Market garden on farm provides staff with healthy vege boxes

Environmental and social trials are underway on a dairy farm near Ashburton.

Rhys and Kiri Roberts are comparing conventional farming with a regenerative system, they're giving staff more work flexibility and are providing them with free farm-grown food.

"Offering your team vegetables in this climate at the moment is just such a fantastic thing to be doing," Rhys says.

Rhys is CEO of Align Farms. The business has eight farms milking 5000 cows and employs 30 people in mid-Canterbury.

Kiri manages one of the farms, Clareview, where the trials are taking place.

A market garden was established on the 297-hectare property a year ago and is managed by Kiri and her mum Liz Phillipps.

"At the moment we have about 13 different vegetables, that's excluding herbs and then in peak summer we can have over 20," she says.

The vege boxes are distributed to staff each week and come with free-range eggs from the farm.

"I'm hoping that by the end of the year we'll also be able to supply meat and milk too," Kiri says.

Rhys says the boxes are one way of showing staff they are valued.

"The team is really critical. They've been super loyal to us and we've got people in our business that have been here 10 years, so we've got to give back to them."

Kiri and Rhys' team are also testing a flexible roster system. It allows them to choose when and where they work.

"If they want to work from 4 to 9 in the morning that's fine...or they can pick up a shift in the garden if they want to," Rhys says.

So far the system is working well.

"We really want to really pull a lot of people along with us on this social journey," he says. 

The regenerative farming trial is a multi-year project.

"Can we farm without synthetic fertiliser and can we increase crop diversity and still maintain a reliable productivity level?" says Rhys.

Clareview farm has been divided in half with one half being farmed using the 'conventional' model. Running two systems makes day-to-day management more challenging for Kiri.

"The conventional paddock beside us was in swedes and we've just re-grassed it with a ryegrass clover mix, and the re-gen paddock we're standing in has gone through a full cover crop which is about 28 species," she explained to Country Life recently.

So far milk production has been even across the two systems.

"One part of the season the re-gen side does really well per cow production and then it swaps and the conventional takes over."

Rhys is also looking at the profitability of each model and in the first year of the trial, conventional farming was winning.

"Were optimistic we can close that belt but at this stage conventional is $900 a hectare more profitable, so there's still work to do."

The couple are proud to share the results of the trial with the farming community.

"Farmers need rational data to make good decisions," Rhys says.

"It's all well and good saying good to say we haven't put N (nitrogen) on this paddock for three years and I'm really proud of that, but there have been detrimental effects... so it's around taking farmers along the journey of the good, the bad and the ugly."