Funding boost to extend Rangitīkei fight against old man’s beard

Rangitikei Rivers Catchment Collective members at an intensive winter grazing field day.

A farmer-led initiative has cleared 1400 hectares of Rangitīkei land of old man’s beard and planted 25,000 native trees and poplars.

Rangitikei Rivers Catchment Collective (RRCC) is a collective of rural residents and farm owners working to protect the environment and enhance biodiversity in the Rangitīkei, Turakina and Whangaehu River catchments. Its main focus is bringing together rural communities, gathering environmental data and closing the knowledge gap so farm businesses continue to grow and thrive.

In the past two years, RRCC has delivered 56 workshops and undertaken a number of projects, including the Environmental Restoration Project to remove old man’s beard and plant new trees, which was funded from a 2020 grant by MPI via the Sustainable Land Use/Jobs for Nature fund.

Old man’s beard grows where there is no threat of it being eaten, such as on road and rail corridors, retired farmland and fenced riparian edges. It is an aggressive, fast-growing vine that spreads quickly through forest canopies by forming a tangled, smothering mass over other vegetation and trees.

“We really made a difference on properties where landowners are fighting to keep the weed from spreading,” committee member and project sponsor Ruth Rainey said.

RRCC contracted the Rangitikei Environment Group (REG), Rangitikei Helicopters, AgDrone and Dronezup to remove the weed.

The funding doubled the capacity of REG which has been providing weed control services for more than 20 years in Rangitīkei.

“In the majority of cases when we turned up at a property we were shown to an area of indigenous forest remnant where the weed was starting to establish,” REG project manager Neil Gallagher said.

Preserving these areas of native bush is important for providing habitat for indigenous plants and wildlife, shade and shelter for stock, stabilising soil and enhancing the landscape.

“With lots of riparian planting and land retirement happening on farms, it critical that the growth and spread of the unwanted weed is controlled to stop it spreading into newly planted and retired areas of native trees as well as our valuable stock of indigenous forest remnants,” RRCC chairman Roger Dalrymple said.

Horizons Regional Council has pledged $15,000 to RRCC to extend its Environmental Restoration Project to June 2024 to help control the bearded weed in private indigenous/native bush.

With the support of member subscriptions and Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) funding, RRCC also undertakes monthly water quality monitoring at 88 sites across its 700,000ha catchment.

“Since 2018, RRCC have built a significant regional dataset of water quality monitoring, which substantially outnumbers regional council monitoring,” RRCC catchment co-ordinator Louise Totman said.

“Three to five years of data has been collected from nine of our 22 sub-catchment groups and this will continue to grow year on year.”