Country Life

We chat to a rural vet, visit a farm where horticulture is helping addicts recover and find out about a novel plan to capture greenhouse gases for feeding farm animals.

In a Rotorua lab scientists are cooking up plans to create stockfeed out of captured greenhouse gases from geothermal power stations.

Country Life visited Nova Trust's farm near Christchurch where the charity is helping rehabilitate addicts through horticulture.

Rory Dean, graduated as a vet from Edinburgh University in 2015, and has already filled a book - Adventures of a Country Vet - full of adventures and experiences as a rural vet in his native UK and now New Zealand.

Kiwifruit is starting to bloom in Bay of Plenty, dairy farmers up and down the country are busy breeding the next season's calves, while North Canterbury farms have welcomed some recent rain to break the dry.

We catch up with a dairy farmer embracing regenerative farming, a flower farmer juggling a young family and visit a farm classroom connecting schoolchildren to the environment.

Schoolchildren are learning in a bell tent on a riverside farm in South Wairarapa. They're taking part in a project connecting the community to the river and moana.

Kate Briant, of The Rural Florist, on how growing flowers helps her juggle a busy young family while keeping her close to her roots in horticulture.

The last time Country Life visited John Legg's Leeston dairy farm, he was adopting regenerative practices across the property. We catch up with him again five years later.

A round-up of the week's agricultural news.

We meet a keen gardener in the Far North, hop in the sheepyards to learn about dagging and talk emissions with a sheep and beef farmer in Wairoa. And later we take a look back in the archives with a rural postman on his rounds.

In a trip to the archives we join rural delivery man Doug Wilson on his 100-kilometre daily run around the big stations around Taihape, from a feature produced in 1985 by the team from long-running RNZ show Spectrum.

A changing climate and shifting land use has prompted Wairoa sheep and beef farmer Dave Read to develop a new breed of low-input sheep.

In this first episode of Farming 101, we check in with sheep grazier Peter Crook to find out about dagging.

If you're heading to the Far North via State Highway 1, you might spy Daphne Andrell busy at work in her garden.