Topoclimate Concept and how it evolved.

by Gary Hutchinson

(Concept Developer and now CEO, Topoclimate Australia)

My name is Gary Hutchinson. I am a Land Resources Scientist with over 35 years of international experience in farm planning and natural resource management. I would like to introduce you to our unique concept called the Topoclimate process for making better use of Land Resource information.

If there’s something that sets farming aside from just about every other occupation, it’s surely the opportunity to appreciate and participate in the patterns of nature, seasonal change and regeneration. While we’re endlessly reminded that farming these days is a business and not a lifestyle, we also generally understand that it’s also a lifelong experience of living with and understanding nature – on nature’s not always accommodating terms.

As with close human relationships, a farming life with nature is fraught with crisis, periods of anger, resentment and doubt but nothing beats the joy of “making up” as the old song goes, after a rough patch. Understanding the rhythms of the land and life and the miracle of recovery from abuse of the resource is one of the immense satisfactions of a life in farming. The Topoclimate Programme will help you to farm more productively and sustainably and will lead you towards this sense of understanding and satisfaction .

What is the Topoclimate concept?

The Topoclimate Concept can be defined as:

“A community-driven vision for sustainable rural development including diversification, increased productivity and more sustainable land use, based on quality information on the land resource and community needs.”

What are some examples of Topoclimate in Action?

Here are some examples of how Topoclimate has changed farms and the lives of farmers:

• In southwest Western Australia, a sheep farmer radically changed his farming systems following a Topoclimate farm Plan and added $200,000 to his farming profit.
• In Southland, New Zealand, a farming couple diversified into a new flower crop on their struggling sheep farm using Topoclimate principles and generated an additional $100,000 per hectare from their property.
• A farming couple on the Dorrigo Plateau in northern NSW completed a Topoclimate Farm plan that eventually added $200,000 to the sale price of their farm.

• A beekeeper in the Woodlands area of Southland found he can generate an additional 25% honey from his beehives by using land resource information to identify better harvest sites.
• A horticultural Farming company near Grafton in northern NSW identifies the right places on its property to grow each of its boutique fruit crops and produces 42% more fruit per tree than the Australian averages for its red-fleshed grapefruit crop.
• Merino sheep farmers in the high country of New Zealand’s South Island worked together on Topoclimate marketing principles to produce and market their ultrafine merino wool at prices well above returns from auction for this class of wool.
• A Blue Mountains (Sydney) couple added value to their $10,000 lavender crop using Topoclimate marketing principles to produce and market a unique line of lavender products valued at well over $100,000.
• The Regional community in New Zealand invested in a $4.3 M farm scale programme mapping soils and microclimates over the 820,000 ha of farmland in its region and ended up creating over 3000 additional jobs from improved productivity, diversification into new crops and more sustainable farming of the land.

The Topoclimate Concept evolved for me from a lifetime of working with farmers on land resource issues.

It has always frustrated me to know that, as a land resources scientist, I was involved in gathering lots of high quality information on the land, producing scientifically credible reports in glossy publications that seemed to be forever destined to gather dust on the shelves of government agencies or local councils that commissioned the work or occasionally on the shelves of the local library.

I realised that this information needed to be clearly explained in layman’s terms if farmers were to receive any benefits from the research but there was little interest from the agencies in funding the vital translation task that was needed to convert potentially valuable data into useable information.

The Southland Project

A large opportunity opened up for me in 1998, when I was approached by a group of farmers from the Southland region of New Zealand. I was working at the time for AgResearch, a large New Zealand Government research agency that undertook agricultural research on land resource and farming matters.

A deputation of Southland farmers explained to me that their key problem was that their region, a very productive farming area, was very largely dominated by fat lamb farming. This was fine when lamb prices were good but a major problem for the whole region occurred when the price of lamb plummeted, as it was prone to do on a regular cycle.

“We need to diversify our farming into other types of livestock and crops to ensure that our region doesn’t continue to go through these boom-bust cycles” they said.

They further explained, “Our fat lamb farms are, on average, about four hundred acres (160ha) in size and while they have in the past carried 2000 ewe flocks on those farms, and made a good living from those numbers, the fact is that there has been a long-term decline in profitability for fat lamb farming, in spite of and masked by the annual fluctuations in returns.”

“This means that farmers now have to carry 3500 sheep on the same farm area to remain profitable and a number are finding this too hard and selling out to their neighbours, or to farmers new to the area, who are wondering if there are more profitable things that can be done with their land.” they said.

“Our trouble as a region is,” they said “that we don’t have any good quality information at a farm scale on our soils or climates that we could use as a basis for developing new crops or livestock farming systems.”

They had tried to get some soil mapping carried out by the usual Government Agency (Landcare Research) responsible for this work but were told that there were very limited resources (staff and funding) for soil survey work and that Southland was nowhere near the top of the priority list for this survey work.

Their challenge to me (as a land resources Scientist) was how can we come up with quality information on our soils and climates at a farm scale at a cost that we can afford as a region?

In pondering how this question could be solved, I didn’t actually have a “eureka” moment in the spirit of Archimedes, but more the final expression of years of training and experience and a desire to solve the problem of the disconnect between data and information that I had expressed much frustration about earlier.

Thus, I began to develop the germ of the Topoclimate Concept. It took me quite a while to realise the scope and power of this concept and I’m sure that the first few farmers that I tried the concept out on, must have wondered whether I’d been smoking some of those funny smelling cigarettes !!!.

However, I persisted in developing the idea and the farmers of Southland, to their everlasting credit, got right behind the concept and adopted the project as their own. The Southland farming community were so convinced of the merits of Topoclimate that they were determined to develop a regional pilot project to test the idea. This determination flew in the face of much negativity from New Zealand Government who were initially not convinced enough to invest taxpayers dollars into what they described as untested science.

The Southland community raised $4.8 million from local sources and asked me to manage a large scale mapping programme to deliver the Topoclimate concept to the 4500 farmers in their district. This was a huge mapping programme and had, to my knowledge, never been tackled anywhere in the world by a local community without any form of government assistance.

Project Scope and Resources

I employed a staff of thirty-six people on contract to carry out the mapping programme including pedologists (soil surveyors) and climatologists. We developed a range of new and novel ways of mapping soils and also undertook the first ever regional scale mapping of microclimates at a farm scale anywhere in the world known as the Topoclimate South Project.

We mapped over 3000 different temperature recording sites, collected over 27 billion temperature records, recorded over 47,000 different soil profiles over a total of 4500 farms to produce the final maps and output information.

The New Zealand government watched the project working for the first 18 months and saw how the Topoclimate process had engaged its farmers in the process. At that time, there were general elections in New Zealand and a new Government under the Prime Minister Helen Clark was elected on a platform of supporting regional initiatives such as Topoclimate. One of the first acts of the new government was to then successfully negotiate with the local Trust operating the Topoclimate South project to buy into a 40% share in the work.

The New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, has been a champion for Topoclimate since she visited the project in 1999 as Leader of the Opposition. When she became Prime Minister in November 1999, one of her first actions was to negotiate with the Southland Community for the Government to buy the 40% share in the Project. She maintained her personal interest in the project until its completion and was Guest of Honour at a Celebration Dinner to acknowledge the successful completion of the project in Southland in November 2001.

Educating Farmers

Because the microclimate mapping concept was so new we had to educate all of the 4500 farmers in the region as to the value and meaning of the information and provide each of them with a soil and microclimate map of their own area. By the last year of the project, the first farmers were receiving their maps and the owners of the properties in the last year of the programme were lobbying my staff to ensure that temperature loggers were installed on their farms rather than their neighbours and that their farms were mapped for soils first. The Southland farmers had quickly grasped the value of the information and were quickly putting it to use in making better productivity, diversification and sustainability decisions about their farms.

We ended up mapping over 820,000 hectares of farm land in Southland over the three and one half years of the project and produced seventy-two different soil and microclimate maps for each District in the region.

We finished the job on time and to the budget but more importantly we unleashed the power of quality land resource information to over 4500 farmers.

Outcomes achieved

Suddenly farmers had good quality information to make better decisions about their farms. All sorts of diversification projects in to crops as diverse as tulip and daffodil bulbs, peony roses, Echinacea, ginseng, blueberries, meadowfoam, eucalyptus plantations and even expansion of dairy farming and development into deer farming started to happen.

Economic benefits

There was some Dutch research that showed that every time you created an extra job on the land in the Dutch economy, up to eight extra new jobs were created downstream in their very regulated economy. Thus for every extra farm job in the Netherlands, new jobs were being created in areas like teaching, truck-driving, policing, and more bureaucrats to service their significantly regulated land use policies.

We wondered whether we would see a similar effect from the Topoclimate mapping process in Southland in our far less regulated economy and were surprised to see that for every hectare of land that changed to intensive cropping uses, one additional job was being created on the land and at least four new jobs downstream in the regional economy.

By the time the project was even finished, we had contributed to the creation of over three thousand new jobs, both on the land and in the rural service towns of the region which started to boom for the first time after many years of decline.The jobs situation turned around so much that there was a shortage of people to take on the skilled jobs created in the regional economy. The local government and regional council was encouraged to take out a four page newspaper supplement in every newspaper throughout New Zealand to advertise the fact that there were big opportunities, good salaries, cheap housing, and a great lifestyle awaiting those who wanted to immigrate to the deep South of New Zealand.

Lessons learned from the Topoclimate South Project

What the Topoclimate Southland Project taught me, and what I now want to pass on to you is that:

• Even large groups of Farmers can work together to explore regional advantages and develop new ways of obtaining information on their land resource.
• You need a clear focus, a common objective and some strong local champions to make a project of this nature work.

• The community dynamics of rural communities are generally pretty strong, bound by a common love of the land, their region and farming in general.
• There are significant benefits to regional economies by investing in their rural sector.
• The importance of microclimates to most farming systems.
• For successful outcomes from resource mapping, there needs to be an intensive parallel effort put into educating farmers into the value of the information. (This is why we have designed training programmes to educate farmers and explain the value of land resource information).
• Technologies to gather information are rapidly evolving and there are always going to be cheaper and better ways of collecting resource information. The Topoclimate programme now uses new and novel methodologies and shows farmers how to use the information from these.

It’s possible to produce much of this land resource Information yourself for your own farm with the support of technical staff. You have most of the instruments and tools required already in your shed and the more technical equipment can usually be hired or purchased for a relatively small cost.

There is a real value in working together with your neighbours to develop farming products unique to your area where you have distinct regional or local advantage.

Whole communities can buy into the Topoclimate process for increased farming productivity, identification of new crop opportunities and farming more sustainably while protecting your land resources for the next generation.

The Topoclimate programme will be the single most valuable investment you will ever make in your land for your future.