26 November 2022

Aligned with Nature

Toitū te Whenua, Toiora te Wai. Our Land and Water.

writer: FELICITY CONNELL
photographer: REBECCA DWYER

It can be difficult to justify sweeping changes when it’s your livelihood on the line. When Kiri Roberts, manager of Clareview Farm near Ashburton, decided to start a multi-year trial comparing conventional and regenerative agricultural dairy practices, she knew it was important to make the data public. Farmers around the country now have access to all of Clareview’s learnings, enabling them to make informed, science-driven decisions.

Kiri adjusting the fencing

“Everyone who visits comments on the incredible backdrop of the mountains. It’s actually far away, but feels very close.”

Nestled under Ōpuke Mount Hutt, and bounded by the Ashburton River, lies Clareview Farm. It’s the largest of six dairy farms in Align Farm Group’s portfolio; Kiri, 31, heads its team of four, who together farm 300 hectares and 1,000 cows. “The other Align farms are on the roadside, but Clareview’s location means you can’t just drive past it. We call it the hidden secret.”

Going sharemilking when she was twenty was the start of Kiri’s passion for dairying. “I get a buzz out working with animals,” she says. “The easiest way to explain it is people like to come home to their pets. Well, imagine if you have a thousand cows as pets! You get to know their different personalities, and their quirks. One of my favourite times is about nine on a hot summer evening, when you move the girls to give them a fresh break. It’s the best feeling. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. Not everyone gets to experience that feeling in their workplace. I think if I could just share that feeling with everyone, maybe people would understand farmers and farming a bit better.”

Spring is Kiri’s favourite season. “It’s the season that sets up the farm for the year. You start to see changes, fresh new growth. The weather warms up, but you can still get frost to kill off bugs. You’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as far as calving goes, and the calves are playing and hooning around the paddocks.”

If Clareview’s location is a bit of a secret, what’s not is the farm’s ambitious trial: half of Clareview is being farmed using regenerative agricultural techniques and the other half using conventional methods. Four years in the planning, the trial started in 2021 and will run for around five years.

When Kiri’s husband, Rhys – the farm group’s chief executive officer – first suggested the trial, Kiri wasn’t keen. “I said, ‘There is no way I’m trying that. I love my 1,500 residual. I like my clean, tidy paddocks.’ I was confident in how I was farming, and felt I had the backing of a whole industry. If you didn’t know something, knowledge and support was right there,” she remembers. “When we spoke to farmers already exploring regenerative methods, they had great tips, but there was no New Zealand data. We couldn’t just wing it – we needed data. Once we decided to do the trial, we also decided to share what we were learning.”

fresh vegetables
“We love that our kids are able to grow up on the farm and have fresh food they have helped grow. The family and multi-generation aspect, and the sense of stewardship, is a big one for us. Thinking about the legacy we’ll leave for our children, and our children’s children, definitely helps with our long-term thinking – what we, and the land, will be doing in ten years, fifty years, one hundred years’ time,” Kiri says.
A close-up of the diverse crop cover in Kiri’s garden and paddocks.
A close-up of the diverse crop cover in Kiri’s garden and paddocks.

Today, Kiri and her team collect and share data from the trial on finances, the environment, animal health, milk quality and social impact on the Align website. “We’ve had pushback from farmers, scientists and rural professionals. People didn’t understand what we’re trying to do. We’ve been clear that we’re not pushing a regenerative agenda. We’re constantly saying, ‘Look, if you don’t like what we’re doing, that’s fine. We’re making the data free for you. What you choose to do with it is over to you.’”

There’s no single way to define regenerative agriculture. A holistic approach to farming, it usually includes a focus on increasing diversity, limiting soil disturbance and grazing management. “‘Regenerative’ is a word that is being used in all sorts of different contexts,” she says. “For us, we talk about being aligned with nature and finding a better balance. It’s about regenerating the soil; it’s all about the land for me.” At its heart is a goal of constant improvement for the farmer, their stock and the environment, and a commitment to well-being.

“We've got people all over the world watching the trial,” Kiri says. “We have comments from America, United Kingdom, Germany. They're all watching, and they’re all wanting to know how we're doing.”

“Everyone’s getting creative trying to improve production and cut costs. But there is a risk to being innovative, particularly if costs go up and production goes down while you’re working things out. We’ve got scale and resources to explore long-term benefits of change. Percentage-wise, only ten per cent of the group’s total herd are part of the regen trial,” Kiri says.

“If you’d said to me four years ago we wouldn’t apply synthetic fertiliser on half of Clareview, I’d have thought you were mad, and it would be detrimental to our bottom line. While it has had an impact, it’s nowhere near as big as I thought it would be. Personally, I think we do need a little bit of synthetic back in the system, but not as much, and not all the time.”

Pumpkins from Kiri’s farm.
Pumpkins from Kiri’s farm. “The best feedback we’ve had as a business has been from the veggie boxes,” she says. “This season we plan to share ideas and recipes using our veggies not only to Align, but with our customers.”

One aspect of regenerative agriculture Kiri is looking at in particular is increasing biodiversity and growing cover crops to protect topsoil. For dairy farmers, this can mean moving away from predominantly rye grass and clover paddocks. “Using diverse mixes is about what you put back into the soil and having living roots all the time. We’re looking at plants that fix nitrate in the soils and also benefit the cows – they appreciate diversity in their diets, just like humans do!” Instead of her previously neat and tidy paddocks, Kiri now has fields teeming with diversity. “The variety in the big cover crops is incredible. We see how many bees and worms we can count in one spot, and what else we can find, like four-leaf clovers. It brings a sense of fun, a spark and something visually different to the farm. You can't drive past a field of sunflowers and not smile.”

Looking at the quality and diversity of the herd’s diet inspired the garden for humans, too. “We set a goal to supply sixty per cent of our team’s food from the farm. This year, thirty Align team members got weekly veggie boxes, along with meat, eggs and milk – all from the farm,” Kiri says. “The food initiative is one way we can give back to our amazing team. I get so much energy from them. There’s been times when I struggled with the trial, and they’ve gone, ‘It’s all good. We’ve got it. It’ll work,’ and that’s given me the motivation to carry on.”

For all the benefits of longer pasture cover – such as increasing the water- holding capacity of the soil so it’s more drought- and flood-resilient – the trial data has highlighted the difference in how and when diverse species grow. “In the warmer months, you can grow nearly the same amount of feed on the diverse side as the conventional side, and over a shorter amount of time. But in the colder months, the growth of the diverse species completely slowed down. That had a flow-on effect on stocking rates and supplement needed. We didn’t get it right in the first season, so we’re making some tweaks,” Kiri freely admits. “That’s one of the strengths of the trial. Even if things don’t work as we thought, we learn something, and we can share it. If every farmer made the same mistakes we did, there could be loss of production industry-wide. We’ll have data so we can say, ‘Here’s the implications of different options and it’s totally up to you and your system which you choose.’”

Kiri on the farm
“The biggest thing that I tell everyone is just stay proud, proud of what you do, who you are and what you contribute to the industry. If you carry yourself with pride, you’ll always do your best. Like everyone, we have bad days, when everything is a mess and things are really not going to plan. But even when things are not ideal, it’s very hard for me to not take a picture each day and stop and enjoy the small things in life.”

“I can grow grass, but I kill any houseplant. We’ve learnt a lot and trialled all the veggies we can to see what people really want. I love seeing the car full to the brim with freshly picked veggies going to our teams.”

One aspect Kiri wasn’t expecting was the focus on the trial from the wider farming community. “Everyone wants to talk to us about regenerative farming, but sometimes I just want to talk about issues we all share, like big weather events or calving – regen or not. We can feel quite different now, when really we’ve got the same things going on as our neighbours. We’ve also found people are keen to attribute something negative to regen when there might be other factors,” Kiri says, describing how people latched on to data showing a higher somatic cell count – a potential indicator of concern – in the regenerative herd compared to the conventional, prompting her to review the parameters when the herd was split. “It turns out many of the animals in the regen herd had a higher cell count the previous year – we just hadn’t picked it up. We’ll get even more data in the seasons to come so we can see if those cell counts are a true reflection of regenerative methods.”

For those investigating different ways of farming, Kiri doesn’t particularly recommend running one farm using two different farming methods, but she does encourage farmers to try smaller-scale experiments on their own farms that work for them. “Know your herd well and be innovative in your own way. There is a perception trialling different farming systems is expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. We know lots of people experimenting with stocking rates, moving herds multiple times a day or trying natural fertilisers. They’re just not calling it ‘regenerative.’”

Kiri is an advocate for farmers taking the initiative to set their own agenda. “I am definitely one to put my hand up and say that change doesn’t come easy to me. I hated the thought of trying something else, because how I was farming at the time was all I knew. Now I say, ‘Don't be scared of change, because it’s the only way agriculture as an industry is going to survive.’ The change doesn’t have to be going down the regenerative path, but we do have to change. We have the opportunity to pave our own way, but we have to move quickly. If we are the ones driving change, then others can come along for the ride rather than telling us how to farm.”

 

Scientific research into the benefits of regenerative agriculture for Aotearoa is ongoing. Explore short reports and webinars about what we know, and what we need to find out, at ourlandandwater.nz/regenag . This piece is the third in a series supported by the Our Land and Water National Science Challenge.

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