Next week will see some of New Zealand's best young fruit growers battle it out for the inaugural Central Otago Young Fruit Grower 2015 competition.

Luck of the draw won’t come into it when the 32 competitors in this year’s New Zealand Ploughing Championships put steel to soil next month, says the host farmer.

 A 1080 poison drop in the Blue Mountains, Otago, has knocked rodent and stoat numbers down to “undetectable levels”, says OSPRI, which runs the TBfree scheme.

Whatever it takes, don’t disrupt your capital stock to cope with the drought. That’s the headline message from a seasoned Canterbury consultant who’s seen the region go through severely dry seasons in over 40 years in the industry.

THE HEAVY snow showers falling in Southland and Otago have come at a bad time with most dairy farmers well into calving.

The 2014 New Zealand Dairy Industry Awards will take place in 11 regions, including a merged Southland/Otago region.

Federated Farmers and the Rural Support Trust are extending the call for volunteers to assist Canterbury High Country farms with snow-raking.

RECORD ENTRIES in this year’s Dairy Industry Awards, which wrapped up late last week with the West Coast/Top of the South region, were achieved despite a record low in Otago.

More than 150 Southland and Otago primary schools are today being invited to be among the first schools in the country to receive free milk for their students under the nationwide Fonterra Milk for Schools programme.

With less than eight weeks to go before on-farm water meters become compulsory, IrrigationNZ is worried one third of irrigators in Canterbury and two thirds in Otago have yet to install them.