Country Life

This week Country Life takes a look at efforts to save soil on farms at both ends of the country and takes you to taste some traditional kai in the Bay of Plenty.

Producer Justine Murray flexes her tastebuds on traditional kai cooked up at Otawhiwhi Marae where food and stories came together as part of this year's Flavours of Plenty Festival. It's the first time a marae has taken part in the Bay of Plenty's annual foodie event.

Kaipara farmer Stephen Newman is intent on improving soils and pasture in low cost, natural ways. He's now helping others too and hopes these methods will become even more useful as the country experiences more and more intense weather events like flooding, heavy rainfall and drought.

The gloom and wet of winter is especially challenging for Southland's farms where pasture can go for nearly a third of the year without growth. Country Life heads south to find out how to keep paddocks and stock in good nick.

This week Country Life takes you to a dairy farm with a difference, supplying milk direct to the customer, and the team checks in at a lab where work is underway to stop a tiny pest munching through grapevines.

It's a busy time of year for Stacey Faith, calving 300-plus cows, rearing their calves and keeping the Faith Farm's roadside milk dispensing outlet going, providing locals with milk fresh from the cows over the fence - with the cream on top.

Are some grapevines better that others at naturally defending themselves from a disease-spreading pest? Michelle Thompson is running trials at Plant & Food Research in Lincoln to find out.

With rural health care under the spotlight, our guest this week sheds some light on working in a small country hospital. Sophia Zohrab is among 12 med students on Auckland University's rural medicine immersion programme, sprinkled around North Island towns.

Country Life speaks to farmers and growers around New Zealand to find out about growing conditions over the past month.

This week Country Life takes you to a farm grazing pigs and cattle beneath solar panels and meets organic honey producers Shayne and Elizabeth Mackenzie, and a recent Lincoln University graduate.

Dual land use, with pigs and cattle grazing under solar panels, has unlocked new opportunities for Waitangi Farm in Waiuku. Mostly importantly say Nigel and Merrin Upchurch, it aligns with their values.

A honey shed on a hill is buzzing with the sound of honey flowing into jars as the bees take a hard-earned rest from honey making. Country Life meets Shayne and Elizabeth Mackenzie whose organic honey is produced from hives scattered over remote parts of the northern Coromandel peninsula.

Time spent helping his grandparents on their whenua near Kāwhia inspired a love of farming for Harris Moana. Having just finished his Agribusiness studies he's now focussed on building his reo so he can act as a bridge between industry and tangata whenua.

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