By Tony Leggett
Photography by Brad Hanson

A succession of three summer droughts and a sodden winter in the past four years helped to confirm a more sustainable approach to farming the land was right for Skovland Farm at Ashley Clinton.

Tucked close to the Ruahine Ranges in the southwest corner of Hawke’s Bay, Skovland Farm is home to Howard and Megan Pedersen and their three teenage children – the fourth generation of Pedersens to live on the home property.

They have steadily retired areas of marginal land and planted more native trees over many years, but when they reflected on the severity of the droughts and the increasingly volatile weather patterns, they knew more work was needed to achieve the outcomes they wanted.

The couple also owns Pedersen Spreaders, a busy six-truck ground spreading business, managed from their home office, and had been feeling a little time poor, wanting more time to enjoy family life and support their children.

These factors strengthened their determination to continue refining their farm business to create a more sustainable but financially sound farming system to match their soils, climate, staff, and their personal and business goals.

“We’ve always had a more environmental bent to the way we wanted to farm, so fencing off waterways and planting trees has always been something we’ve done,” Megan says.

Howard says two of the droughts were particularly challenging, even for a region known for its summer-dry weather. When it did finally rain heading into last winter, it hardly stopped until well into September and they were battling to minimise damage from pugging caused by running older steers and dairy grazing stock.

“These droughts were pretty tough and that volatility in our climate has become a major issue. So, we’ve buttoned back on stock, grazed fewer heifers this winter, and because we’re doing fewer stock better, our turnover is not taking a hit and the farm is looking much better,” Howard says.

They still farm five livestock classes across the 359ha of effective grazing area over their three separate blocks. The remaining 217ha are already either partially or fully retired from grazing and they still have more marginal land to permanently fence off to let it regenerate to native bush.

Their home block was originally owned by Howard’s grandparents who named it Skovland Farm, a nod to their Danish heritage. Its 185ha of flat to rolling land is ideal finishing country for lambs, alongside velveting stags and grazing dairy heifers.

Pictured below: Howard Pederson with Skovland Farm velvet.

Just over 4km further west from their home block is Top Block, 215ha of mostly flat to rolling land but with some steeper sidlings, bought in 2009. This block has two large gullies running through it, which the Pedersens have fenced off and allowed to regenerate to native bush. It also has several wetlands, streams and dams. About half the 1,100 head terminal ewe flock is run there along with trade steers.

Their third block, Highview, is 190ha of steeper hill country closer to the ranges, bought in 2015. It is where the balance of ewes and steers spend most of their time.

A recently planted 38ha pine plantation has been registered in the Emissions Trading Scheme and there are also several areas of regenerating bush that are fenced off with permanent fencing, or will be in the next few years.

The emphasis has shifted from high stocking rates and driving high per hectare returns to focusing more on per head performance and matching livestock to soil types so they minimise the risk of over-grazing and pugging damage.

The results have been immediate and confidence boosting. The Pedersens finished fewer lambs last winter but to significantly better carcase weights (24–25kg vs 21kg before) and achieved a similar financial result to the previous year, with less work and pressure on their one full-time and one part-time staff members.

Only grazing dairy heifers up to two years of age reduces the risk of pasture damage in wet winters, rather than taking on cows for winter grazing as they’d done in the past. Every animal is on a weight gain contract and this provides excellent returns, they say.

The jury is out on how much longer they will continue to buy in steers for finishing because of the risk of soil damage over winter. Buying younger steers for a summer trade is one option under discussion, along with buying in more ewes to replace the older steers.

Megan says they have completed 17km of riparian fencing in the past 20 years and most of the reduction in grazeable area has occurred at High View and Top Block.

“It’s not like we’ve fenced off anything that’s suitable for grazing, and now our paddocks are performing way better, we feel. We get way-better quality of feed, because if you put stock in a paddock with a creek through it, the stock head there.

“We’ve done a lot of the planting, but the more you look the more you find opportunities to plant more,” she says.

A lot of the fenced off areas alongside creeks are left to revert to manuka and other natives. But each year Megan and Howard plant between 2,000 and 3,000 natives.

“We used to dig all the holes by hand and hand-weed them as well, but now we spray it out first and use a borer. We do try to get back to spray release [around each tree planted] as well,” Megan says.

“We’ve got a 15-year-old son, so pests are not a problem! We haven’t seen a possum here for 10 years or more,” Howard says.

Local community heart beats strongly

Nothing beats community spirit when it comes to protecting the land and improving water quality, says Megan Pedersen.

She became a committee member of the Tukipo Catchment Care Group soon after it was formed nearly five years ago by landowners keen to tackle declining water quality.

Current group chairman is local landowner and Ravensdown Principal Environmental Consultant Colin Tyler who says the group’s initial success was driven by local dairy farmer Rob Barry from the BEL Group.

“We tucked in behind Rob and got swept up in his slipstream really. Rob has moved on now, but others have stepped up to take over,” Colin says.

The Tukipo catchment is a long narrow strip of land that captures runoff from many of the large-scale intensive dairy units and other livestock and cropping farms.

It will take many years for water quality to improve, but already there are positive signs coming from the hundred-plus individual projects now underway to create wetlands, fence riparian strips to exclude cattle, and in many cases sheep as well, and the planting of many thousands of native plants.

“As a catchment, we decided to get stuck in. There’s about 90 landowners involved now and that’s all but a couple of the landowners in the catchment,” Colin says.

“It’s grown a lot from water quality to include biodiversity and that’s the really exciting thing for farmers, especially when they see the return of birdlife and patches of native bush to their farms,” he says.

Demand for plants was so great that three years ago the group helped establish a native nursery in the district. Local farmers bought 20,000 plants from it in the 2021-22 year and double that number are on order for the 2022-23 year.

“So, it’s a huge community effort. Most want to fence off their creeks and plant natives, and this has given them the enthusiasm to do it,” Megan says.

Initial funding of $300,000 was provided by Fonterra and was mostly spent on establishing a large wetland in the lower catchment.

The group then received $2.3 million from the Freshwater Improvement Fund, administered by the Ministry for the Environment. It took a lot of volunteer time and effort to get, but it was a game-changer for the group, Colin says.

Group members still match the funding on a 1:1 basis, but the funding gave them the ability to employ a co-ordinator to manage all the compliance from funders for the individual projects, run workshops and assist farmers with their project applications.

“We invited farmers in the catchment to create a project, and most were to assist with wetland development and riparian fencing,” Megan says.

Workshops are run to educate landowners in best practice to improve water quality and are having a positive influence on nitrate levels being monitored along the catchment.

Colin says the levels will take time to show a decline. “The [higher nitrate levels] result from intensification. Winter cropping is also an important consideration too,” he says.

Howard says he’s noticed a shift to lower application rates for nitrogen-based fertilisers in their spreading business. Most farmers are applying at rates of 60kg/ha, about half what they did a decade ago, and they are targeting suitable weather days to apply it.

Megan says they’re confident that environmental and financial performance can work together.

“You don’t have to lose [money] to achieve better environmental outcomes,” she says.

Colin says the dairy farmers in the catchment group are “leading the charge” to reduce nutrient runoff and created the enthusiasm among the other livestock farmers to follow suit.

“There is no ‘them and us’ situation within the group. Often the scale of farm reflects the size of the projects, but it’s all relative really,” Colin says.

Megan agrees and says although it might have been individuals who got it started, the community has driven it and achieved a lot more than was originally anticipated.

Pictured below: Howard Pederson with Ravensdown Principal Environmental Consultant Colin Tyler.

Fertiliser decisions more precise with whole farm testing

Howard and Megan Pedersen say whole farm soil testing (WFST) is a “no-brainer” for every farm.

They have been doing WFST for the past six years, a rarity outside the dairy sector, and sampling every paddock on each of their three blocks in a rotation about every two to three years.

They have found the variation between paddocks within each block surprising, even though they are run as blocks with similar livestock classes and have a history of being well fertilised, based on test results.

For instance, the latest Olsen P results for their mostly flat home block where they finish lambs, run a mob of velveting stags and graze dairy heifers on weight gain contracts, range from 9 to 43.

The average is 26 but the range is almost the same, at 24.

Driving their decision to spend the extra $1,000 or so on soil testing each year was their determination to reduce waste and apply the right amount of fertiliser to each paddock, rather than just a blanket application over each whole block.

“If we can do less there, we transfer it over to where it’s needed and the end result is better pasture production across the whole block,” Howard says.

“We still look for trends across the blocks, so we don’t need to do 20 different fertiliser mixes, but we might do three different mixes and sometimes we leave a paddock out completely if that’s what the soil testing shows.”

After six years of WFST, they are still targeting low nutrient status paddocks with capital fertiliser applications to bring them up to optimal status, but they can see the opportunity to reduce the volume of fertilisers being applied in the future.

For now, they are still building pasture production and resilience.

Their Ravensdown Environment Consultant Colin Tyler says the Pedersens’ results show just how variable soils can be under different livestock and cropping systems.

“A lot of what we’re encouraging farmers to do environmentally is to treat every land class differently. There’s no point putting fertiliser on a paddock if it doesn’t need it. Apart from the cost, it can be environmentally risky too,” he says.