Kia ora koutou

We will be releasing a large number of beetles with the aid of the local school children at Mahia Peninsula (Hawkes Bay) next Tuesday, late morning.  This is part of the Whangawehi Catchment Management Group initiative (https://whangawehi.com/), a farmer and Marae led collective, supported in part by Beef & Lamb NZ. School children will be involved in the release as part of our Hill Country Futures project’s citizen science initiative.

Dung beetles are game changers.  They will build and retain soils, integrate nutrients into the soil profile and cut off run-off at source (within the paddocks).  Releasing them complements all the hard work done by regional council and the Whangawehi Catchment Management Group to plant riparian margins to reduce run-off reaching the streams.  Dung beetles will also help farm productivity by building healthy soils and disrupting nematode transmission between stock, so reduction in the need for fertilizer and drenches are likely in the long run.

We have written to several Ministers to come to help the children release the beetles – basically by making a series of pooh sandwiches – pooh is piled up, a teeming mass of beetles are dunked on top, and a bucket of extra pooh is then dumped on their heads to prevent them flying away.   We expect that the involvement of school children up to their elbows in pooh will help spread the message.

It’s a national interest story with a fresh angle that shows farmers and locals teeming up to help each other. The school kids are also setting up a terrarium in their classroom to watch the way they devour the pooh and bury it in dung balls.

We have invited the following Ministers and await their response:

• Damien O’Connor as Agriculture Minister – he has repeatedly spoken in support of funding dung beetles.
• Eugenie Sage as Minister of Conservation – the beetles will be release directly alongside community plantings along the Whangawehi River where the community group are creating a public walkway.
• James Shaw as Climate Change and Associate Finance Minister – the beetles are ‘ecosystem engineers’ that will build resilience and support the farming economy.