The lease of the Southland Demonstration Farm, which is at Wallacetown near Invercargill, runs out June 1, 2016, and the trust now wants to take the concept several steps further to provide a permanent commercial farm to demonstrate best practice in the south, farmers at the demonstration farm’s focus day in late February were told.
“Instead of using community halls scattered throughout Southland we want a facility where anyone can come and learn about dairying,” Southland Demonstration Farm’s chairman Maurice Hardy said.
“And we don’t want people having to balance papers on their knees while they write things down while they’re there either. We want the very best of facilities.”
The proposal has already been discussed with potential partners and the regional council, Environment Southland.
“Environment Southland very quickly engaged with the project as they see it as finding solutions to the environment problems of dairying in the south,” Hardy said.
The hub will include a self-contained farm milking 800-850 cows which can be divided into separate herds for research purposes.
“We want to have room for scientists to work and office space for various people in the industry to use and educational facilities where we can teach farmers and anyone who is interested what we have learnt on this farm,” he said.
“That’s why we have to be reasonably close to an airport, so people can travel to it easily.”
The trust wanted the farm to be a centre of dairy research.
“The only scientists we have working solely on agricultural research in Southland are at Woodlands and they’re studying sheep. We want to change that.”
Hardy said existing dairy farms would be looked at but the trust preferred to convert land so it could set up the dairy unit the way it wanted.
Land would have to be bought by early next year for the conversion to be ready in June 2016.
The trust wants to find $26 million for the hub, some of which will come from the revenue from the Southland Demonstration Farm. Southern farmers are being asked to contribute $2m.
“If you give us the value of one of your cows we’ll be happy.”
However, farmers were not being asked to write cheques out yet.
“We want to firm up our industry partners and then we’ll be asking for pledges of support from farmers in another month or two.”
Hardy said southern farmers would be the primary beneficiaries of the research at the farm.
New whole farm systems would be tested and developed for the south’s climate and soils, making sure they did not exceed environmental footprint targets.
“We want to do applied science, not pure science.”
