Canterbury dairy farm wins grant for injecting beneficial bacteria and fungi in soil
'We've got 40 hectares of paddocks that we'll be taking out and putting in a new pasture, and that will be dairy mix from RespondBio,' Williams said.
'As they are drilling that seed, they're also injecting direct pressure injection of living fungi and bacteria into the soil at the same time, along with the seed.
'They've had some really promising results from the North Island, but nothing in the South Island, so we're really keen to get an understanding of how that works on the Canterbury soils.'
Once the new planting was carried out around October, coming into spring, the one-year trial would use multi-species diverse paddocks as a control, comparing results with the paddocks injected with bacteria and fungi.
The method was considered a way to improve soil health, enhance plant growth and reduce the environmental impact but using the power of microorganisms to decompose organic matter.
Now into the third season without synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, Williams said the farm had better than average pasture yields for Canterbury thanks to careful soil and herbage management with lots of testing along the way.
He said testing throughout the year-long trial will be key to gathering evidence about its long-term benefits.
'Through that year, after every grading round, we'll do a pasture cut, we'll do a herbage test, a plant sap test and then look at the dry matter yields and obviously plate metering as well.
'So we'll start to get a really good feel, and then by the end of the year, we can figure out how much each paddock is giving us and the quality of the feed, and then starting to look at other things as well, like production and how the cows are doing off of it as well.'
Williams said the new trial will add to other research projects carried out at the farm with support from Synlait and AgResearch into pasture species and reducing fertiliser use.
'The soil health, it's ultimately the foundation, the backbone of everything that we do,' Williams said.
A2 Milk Company chief sustainability officer Jaron McVicar said it was encouraging to see such a diverse range of applications, and the impact the fund was having on-farm.
'We've had farmers awarded funding over multiple rounds, building on their projects year-on-year, as well as farmers applying for the first time,' he said.
'It's great that we can support positive environmental outcomes on-farm for those who are early in their sustainability journey and those who already have long-term plans in place to improve their farming practices.'
Twelve farms supplying A2 Milk were supported in New Zealand by the Fund and seven in Australia, equating to $575,000 in total for this year.
Other projects included replacing diesel farm machinery with electric run by solar and building sheds to protect cattle.
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Otago Daily Times
29-05-2025
- Otago Daily Times
Farm sustainabilityfund to help farming family trial biostimulant
Dewhirst Land has eliminated synthetic nitrogen from its Canterbury soils which are about to get a bacteria and fungi boost, Tim Cronshaw writes. A Canterbury dairy farming family with a herd of 1700 cows is about to go deeper into soil health after being free of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser for three years. Dewhirst Land has just won a $35,000 grant from The a2 Milk Company's farm sustainability fund towards a project testing bacteria and fungi added to the soil with a tailored pasture mix. The supplier of a2 milk for Dunsandel-based processor Synlait Milk will foot the remainder of the bill for the $90,000 project on part of the 435ha property in Selwyn. As a structural engineer by trade, managing director Isaac Williams takes an engineering lens to the farm he jointly manages with his wife's family. He said the family had been running regenerative, diverse multi-species pasture for three or four years on about 85% of the milking platform. This had been producing good results and they looked to push this further with a trial based on a RespondBio biostimulant system. "We are a farm trying to push the boundaries a wee bit and be innovative in sustainability and regenerative pastoral farming. "In doing so it's a bit of a space where there's no real hard and fast research or evidence supporting it, not because it's not working, but because it's just that nobody has put the money into it." Mr Williams said they initially dismissed RespondBio as another "sales pitch", before revisiting its fungi and bacteria-enriching potential to test it for themselves. "We had always known with the soil health on Canterbury dairy farms it is a challenge to maintain high populations of fungi and bacteria, particularly fungi as the bacteria we've still got. "For us, we have been very much on that journey with agronomists and soil specialists Agrownomics and AgResearch who have been doing some trials on our farm as well. Time and time again the fungi side of things had come up." Fungi helped to breakdown organic matter and spread and mobilise nutrients within the soil and between the root systems, he said. "We asked ourselves how we could get more fungi and nobody really had an answer and I recalled this conversation that RespondBio had floated to us about fungi and bacteria and we picked up the phone. The prices were a bit up there and as a structural engineer by trade I'm all about numbers ... The numbers they had were relative to a North Island system which didn't really relate to our system here in Canterbury. So I told them if we are going to do this I wanted to substantiate it with our own measurements and track it, but by the time you factor in the product cost and the time doing the recording I didn't know if it would stack up as a trial." However, the claims for substantial increases in dry matter yields were appealing as it would mean they could reduce their supplementary feeding of palm kernel extract by growing more pasture on the farm. About the time they were toying with canning the idea, they came across a2 Milk Company grants. Mr Williams said they were pleased to get the funding to progress the project after preparing a proposal with input from their agronomists and AgResearch. Dewhirst Land will begin the trial over one year on 40ha in about October. This land will be split into two parts of four paddocks each, with one of the paddocks in conventional multi-species pastures as a control site, another sown in a customised dairy seed mix with no biostimulant and the other two paddocks sown in the seed mix with the biostimulant. This will be repeated at another site. "The idea there is we get a feel for whether it is the dairy seed mix or the bacteria and fungi which are doing wonders. So we can control for those two things to get some idea of what is giving us the best bang for buck. If it's successful we will look to roll it out across our farm and if it's not we carry on." Dewhirst Land is part of several benchmarking groups as the only farm with zero nitrogen and growing and feeding well above average pasture rates. Mr Williams said the farming system was working and he credited his father-in-law for making the change. "I don't think anyone's excited about removing nitrogen from the system when it has for so long been associated as arguably almost an additional feed as you just put it on and get new grass. From a mathematical production point of view I understand it, but we've been on a journey with a focus on soil health for five years now and the soil health has come a long way." Nutrients are added to plant leaves via foliar applications by PFA Contracting rather than the soil at Dewhirst Land, with pastures added with fish hydrolysate soil improvers, seaweed, amino acids, potassium humate and fulvic acids which are tailored every grazing round. Depending on the time of year they might do a pre- and post-graze spray of paddocks to get trace elements and nutrients into feeding cows, and follow this with a nutrient mix to improve soil and plant health. Over the past two years they have been harvesting about 16.2 tonnes of dry matter to the hectare compared with an average 15t/ha to 16t/ha in central Canterbury. "This season coming up we will be more than that." Only 15% of the farm remains in conventional ryegrass and clover pastures, which also go without synthetic nitrogen. Nor are their nearby 220ha support blocks fertilised with nitrogen. Mr Williams said there were still costs involved as they had to pay for other products and higher spreading costs, but they were at a point they could reduce some of this soon on balanced soils. "We have also partnered with Synlait and are doing full farm soil testing and they are helping support us to do that. Every paddock will be tested every season. The idea is Synlait's milk has a sustainable market placement adding value to their customers." Other ongoing projects are soil carbon measurements, methane inhibitors via the seaweed and technology measuring cow health in the rumen. Another interesting part to Dewhirst Land's system is it operates Roto Rainer irrigators instead of centre pivots which partner well with multi-species pastures as they respond well under moisture stress. Leaching losses monitored via modelling remain relatively high as the farm has a lot of nitrogen-fixing clover in the system. "This is where we hope the fungi and bacteria will help redistribute that nitrogen to the plants that need it, rather than just having it fixed in the clover and immediately around it. So we do lose a bit and we are still very much learning." Multi-species pastures include three different clovers, Italian and other ryegrasses, tetraploids, plantain, chicory, fescues, lucerne and timothy. A trial of sunflowers in a paddock was not repeated because of the mess left after grazing. The cows complete about 10 grazing rounds per paddock for the season. Three plate meter readings will be taken of the pasture's dry matter cover before and after each grazing round, followed by a pasture cut which will be bagged, then sent for the testing of herbage data as well as plant sap testing for the nutrient uptake. Then the dry matter percentage is monitored with the initial wet weight gathered for each cut compared with the residual result to get an exact picture of each yield. This is repeated for each paddock over the season for a total of 80 herbage and 80 plant sap tests. On top of this will be the trial's 16 soil tests with the soil's microbiology also to be analysed by Soil Foodweb for a micro-organism count in the soil before and after the trial. As a larger farm, Dewhirst Land typically runs its cows in four herds with paddock-to-production performance also to be tracked. Some of the split herd are winter-milked with the herd generally milking twice a day during the peak of the season. Up to 30% of the herd is reduced to once a day in the shoulder of the season if they need their condition improved or for animal health reasons. Mr Williams said the family was grateful for the support of The a2 Milk Company to do the work. "This project aims to enhance the farming system, improve the profitability of the farm to ensure the land is protected for future generations and also maintain the welfare of our cows. Through this project we hope to produce beneficial results that can be shared with the wider industry." A total of 19 projects received grants from the $575,000 fund, including 12 in Southland and Canterbury, with the rest in Australia. They included initiatives reducing greenhouse gas emissions by replacing diesel operated machinery with electric machinery run through solar, and building calf sheds to provide shade and shelter. The a2 Milk Company chief sustainability officer Jaron McVicar said it was encouraging to see the impact the fund was making for positive environmental outcomes on farms.
Scoop
28-05-2025
- Scoop
Antarctic Footprint Clean-up Challenges – How A Remote Antarctic Base Clean-up Protected One Of Earth's Clearest Lakes
Press Release – NIWA Dr Howard-Williams says while recent guidelines on cleaning up contaminated sites in Antarctica outlined in the Antarctic Clean Up Manual are useful, challenges remain particularly when not much is known about the consequences of contamination of Antarctic … The flooded station site in 2023 was a shallow submerged reef surrounded by an open water moat. The station was located on the upper left of the reef. (Antarctica New Zealand; A.D.A.M.) / Supplied The clean-up and site restoration of a New Zealand research station in Antarctica has provided valuable lessons on the challenges of contaminated sites, according to a study in the journal Polar Record, recently published by Cambridge University Press. The study found that while tonnes of contaminated materials were removed from the former Vanda field station, some residual contamination still remained. 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In 1991, the Antarctic Treaty Parties had just agreed on the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which provides for the comprehensive protection of the Antarctic environment. Its Annex III on waste management and disposal outlines the requirements for the management of wastes associated with present and future activities. Annex III called for programmes to clean up existing waste disposal sites and abandoned work sites so long as their removal didn't result in a greater environmental impact than leaving the structure in its existing location. It was decided that decommissions of the station would be compliant with the Protocol even though New Zealand did not implement the Protocol into domestic legislation until 1994 as the Antarctica (Environmental Protection) Act.' One concern was that compounds not normally found in the lake, such as organic phosphates, hydrocarbons, fats and soot, might contaminate Lake Vanda, says Professor Hawes. 'A site survey found soil contamination around the station and other locations with hydrocarbons and domestic waste, including high metal concentrations, and contamination associated with detergents, food scraps, packaging and fuels, particularly in the area known as Greywater Gully. If contaminants or nutrients were released into the lake, it could affect the unique microbial mat communities that grow on the floor of Lake Vanda .So, a great deal of effort was put into removing the most contaminated soils and groundwater before the site was flooded. To assess the effectiveness of the rehabilitation, these microbial mats have been monitored, along with levels of trace metals and nutrients in the lake water at the station site.' Rather than return the site to a pristine state, the plan focused on ensuring minimum impact on the lake ecosystem, ensuring that benefits outweighed the damage of remediation activities, says Dr Howard-Williams. 'The plan included excavating and removing the soils and contaminated groundwater, including lead-based painted rocks and fuel-splattered dirt, and returning the terrain to a more natural, pre-human appearance. Around 400kg of contaminated groundwater from the gully along with 7,000kg of soil were shipped back to Scott Base for treatment and disposal.' Results showed that while initial research suggested contaminants from the gully could potentially impact the lake's ecosystem, 20 years after decommissioning and the complete flooding of the site, there was no evidence of contaminants entering the lake water and the microbial communities colonising the station site were not significantly different from those developing in uncontaminated areas. Dr Howard-Williams says while recent guidelines on cleaning up contaminated sites in Antarctica outlined in the Antarctic Clean Up Manual are useful, challenges remain particularly when not much is known about the consequences of contamination of Antarctic ecosystems. 'It has been estimated that across Antarctica there may be around two million cubic metres of abandoned waste materials and hydro-carbon contaminated sediment. Effective remediation in Antarctica requires early planning, robust environmental baselines, and adaptive strategies grounded in research – recognising that full decontamination is rarely possible and must be balanced against the risk of further environmental harm. Despite the lack of comparable data, detailed clean-up guidelines, and contaminant baselines, Vanda's clean up not only demonstrates New Zealand's commitment to good environmental management, but it will also serve as an example to other countries involved in operations across Antarctica.' Content Sourced from Original url
Scoop
28-05-2025
- Scoop
Antarctic Footprint Clean-up Challenges – How A Remote Antarctic Base Clean-up Protected One Of Earth's Clearest Lakes
Press Release – NIWA Dr Howard-Williams says while recent guidelines on cleaning up contaminated sites in Antarctica outlined in the Antarctic Clean Up Manual are useful, challenges remain particularly when not much is known about the consequences of contamination of Antarctic … The clean-up and site restoration of a New Zealand research station in Antarctica has provided valuable lessons on the challenges of contaminated sites, according to a study in the journal Polar Record, recently published by Cambridge University Press. The study found that while tonnes of contaminated materials were removed from the former Vanda field station, some residual contamination still remained. However, the remediation of the site in Antarctic's Dry Valleys, which had served as a research base for a quarter of a century, didn't affect measurably the water quality of the area's largest and deepest lake or the biological communities that colonised the station footprint. There was no detectable human-induced environmental change to the pristine Lake Vanda following the decommissioning of the research station, conclude researchers from NIWA, Waikato and Canterbury universities, and Antarctica New Zealand. The successful site rehabilitation shows that in a harsh environment, amongst delicate ecosystems, it is possible to ensure minimal impact from the restoration of a contaminated site, says NIWA aquatic scientist Dr Clive Howard-Williams. 'Located in Antarctica's largest ice-free area, the arid Dry Valleys, Vanda Station is one of the few research stations that have been decommissioned under more stringent Antarctic environmental standards. Neither minimizing human impact nor climate change may have been top-of-mind when construction commenced in 1968. The eight-building complex was built on a ridge 200m away from Lake Vanda, which has a depth of 78m and some of the clearest water on earth, with a unique warm bottom layer that is more saline than the Dead Sea.' The station facilities included a workshop, lab, generator room, huts for a dozen people, and a toilet above a removable drum, with a tractor hauling supplies and fuel from three helicopter landing areas to the station. The station was occupied every summer from 1968 (and even had staff year-round for three winters), hosting scientists, surveyors, maintenance staff, aircraft crews and VIPs. By the time it was closed in 1992, the site had hosted nearly 17,000 person-days – the equivalent of nearly 46 years. For a polar desert site, this is a substantial human footprint, says Antarctic inland water expert and veteran of more than three decades in the Dry Valleys, Waikato University's Dr Ian Hawes. It wasn't the cumulative human impact that prompted the decision to close the research station, but the consequences of changes in climate. 'While the station was located 15 m above the level of the large, ice-covered Lake Vanda, over time more glacial meltwater flowed from Antarctica's longest waterway, the Onyx River, into the closed-basin lake. So by 1991, it was just 2.5m below the site. The threat of inundation meant removing the buildings and structures became critically important. In 1991, the Antarctic Treaty Parties had just agreed on the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, which provides for the comprehensive protection of the Antarctic environment. Its Annex III on waste management and disposal outlines the requirements for the management of wastes associated with present and future activities. Annex III called for programmes to clean up existing waste disposal sites and abandoned work sites so long as their removal didn't result in a greater environmental impact than leaving the structure in its existing location. It was decided that decommissions of the station would be compliant with the Protocol even though New Zealand did not implement the Protocol into domestic legislation until 1994 as the Antarctica (Environmental Protection) Act.' One concern was that compounds not normally found in the lake, such as organic phosphates, hydrocarbons, fats and soot, might contaminate Lake Vanda, says Professor Hawes. 'A site survey found soil contamination around the station and other locations with hydrocarbons and domestic waste, including high metal concentrations, and contamination associated with detergents, food scraps, packaging and fuels, particularly in the area known as Greywater Gully. If contaminants or nutrients were released into the lake, it could affect the unique microbial mat communities that grow on the floor of Lake Vanda .So, a great deal of effort was put into removing the most contaminated soils and groundwater before the site was flooded. To assess the effectiveness of the rehabilitation, these microbial mats have been monitored, along with levels of trace metals and nutrients in the lake water at the station site.' Rather than return the site to a pristine state, the plan focused on ensuring minimum impact on the lake ecosystem, ensuring that benefits outweighed the damage of remediation activities, says Dr Howard-Williams. 'The plan included excavating and removing the soils and contaminated groundwater, including lead-based painted rocks and fuel-splattered dirt, and returning the terrain to a more natural, pre-human appearance. Around 400kg of contaminated groundwater from the gully along with 7,000kg of soil were shipped back to Scott Base for treatment and disposal.' Results showed that while initial research suggested contaminants from the gully could potentially impact the lake's ecosystem, 20 years after decommissioning and the complete flooding of the site, there was no evidence of contaminants entering the lake water and the microbial communities colonising the station site were not significantly different from those developing in uncontaminated areas. Dr Howard-Williams says while recent guidelines on cleaning up contaminated sites in Antarctica outlined in the Antarctic Clean Up Manual are useful, challenges remain particularly when not much is known about the consequences of contamination of Antarctic ecosystems. 'It has been estimated that across Antarctica there may be around two million cubic metres of abandoned waste materials and hydro-carbon contaminated sediment. Effective remediation in Antarctica requires early planning, robust environmental baselines, and adaptive strategies grounded in research – recognising that full decontamination is rarely possible and must be balanced against the risk of further environmental harm. Despite the lack of comparable data, detailed clean-up guidelines, and contaminant baselines, Vanda's clean up not only demonstrates New Zealand's commitment to good environmental management, but it will also serve as an example to other countries involved in operations across Antarctica.'
