Country Life

Docking has continued in King Country this week between the showers and despite muddy tracks and puddles in gateways. Wairarapa is looking lush, The planting of fodder beet and barley crops is underway in Canterbury.

The cornerstone of soil consultant Rob Flynn's philosophy is that agriculture is a biological system, not a chemical system. One of his clients is North Canterbury farmer Russell Rudd, who has been using biological nutrients to enhance crop yields and animal performance on his 600-hectare beef, sheep and deer farm for the past nine years.

Precision-bred trees will be central to our economy as wood-based products replace plastic and glass fibre in laptop cases, car interiors and even aeroplanes, a molecular geneticist says.

The New Zealand Young Farmers organisation has been gifted a 74 hectare dairy farm (by the late Donald Pearson) on the outskirts of Auckland. The aim is to use the property as a demonstration farm for city kids. Plans are still being finalised but Young Farmers national chairman Jason Te Brake says they hope to showcase horticulture, sheep and beef, and dairy operations, as well as some of the primary industry roles needed beyond the farm gate.

Chris Thorn has combined his love of hunting and curing wild meats into a business that produces venison salami from locally shot deer; unpicking the DNA of pine trees with Scion and biological farming in Canterbury.

In the past five years, Retired Working Dogs Adoption has rehomed hundreds of huntaways, eye dogs and beardies that are too old to work, have been injured or are just not up to the job.

Farming couple Duncan Smith and Annabel Tapley-Smith took over the butcher's shop in the central Hawkes Bay town of Waipawa this July. They're selling beef and lamb from their farm just down the road and business is taking off.

Country Life first went to air in January 1997 - it was the year the rabbit calici virus was smuggled into the country and milk trains were trialled.

In Horowhenua and it's hard to get any summer crops into the ground. Asparagus harvesting is underway but yields are down on last year. A good weather week in Canterbury has seen a flurry of activity on farms as things again dry out from a previously wet week.

On Country Life old working dogs are given a new life, the programme's just clocked up its 1000th show ...we reminisce about some of the stories covered in that first year, Waipawa Butchery in Central Hawkes Bay.