Carbon positive project Update

Carbon Positive, McCains Global visit

Added 8 months ago

By Brenda Newth

The Carbon Positive Project based at LandWISE, Ruahapia Road, Hastings is a partnership between LandWISE, Hawkes Bay Future Farming Trust with key support from McCain Foods, Heinz Watties, MPI, HBRC, HDC, HB Veg Growers and BASF.

The project is in its second year of crop rotation having successfully harvested a sweetcorn crop for McCain Foods this season.

McCains have a global strategy to work towards sustainable vegetable growing practices and the Carbon Positive project is undertaking important work comparing conventional with regenerative and hybrid systems.

The Carbon Positive project was pleased to host the global McCains team to Hawkes Bay recently. The McCains team included Rod McLaren Ag Director Australasia who is based out of Tasmania, Australia, Yves Leclerc Director of Agronomy, McCain Foods North America, based in New Brunswick Canada and Timothée Murillo Kockmann, Global Director Smart & amp; Sustainable Farming based at McCains European operations, Marseille France.

The team was interested to discuss the project setup, learnings and challenges along the way and appreciated the way the project had been setup to reflect real cropping situations and generating useful insights about growing systems for cropping farmers.

The project has five more years to run and alternates between McCains and Heinz Watties crops annually. An important part of the crop rotation are the winter cover crop rotations and particularly how that integrates with vegetable crops to help.