system. We need the rest of the country (world) to follow suit. On farm, we need to minimise phosphate use and avoid excess soil levels. And we need to stop soil erosion and loss of effluent.  Water largely recycles itself and New Zealand has a very fortunate short cycling period. We do need to capture rainfall (free irrigation) and retain water in the landscape. That means strategic use of water storage including farm and community dams. On farm, it also means keeping soils in top condition to allow infiltration and store as much water as possible, and still ensure suitable drainage.
Our other main duty is looking after water quality, keeping nutrients levels suitable for stable ecosystems. We need to keep farm nutrients on the farm for growth. The cost of external nutrients is increasing. Soil is a resource we must retain. So there are multiple drivers for keeping soil and nutrients away from waterways.
Soil is the linking theme throughout this article. Too often we draw down on this natural capital for short term gain. It is the base farm resource and biggest capital investment. It is central to all we do and deserves as much care, repair and maintenance as any asset.

Uncategorized

Get Free Email Updates

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Now our website offers “Feeds” you can get automatic updates when we post new items or newsletters on the website. A wee search engine checks our site each day for new material and emails you if it finds any.

Increasingly, this will be the main way we communicate with you, so please get registered as soon as you can. This will effectively replace our newsletter and email notices. We put the news on the LandWISE website and you automatically get it delivered.


Register for free LandWISE email updates

Registering gets you set up for automatic email notices when we put new material on the website. You don’t have to do anything but check your email.

You subscribe to feeds by filling in an on-line form.

You can un-subscribe on-line if you no longer want to receive notices.

How do you register?

Registering is easy, but takes a few steps. These are part of protecting you from spam, and make sure you are actually the person asking to receive email notices.

1. Look for Register for Free LandWISE updates on the LandWISE website (just left of the title of this page)

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2. Enter your email address and click Subscribe

• A pop-up window from Feedburner will ask you to check your email address and enter some text to complete your subscription request

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3. Check your email, enter the code you see, and click Complete Subscription Request

4. Feedburner will email you a link asking you to verify you want the notices.

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 5. Click on the link and you’re away!


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What are RSS Feeds?

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You’ll see that our website offers “Feeds”. A wee search engine checks our site each day for new material and lets you know if it finds any.
The steps below show you how to have LandWISE Feeds set as a favourite on your web browser.


Subscribe via RSS

RSS feeds set a favourites link in your web browser. The RSS feed collects our updates for you. When you look at your feeds, it contains items put on our website. You get the information, but you have to remember to look regularly yourself.

How do you subscribe to RSS feeds?

1. Look for this icon  RSSFeeds

It tells you the website offers feeds. On the LandWISE site, you’ll find it just below the Subscribe for Free LandWISE Updates option

2. Click on Subscribe via RSS

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• A special LandWISE page will come up showing all the latest content. At the top of the page is a box in which you’ll find a link to set up the subscription.

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3. Click on Subscribe to this feed

• A pop-up Subscribe to this feed asks if you want to subscribe to LandWISE

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4. Click Subscribe and a Feed called LandWISE will be added to your favorites

5. Check your favorite feed regularly for LandWISE updates or to quickly search our postings. You can search here by categories too.


Uncategorized

New LandWISE website launched

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The LandWISE website has been rebuilt and now allows users to post comments and other responses to articles. We encourage you to use this to discuss the ideas we are developing. You need to sign up and get approved in the first place, but once you are verified, you can continue posting comments without them needing approval.