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REX April 2 - Ron Park, Marianne Awburn and Natasha & Alan Cave

April 1, 2026·58 min·5 clips

The Kiwi Tender product uses kiwifruit enzymes to dissolve the fibrous texture of beef, lamb, and venison so that elderly people can eat premium New Zealand meat without chewing.

Dom George opens with a packed rural lineup. Ron Parker is introduced as the head of a health supplements company whose red-meat product range recently won the 2026 Meat Industry Association Dragon's Den competition. The product has a tongue-soft texture, and the host frames it as meat made easier for elderly or unwell people to handle. Then the episode gets more farm-shed practical. Mary-Anne Auburn talks about Springarm, the on-farm accessory she and Rick founded after winning the Field Days Innovation Awards in 2021. The good part is the trial and error. Springs got welded onto bolts, rods got threaded, parts broke, and the design only started working when the spring went straight onto the rod. Auburn describes putting some order around the inventor chaos by testing spring lengths and strengths instead of just grabbing parts that looked about right. The job was simple enough to say and hard enough to solve. The spring had to shut the water off, but still bend when farm gear pushed it around. Auburn says the arm is broadly universal and replaces a normal ball-cock arm in setups already common in New Zealand. A standard arm might bend about six times before snapping. Their version was tested to about 25,000 bends by machine, which saved someone a grim afternoon. The final segment is Natasha Cave and husband Alan on wearables for New Zealand hill-country beef, with a hint that the tech may be moving. The close returns to sponsorship and seems to include an unrelated political advertisement, so the real episode is the rural interview material, not the stray insert.

As heard by us

Practical rural innovation with a plainspoken, on-farm focus.

Rex's April 2 episode keeps its feet on the ground. Ron Parker talks through a New Zealand red meat range with a tongue-soft texture for elderly or unwell people, Mary-Anne Auburn looks at Springarm and what it can do on farm, and Natasha Cave turns to wearables and Halter in…

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Why you'd press play

You want practical farm innovation, not shiny ag-tech slogans.

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