Country Life

This week's Country Life is all about tech and science - from cutting edge ag drone, to collecting sheep poo samples to be processed in the lab as part of a national study, and the team helping breed the kiwifruit of tomorrow.

It takes years to perfect cultivars and to keep New Zealand's kiwifruit industry ahead of the game. Country Life takes a tour of the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre in Te Puke and meets those helping create the fruit of the future.

Wairarapa sheep farmer Paul Crick is one of hundreds out collecting poo samples from his flock as part of a national study testing for the presence of spores which cause facial eczema in sheep.

Two King Country farmers have trained up as drone operators to offer on-farm drone spraying services, a side hustle alongside their traditional farming work.

A round-up of the week's news from the primary sector.

This week Country Life gets up close and personal with some of the animals at Massey University's teaching farm and heads to a high country station near Omarama where merino sheep run alongside shorthorn cattle.

There's a romance attached to living in the Mackenzie High Country, but does it still exist? For Simon Williamson it is the only life he knows. He grew up through the harsh winters and hot summers and loves the challenge of it.

Set on 40-hectares near the university's Palmertston North campus, the Large Animal Teaching Unit, is home to a menagerie of animals for veterinary students to work with.

A round-up of the week's news from the primary sector.

RNZ reporter Kate Green has recently returned from parts of Southeast Asia as part of a Jefferson Fellowship exploring food security issues across the region.

Country Life meets Berwick Settle who's worked on huge dairy farms in Russia and China, joins a shearing gang for a day and finds out about the world of heritage seed saving.

In this story for the long-running programme Spectrum, first broadcast in 1972, Jack Perkins joins a Wairarapa shearing gang, on a farm near Masterton. It starts at the beginning of a day's shearing, with sounds of sheep in the yards, dogs barking and shepherd's whistling.

A round-up of the week's news from the primary sector.

There's a story to many of the heritage seedlings which Jemma Ostenfeld grows on a patch of borrowed land in the eastern Bay of Plenty.

Twenty years ago Berwick Settle was a Southland sharemilker. Since then he's worked in some of the biggest dairy farms in the world, helping set up farms in China and Russia where cows live year round in huge barns, a far cry from New Zealand's pastoral system.