Northland Agricultural Research Farm has occupied the same site 5km north of Dargaville for the past 100 years, doing trial work of great benefit to Northland farmers.
NARF began as the Northern Wairoa Experimental and Demonstration Farm in 1924, gifted to all Northland farmers for research of benefit the region and the agricultural industries.
The farm has paid its own way through floods, droughts and the ups and downs of milk payouts.
In recent years it has received funding to pay for additional science costs such as extra staff to enable trial work to be carried out.
The farm has the unique ability to run systems trials on three equalised farmlets of up to 90 cows each on 27 hectares.
This gives enough scale for robust comparisons and there is great interest in the work the farm does from the length of the country.
It has a dairy herd with high genetic merit that has been professionally managed with supervision by a farmer committee.
Farmers and industry members are encouraged to attend the fortnightly farm meetings and join the discussion and debate on the current and future management of the farm.
More than 400 farmers and rural professionals receive the emailed fortnightly farm notes.
Since 2006 NARF has had a very close working relationship with the Northland Dairy Development Trust (NDDT), with trustees appointed by NARF and Fonterra.
In the past 25 years trial work has been done on split calving, endophytes, mastitis, nitrogen fertiliser, kikuyu management, and the economics of cropping and supplement use.
Trust coordinator and farm consultant Kim Robinson said the current Future Farming Systems trial looks forward 20 or even 30 years, whereas previous trials have addressed current concerns for Northland farmers.
“The alternative pastures are of great interest to Waikato and Bay of Plenty as climate change kicks in, and the future low-emissions work is running concurrently with research farms in Taranaki and Southland.”
Long-time Kaipara farmer on the NARF committee, Peter Flood, said the breadth of trial work in his time has been of great benefit to all pastoral farmers in the north.
Before NDDT was formed in 2006 the workload on volunteer NARF committee members was considerable, scoping research work, finding sponsorship, running the trials and reporting back.
After attending his first NARF event in 1980, Flood has been on the committee since 1998 and he looked after the finances from 2010 to 2022.
