MPI Opens $3m Greenhouse Gas Research Funding Round
The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) has announced has opened applications for the 2026/27 funding round of the Greenhouse Gas Inventory Research (GHGIR) fund.
The Ministry for Primary Industries' (MP) head of their On-Farm Support Team, Dr John Roche, says the declaration of a drought or adverse event is a recognition that things are tough in a region such as Taranaki.
He says MPI has been working with other organisations such as Beef + Lamb NZ, DairyNZ and the local Rural Support Trust to run seminars on how to deal with the dry conditions, and social occasions to get farmers to meet and support each other.
Roche says different groups of people are affected in different ways.
"For example, your dairy farmer has a good milk price to look forward to and so does your sharemilker, but your contract milker is depending on the milk coming in to get their revenue. So we are just trying to cater for all the different people who will be differently affected," he says.
He says while sheep and beef farmers have little supplement, they tend to react more quickly, for example, destocking, when the drought starts to appear.
"The idea of a declaration is that it recognises that it has been much drier than a normal summer," he says.
Roche was at the Northland Field Days recently and says conditions are very dry on the west coast of the north.
He says the area around Dargaville is very dry and farmers there have been feeding out for the past couple of months.
New Zealand dairy farmers are set to be the first in the world to receive access to a new digital physical milk pricing tool that enables them to fix the price for their physical milk.
State farmer Pāmu is opening its farm gates this summer in an effort to give the rural sector the opportunity to see how large-scale, multi-system farming is delivering productivity and profitability across New Zealand.
A five-year study has found that the cost of reducing emissions without technology may be significant and unsustainable for Northland dairy farmers.
DairyNZ says Waikato farmers need certainty on Plan Change 1, but they say that certainty must be matched with practical, workable rules and a clear transition that doesn't get ahead of the new resource management system currently under review.
While the Government has moved quickly to make commercial hauliers' lot easier during the current fuel crisis, they appear to be stuck in the creep box when it comes to the agricultural industry.
Waikato farmers have been told that the Government’s new planning system legislation and the region’s Plan Change 1 (PC1) “won’t mesh together very well”.