Category: Public Media

Source: Radio New Zealand

Tracy Marshall makes the same 150-kilometre round trip up the Whanganui River and back five times a week.

“I’ve got one of the longest mail runs in our region in terms of distances, but I’ve probably got less letter boxes,” she told Country Life.

One might imagine she’d be sick of travelling the same road day after day, but she loves it and jumped at the chance to take over the rural delivery, or RD6, route five years ago.

As one of the more scenic routes travelling up towards National Park, it’s one she also often shares with travellers who join her as part of the Original Mail Tour.

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Her day starts at 6:30am when she picks up the mail from the depot. There are 65 letter boxes on her route, each unique.

“They’re a creative bunch.”

Her favourite is an old microwave, also the “driest” letterbox on the route.

There are others too – one in the shape of a wharenui, another that looks like a hanging lantern and one an old fuel tank.

There’s also a lawn-mower catcher and a canoe said to have once been used to help rescue someone from the river.

Marshall delivers a mix of mail and parcels. She also collects letters and parcels to take back to the depot from the mailboxes – the signal for her to do so is the flag being raised.

“I don’t do a lot of parcels up here – although today looks like I do but I’m doing some Chrisco’s because you know it’s Christmas time.

“They tend not to buy a lot of junk up here. I think the biggest thing I do is dog biscuits.”

She said the weeks before Christmas are usually some of the busiest, although this year has been quieter than expected.

More recently she has noticed an increase in mail, which seems to be coming back into fashion after a period of decline.

The route is also popular with walkers and cyclists making their way along Te Araroa Trail.

Born and bred in Koroniti – a marae settlement with its own Anglican church – Marshall ( Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Pamoana) knew the riverside road well before taking on the mail run.

She understands how much has changed, and yet how many things stay the same.

“[The river] was used for their main form of transport, their wellbeing. They used to travel up and down.

“I don’t know anyone that has paddled up the awa in my lifetime. I think everything changed once the road was put in – which was a good thing, you know, access.”

Before Marshall and her van, the mail used to be delivered by canoe – a trip taking about two weeks.

The development of the road and new transport made it easier for people to travel down the river to Whanganui with increased job opportunities there luring many from the rural community.

Along the tour she points out where the river trade markets were once held and historic sites like the Kāwana flour mill and the convent in Jerusalem – Hiruharama.

“The riverboats changed all of that for them.”

Her favourite part of the tour is near the heart of the National Park where kiwi can be heard at night in the surrounding bush.

Learn more:

You can learn more about the tour, here.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

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There’s a job for even the youngest of the Roy family when the Christmas berry crush is on at their orchard in Piopio.

With queues out the door of their farm shop over the festive season it’s all hands to the pump, according to orchardist and grandmother, Angela Roy.

“Sam’s our little six-year-old. He does the stickers on the punnets, not always as straight as one might expect, but hey…”

Angela and her husband Mike have been growing berries at their 13.5ha King Country orchard for more than three decades and have enjoyed involving the whole family in the operation over the years, along with a team of Piopio locals, up to 100 at the height of the season.

The Roys’ four children were brought up around the customers who pour in by the carload over the summer for the freshly picked strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries.

Of their produce, 95 percent is sold at the farmgate, about half-way between Hamilton and New Plymouth on State Highway 3.

Not having to worry about exporting or supermarket sales, they can pick the berries at the last possible moment for transport from the polytunnels to the shop, a journey of only 150 metres.

“Then they’re full size and full-flavored. Quality fruit is our main selling point, ” Mike said.

“Unlike some growers, we are a little bit different. We do see everyone that has our fruit. We see them face to face, obviously, in the shop. So, everything about our berries has to be top,” Angela said.

The Roys took on four hectares of blueberries in 1993 and have expanded the orchard, now growing 66,000 strawberry plants under cover, and several varieties of blueberries under nets.

The original blueberry bushes are still producing at 40 years old.

“We had a dream of what we could do with the shop, and that required more production to fulfil those dreams.”

Six years ago they made a million dollar investment, installing several large polytunnels and a tiered vertigation system, drip-feeding nutrients and water into the strawberry plants.

A computer balances the water and feed from sensor readings in the tunnels while Mike keeps an eye on pests, especially two-spotted mites.

Predatory insects are brought in to keep them at bay.

“They come in a little plastic bottle, and we just spread them around inside the tunnel houses, and they crawl around, and they will eat the eggs and the immature stages of two-spotted mite.”

Neither birds nor fungi seem to like the environment but the pickers do, the Roys told Country Life on a tour of the tunnel houses.

“It’s a lovely, warm, dry environment in here, and so the pickers love it, because they don’t have to wear raincoats, like they would if they were outside,” Mike said.

“We’ve eliminated a lot of the risk because we’ve eliminated a lot of the weather issues, which, of course, as in all farming, that’s the biggest issue.”

The tunnels also mean they can provide strawberries continuously over six months.

The Christmas-New Year period is the busiest time of year and the Roys’ daughter Jessie Loomans describes it as “controlled chaos”.

You’ll find her behind the berry ice-cream machine in the shop’s Berry Cool department.

“These days, the ice creams are just as busy Christmas week, and so it’s such a neat time.

“We probably should be on the ground in a corner, rocking backwards and forwards, but we love it.

“So much laughter.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

From growing a few Christmas trees “for fun”, to a diverse range of towering exotics and natives – there’s a bit of everything at Tāmata Hauhā’s demonstration farm outside Palmerston North.

“One of the reasons we created this farm is because farmers actually want to come have a look,” founder and chief executive Blair Jamieson told Country Life.

Launched in 2021, Tāmata Hauhā works primarily with Māori land owners to provide strategies and funding to develop their land holdings and make the land more productive, mainly through forestry.

It provides the finance for purchasing trees, preparing the land, planting the trees and managing the forest created, as well as carrying out all the administration.

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They grow about 46 exotic and 30 native species of trees across three farm sites.

“You can come here and see nearly every type of forestry system that can be applied.

“We’ve even got silvopasture agroforestry systems behind us, which show you how you can actually continue to graze and actually run a farm and stock underneath those trees.”

With adequate spacing between the trees, Jamieson said the systems also enable farmers to generate carbon credits which offer extra profit through the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

They also offer added benefits like shade and shelter for the stock.

Many of the trees on the farm were planted in 2022 and 2023 – already many stand several metres tall.

There are various types of eucalyptus, elm, paulownia, cypress and poplar, along with different types of pine.

Jamieson said seeing the trees next to each other and understanding their growth helps land-owners in decision-making.

“We support them by saying ‘here is how much you get protected for this type of structuring. Here’s the the native integration you can have for this type of species’.

“I mean, ‘here’s the other options if you wanted to go down the alternative timber production route’.”

While there’s a push to move away from pinus radiata, Jamieson is not totally opposed to it.

“There are a number of people out there in this space who are, you know, just carbon-focused – all about the yield, don’t care what they plant.

“They just want the carbon for the coin and that has led to a number of, you know, outcomes which in the long term are not going to be very good. There’s going to be a lot of pine forests.”

His primary concern is how well these pine forests will be managed, particularly when it comes to large monoculture conversions.

While the Government has introduced tweaks to try and address some of these issues, Jamieson said this had also created uncertainty in the sector.

His view was that pine should be removed from the permanent category in the ETS.

“Encouraging the right type of forestry regimes is all that is needed to actually fix the underlying problem to stop mass farm conversions into pine.

“But that being said […] you can see some of the trees over across the river here are three to four times taller than pine planted at the same age and when you equate that I can actually go into those areas and plant 75 percent native trees, that will stratify and become the dominant canopy over time, I’ll get you there and you’ll make more money than pine and you won’t have the problems and you got more jobs.”

Jamieson said some of their systems, on a per-hectare basis, could create more jobs than farming.

He said it was about using “the right exotic to perform a job for a period of time to enable native growth”.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand