Waitatapia Farming
Driving success through diversity and innovation at Waitatapia Farming.
Eat your greens, but don’t forget our prime beef and lamb, could well be the mantra at multi-layered Waitatapia Farming, where two brothers, Hew and Roger Dalrymple, run diverse businesses on land owned by the family for more than 100 years. The Dalrymple brothers (Hew and Roger) aim for the best conventional and innovative farming practices to run their successful livestock grazing, cropping, forestry and farming services business. They are the third generation of Dalrymples to farm Waitatapia, located north of the Rangitikei River 10kms to the west of the township of Bulls.
Rural Delivery first visited Hew and Roger in 2007 when their story of using the best conventional and innovative farming practices to run a diverse farming operation in a profitable and sustainable way was unfolding. It was then that the brothers were named supreme winners of the Ballance Farm Environment Awards for the Horizons region – and across the years since they have been awarded other eco accolades as well as contributing to agricultural advancement in a variety of ways, including, for Hew, being a board member of the Rural Innovation Lab.
Today, some 2,200 hectares are encompassed by Waitatapia Farming, incorporating 230 hectares of leased land. Soil types are a combination of alluvial silts and a variety of productive and lighter sands. Some 750 hectares are irrigated with 16 centre-pivot irrigators.
Roger oversees the livestock department which each year finishes 30,000 lambs and 3,500 beef cattle, both for ANZCO, as well as offering a wide variety of grazing options for farmers for dairy heifers and winter grazing for dairy cows including a weight-gain option.
Hew runs Waitatapia’s timber and cropping operations. Included here is the mainly radiata pine forest covering 300-plus hectares, where the trees are treated as a rotational crop, with some 12 hectares harvested and replanted each year.
A wide variety of vegetables are grown annually, from pumpkin and squash to different kinds of lettuce, cabbages (green, red and savoy), curly leaf kale, cauliflower, broccoli and this season, a new crossbreed that’s proving very popular amongst Kiwi chefs. It is a long-stemmed cauliflower-broccoli hybrid developed in the United Kingdom that Hew has dubbed ‘cauli-lini’ – and he loves it.
Other crops this brother oversees depend on what is in demand each year, with feed and malting barley and maize being the main cereal crops. Small seed crops include buck wheat and quinoa. Garden peas and sweet corn are also grown along with the fodder, sugar beet and oat crops grown for animal feed.
Soil types across the farm are a combination of productive river silts with significant areas of heavy and lighter sands. Hew notes the lighter more sandy soils are an ideal seed growing medium.
Over the years, the brothers have invested significantly, both in terms of time and money, to turn the heavy sands into land that is now highly productive, contouring, levelling, draining, fencing and irrigating this zone. “We have been able to transform this heavy sand area from being marginal to being highly productive pasture,” says Hew.
He explains that Waitatapia is a Māori phrase that translates as ’plenty of water’ and the Dalrymple property was named due to frequent flooding from the Rangitikei River before stop banks were constructed in the area to protect farmland and residents.
The property’s pivot irrigation system features variable speed rate watering systems, allowing water application rates to be readily altered to meet requirements. “Our irrigation system has lifted the productivity of our business. Grass growth is outstanding and crop yields are always at the top of local averages, including when there’s a dry summer,” he says.
Hew and Roger were early adopters of technology in their drive to be sustainable and environmental farmers. In terms of irrigation, the technology goes below the surface too with buried soil moisture probes ensuring watering takes place only when required, while GPS has been a common feature on Waitatapia machinery for many years, helping to reduce fuel consumption and wasteful overlapping when spraying and cultivating.
Also well entrenched on the property is the use of chicken manure sourced locally and other natural fertilisers, as well as direct drilling and minimum tillage, while individual woodlots – 36 of them – act as shelter belts for stock and help to reduce wind erosion.
Along with waterways, wetland areas have been fenced off and replanted for future generations to enjoy while improving water quality.
With the know-how and the gear, the Dalrymple brothers also offer a range of farming services throughout the lower North Island including crop harvesting, felling trees and land development where they specialise in improving coastal areas to increase production by levelling, draining and preparing properties for irrigation.
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