Around 300 people attended the Silver Fern Farms Hawke’s Bay Farmer of the Year Field Day on 8 May. Hugh and Sharon Ritchie won the award and opened Horonui, Drumpeel and Wainui farms to public gaze.
A good selection of images from the day can be found on Kate Taylor’s website, rivettingkatetaylor.com. A sample image of folk at Drumpeel is below (thanks Kate)
The weather put on a good show as 120+ utes travelled across the three farms.
Horonui has most of the rolling hill country and is the largest part of the the animal enterprise. Check Kate’s photos to see more. The flats are used for cropping with a 50ha area block irrigated by a towable pivot fitting with variable rate technology.
Drumpeel has been the cropping base since Hugh’s parents David and Sally took over the farm and began developing it. Now fully irrigated it has been the site of many trials and field days over the years by FAR and companies testing seed and plant protection options. Hugh himself is constantly testing new ideas!
Hugh has hosted many LandWISE events and supported LandWISE Smart Farming investigations including pH mapping, EM soil scanning, minimum tillage, strip-tillage. Generally he’s been ahead of us.
The Drumpeel linear move irrigator was a test-bed for LandWISE nozzle option research into improving application uniformity. This has been a passion of Hugh’s since his Nuffield Scholarship when he visited Charles Burt at the Irrigation Training and Research Center in California.
Wainui is a new aquisition that adjoins Drumpeel. The Ritchies have just completed their first summer of cropping. A large centre pivot on Wainui has variable rate irrigation which should give increased flexibility and use a set amount of water most efficiently. A programme of GPS surveying and levelling to enhance drainage at Wainui has begun. This will be discussed at the upcoming LandWISE Conference in Palmerston North on 21-22 May.
Once again, congratulations Hugh and Sharon and their family and staff.
Hugh Ritchie has been using the power of his in-tractor GPS to efficiently map his farmland and generate optimum drainage plans. He is gaining significant benefits from both improved surface drainage and buried tile drains.
The software is also used to capture position and elevation data to create accurate 3D maps for surface drainage. Using the tractor as a survey tool, Hugh maps his paddocks then exports the data to OptiSurface which calculates best cut-and-fill plans to guide water to desired points in the paddock. The generated cut-and-fill plans are sent back to the tractor which guides either a scraper or levelling blade to shape the land.
An extract from a landuse map is shown at the left. This is an enlargement of summer 2011/12 classification, showing land use timing at paddock-level
John is a researcher in the Vegetable Centre of the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture. John has long experience working with farmers to develop systems to care for soil, save time and energy, and grow good crops.
Chris has also addressed previous LandWISE events. He recently returned to SnapFresh Foods to grow salad crops in South Auckland. He will discuss the implications of reverting from controlled traffic farming back to random trafficking. He has seen very significant soil changes, and increases in machinery and energy requirements, water ponding and costs.
LandWISE has been granted funding to develop fertiliser application calibration procedures suitable for farmers applying nutrients with their own equipment. The two year Ministry for Primary Industries’ 
The project will address the two broad types of ground based spreading equipment:
