We invite you to watch telly. Here’s a link to Rural Delivery, broadcast on Saturday 21 April.

At the end of January, we had a visit from director Kirsty Cooper and camera and sound operator Richard Williams of Showdown Productions.

Why did they come?

They were filming for Rural Delivery and wanted to discuss the Onions New Zealand MPI Sustainable Farming Fund project we have been doing with Plant & Food Research. Now drawing to a close, the three year project has investigated ways to map crop variability at field scale and where variability originates.

The story began four years ago when we had a crop of onions at the MicroFarm. To get a good look at the crop LandWISE Manager, Dan Bloomer climbed up the irrigator.

“The view when you get 7m up in the air and look down is very different to what you see walking around, and I saw massive variability throughout the crop,” he said.

“I could understand some of it but a lot more I couldn’t explain. A colleague was playing around with imaging and smart phones and he made an application where we could drive up and down the rows and map the percentage canopy cover.  I talked about it with  Onions NZ Research Manager Jane Adams who thought it would be quite useful and could lead to greater understanding of variability in onion crops.”

We then partnered with Plant and Food Research with support from Onions New Zealand and the Sustainable Farming Fund to do a project aimed at studying that variability.

Bruce Searle, crop scientist with Plant & Food Research, designed a research approach to get the data we needed to make some practical applications. 

“We wanted to figure out where the variability comes from and how much of it is something that a grower can control.  So we looked at the different factors that might influence variability and worked through the contribution of each to the overall variability,” he says.

“A lot of it comes down to individual plants growing at different rates – something that the grower can’t do a lot about.  However, factors that influence getting good crop establishment are critical to reducing variability, and once the crop is up you can look at poor performing areas within in the crop.   The tool that Dan has been working on captures that information so that you can map the field and make some decisions.”

We have done items with Showdown Productions before and have enormous respect for their work. You can see the result of the onion interviews on Rural Delivery, TVNZ1.