Towards the end of my stay in New Zealand I took the opportunity to walk one of the Great Walks, the Routeburn Track, which is location in the Mount Aspiring and Fiordland National Parks, south-west of the South Island. For the whole track over the distance of 32 km which I walked in three days. The track winds through beautiful beech forest, across tussock-covered flats, over the Harris Saddle, passes subalpine shrublands, alpine tarns and bogs. Most interestingly, even here science follows on the footsteps. I met a couple from Thames, Coromandel. They were dairy farmers and these few days on the track were their only only holidays for the last year. We had a great conversation about sustainable agriculture and manure management. They had apparently even won an industry award for best effluent management and they collaborated with scientists and an innovative company that developed a solution to reduce the smell of a manure. That was a great example of scientists, ent...
