Country Life

Adrian Ball used to crank as much milk out of his dairy farm as possible. The figures were a source of pride. Then 15 or so years ago he started thinking more about the environment and making changes to his farming model. That resulted in Adrian and Pauline Ball winning the Waikato Ballance Farm Environment Award 2019.

Jo Jack is a keen woodworker and runs sign-making classes for woman in rural communities. She makes rustic wooden signs of all shapes and sizes and sells most of them via her Gingham Girls Facebook page. What started as a hobby is now a full-time business for the Balclutha woman who was a police officer for 18 years.

Former teacher Fleur Cutfield has a mobile menagerie on her lifestyle block that she takes to visit retirement villages, pre-schools and schools.

Rain in Waikato has been just what the doctor ordered. Pasture is growing but moisture is really needed to wet up the subsoil. It has been another stunning week in Canterbury with warm and mostly dry conditions. Farmers have been able to plant catch crops after early grazed fodder beet which is much earlier than normal.

Winning Ways in Waikato, A Sign of the Times, Mobile Farm and the Regional Wrap.

Groundwater scientists are using John Saywell's Canterbury farm to measure how well buried trenches filled with woodchips and bacteria break down nitrates in drainage water.

Paul Francis used to be a train driver and then a country cop but he has gone back to what he absolutely loves. He's set up his own tourism venture, Awakeri Rail Adventures, which allows him to spend his days chugging along through the countryside on the Taneatua branch line in the Bay of Plenty.

A Plant and Food Research principal scientist John Monro says if some carbohydrates in a meal are swapped out for kiwifruit it will help reduce blood glucose levels.

Waikato dairy farms and cows are looking a lot better now than they were a month ago, and West Coast dairy cows are getting feed supplements to keep them topped up.

Mike is just back from China and says African swine fever is having a huge affect on local pork production with a flow-on affect to world protein prices, and as Brexit negotiations continue, the volume of NZ sheepmeat exports to the UK have reduced this year.