The Farmer in New Zealand
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New Zealand Centennial SurveysVI. The Farmer in New Zealand
The Farmer in New ZealandbyG. T. Alley & D. O. W. HallWellingtonDepartment of Internal AffairsNew Zealand1941
Preface
The Farmer, who reaps as he sows, and farms his land for future generations as well as for his own, knows well that history is the history of the present rather than of the past. Yet without reliable information about the past, plans for the future must be less accurate and fruitful. This historical essay does not attempt to lay down a 'land policy', nor even to suggest the broad lines along which reforms or changes might be made. Possibly, however, it may be of some value to those who seek cures or solutions for land and farming problems.
The authors wish to acknowledge the great help received in preparing this survey from the splendid collections of early New Zealand material in the General Assembly and Alexander Turnbull libraries. Finally they offer their thanks to those friendly critics whose suggestions and cautions have so greatly aided their work.
G. T. AlleyD. O. W. HallWellingtonJanuary 1941
Contents
PagePrefacev1. The Maori Farmer12. Early Settlement and Farming233. Gold, Wool, and Wheat534. The Farming Industry875. The Farmer and the World121A Note on Sources143Index153
Illustrations
Machine Shearingfrontispiece
From a photograph by H. Drake, Department of Agriculture, Palmerston North.
Maoris Working in a Potato Fieldfacing page 10
From an engraving from a drawing by de Sainson published in Dumont d'Urville's Voyage Pittoresque Autour du Monde (1839).
Pig Hunting in the Wairarapa10
From a lithograph from a drawing by S. C. Brees published in Illustrations to Adventure in New Zealand (1845).
Repairing a Cottage (1847)38
From a pen and ink sketch in the manuscript diary of William Bambridge in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Bambridge lived in the Auckland district.
The Deans Farm, Riccarton (1848)38
From a pencil sketch in the manuscript diary of W. B. D. Mantell, geologist and explorer.
Threshing from the Stookfacing page 76
From a photograph by the Government Tourist and Publicity Department. Until the appearance of the header harvester, this method was the most widely used.
Reaping wheat, Pembroke, Lake Wanaka76
From a photograph by the Government Tourist and Publicity Department.
Farm-lands near Cust, Canterbury82
From an aerial photograph by V. C. Browne.
A Jersey Herd94
From a photograph by H. Drake, Department of Agriculture, Palmerston North.
A Butter Factory in the Waikato94
From a photograph by H. Drake, Department of Agriculture, Palmerston North.
Unloading Lambs at a Freezing Works106
From a photograph by J. D. Pascoe, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.
Cleared Land in the King Country124
From a photograph by G. T. Alley.
Erosion at Tutira, Hawke's Bay124
From a photograph by J. D. Pascoe, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington.
This volume is one of a series commissioned and published by the Government of New Zealand. The Government however does not hold itself responsible for any statement made or opinions expressed herein. The responsibility for these is the authors' and theirs alone.
The Farmer in New Zealand
1The Maori Farmer
In the Procession of farmers who have lived and worked in this country the Maori must take his appointed place. The Maori of pre-European days was hardly a farmer in the sense in which the word is used in this survey. He had, however, advanced far beyond the mere gathering of food from forest, river, and sea. The cultivated kumara was the staff of his life, with fern-root as a stopgap. One tribe alone, the Tuhoe people in the inland fastnesses of the Urewera, subsisted entirely on berries, fern-root, birds, rats, freshwater fish, and even insects — for the kumara would not grow on their uplands—until, about the beginning of last century, the coming of the potato revolutionised their way of life.
Although the Maori's cultivation of the kumara was closer to gardening than to farming, the elaborate methods needed to grow it prepared him for the problems of less fickle European crops. There were many varieties of kumara—probably more than eighty —and the fact that it was a tropical plant (it flowered but never seeded in New Zealand), which needed shelter and warmth, made its cultivation a matter for close organisation. The ground that was to receive it was prepared some time beforehand: the roots of the cleared trees were dug out with the ko, the most serviceable of the wooden implements of the Maori, and burned on the spot; when the clearing and stumping of the land had been achieved, the top soil was finely worked, sand was added, and, if the soil were clay, it was drained by surface channels. The kumara was surrounded with elaborate rituals and tapu; fertility symbols were placed to aid its growth; and everything connected with its planting or harvesting was accompanied by magical observances.
The close identification of so much of Maori religion with the raising of food crops is a clear indication of how important they were to Maori life. Food gained from crops was to the Maori something that had to be seriously worked for, something that needed both long planning and the sympathy of the gods, something that could be assured only by the concerted effort of the whole tribe. Food gained by hunting or fishing was less certain, and it could not be relied upon to supply the whole means of life. Even the wild fern-root was cultivated to the extent that its tops were periodically burned. The Maori, with his close attention to soils and situation (for the kumara, unlike the potato, would grow only in an entirely favourable situation), to working, draining, and fallowing the ground, and to the cycle of the seasons, was a farmer in embryo. His immediate realisation of the value of European plants and his instant casting aside of his poor crude ko and timo (or grubbing stick) in favour of European spades and hoes show how far he was ready to accept the superior techniques of the white man. It needed no important adjustment of his ways for the Maori to engage in European farming; he was already attuned to farming as a way of life.
Year by year the Maoris had wrestled with their difficult environment, using a complicated variety of skills to make a living from the soil or forests of their adopted land. They had brought with them from their island origins the taro, the gourd, and the kumara, to give some diversity to a diet very limited in both quantity and quality. The Maori had always been faced with the need to plan his production of food over the whole year, and when his planned cycle broke down, interrupted by war or the seasonal failure of a main crop, he starved to death. Not only were his food resources limited; he had to face the almost equally great disadvantage of the crudity of the tools of his stone age material culture.
The navigators who re-discovered New Zealand in the late eighteenth century plied the Maori with seeds and animals: the pig is usually ascribed to the benevolence of Captain Cook. These gifts were on a small scale, however, and the lack of any continuing advice on horticultural matters and the use of the few implements distributed by the explorers left the Maori people in substantially the same state of agricultural ability as before—with the important exception of the potato. The potato, indeed, had by 1807 become a principal article of Maori diet (though there were those who said that the coarse and tediously prepared fern-root which it pardy replaced was a more healthy food), and a lucrative export, for in the eighteen-thirties the Maori exported pork and potatoes regularly to Australia.
It is fair to date the beginnings of Europeanised Maori agriculture from the establishment of the first mission at the end of 1814 by Samuel Marsden. Before Marsden the Europeans who had contributed to Maori knowledge and equipment had acted without system or study of the needs of the country and the capabilities of its climate and people, spreading their gifts with an undiscriminating self-indulgent philanthropy. It was the Rev. Samuel Marsden who first deliberately set out to help the Maori to acquire experience of European farming with the express intention of raising his standard of living. Marsden, himself sprung from Yorkshire small-farming stock, had become a leading farmer in New South Wales, an activity he believed as pleasing to God as to man. In regard to New Zealand this policy would be even more directly useful for moral than for material improvement. The great Hongi, for instance, at once the terror and the pride of his country, could be induced to give up the passionately loved sport of war only if he should have 'some object of importance to employ his great mind. There is nothing in New Zealand but war that can meet his active spirit. Agriculture alone offers a substitute. . . .'
Though the diversion of the bloodthirstiness of Hongi was one of the ends proposed for Maori agriculture, the grand aim was to give the Maori people easier means of life. This was felt not least by the Maoris themselves. Ruatara, who may well be dubbed the first Maori farmer if one seeks to distribute such thorny garlands as titles of priority, was fired with an ambition just as burning as Marsden's own to give to his people their daily bread. Ruatara was as much the advance scout for his whole people as Toi or Kupe, when he saw on Marsden's farm at Parramatta just what could be gained from the orderly production of food from European crops. Ruatara learned Christianity at Parramatta. He learned also the value of wheat, the missing element that might give stability to Maori agriculture. There is abundant evidence that the Maoris starved when the potato and kumara crops were exhausted, either by too extravagant use or by bartering them away to European ships in exchange for highly prized iron.
The questing spirit of Ruatara had already taken him round the world in European vessels—to suffer much at the hands of unscrupulous sea-captains—and his race was indeed fortunate in his enterprise and leadership. In Maori society innovation was made from above, by chiefs of high rank like Ruatara or Hongi. As soon as Marsden knew that his 'new leader and friend', who had promised so well at Parramatta, was at length arrived, after undergoing unknown hardships, at his native land, he eagerly sent him wheat-seed and tools, for Marsden and Ruatara were united in their belief that industry would correct the 'wild and vagrant habits' of the Maoris and 'prepare them for the everlasting gospel'. Both men wished the Maori people to become Europeanised, the process to begin with material culture. Indeed, one of the missionaries, King, doubted Ruatara's knowledge of religion, although he 'was a well-wisher to his own people'.
Whatever his spiritual shortcomings, so visible to King and so unapparent to Samuel Marsden, Ruatara set to work with a thoroughness and method as yet unusual in his race. He travelled forty miles inland to the most remote extent of his chiefly authority, and in Marsden's words, 'laid out the grounds he intended to clear and cultivate, and marked out the ground for his men, having first enquired of me how much ground a man broke up in a day at Port Jackson. He was seldom at home but constantly at his farms.' It was not enough, however, to grow corn. He had to wait until Marsden had sent him a steel mill before his people would accept the new crop with anything like the required revolutionary ardour.
Ruatara, besides being the first Maori farmer, was the protector and encourager of the first missionary settlement, which was made on his territory at Rangihoua, Bay of Islands. The association of Ruatara and the missionaries would have produced great mutual benefit, not least in the sphere of farming, had the Maori leader not died during 1815, leaving both his white friends and his half-instructed people to fend for themselves. A new leader was ready to step into his place. This was the great Hongi, like Ruatara a pupil in the arts of civilisation at Marsden's establishment at Parramatta. Hongi had perhaps even more than Ruatara's ability to organise his people for the tasks of peace or war. 'Shungee had,' reported Marsden, 'near the village we were at, one field which appeared to me to contain forty acres, all fenced in with rails and upright stakes tied to them to keep out the pigs. Much of it was planted with turnips, common and sweet potatoes, which were in high cultivation. They suffer no weeds to grow but, with incredible labour and patience, root up everything likely to injure the growing plant.' Hongi was also growing his first crop of wheat, but there were difficulties to contend with just as formidable as the Maori ignorance of European methods.
'No labour of man without iron can clear and subdue uncultivated land to any extent. The New Zealanders seem to do as much in this respect as the strength and wisdom of man is equal in their situation.' Marsden was very willing to do everything he could to provide the Maori with iron tools, though with his usual integrity he would not promise much, even to Hongi, because it might not be within his power to supply it. He was constantly assailed during his evangelical journeys in New Zealand by requests for hoes, spades, axes, and a blacksmith to make more of these things. In the first five years of his acquaintance with the Bay of Islands Marsden found the area of ground under cultivation by the natives increase tenfold. With this testimonial to native application he could not but feel embarrassed by importunities for tools he knew would make the wilderness fruitful and which it was beyond his means to supply. Poor Pomare, enviously comparing his crude and broken wooden implements with the European tools in the hands of Hongi, wept when he found there was no blacksmith to help him, and his wives added their sympathetic tears. He feared he would be dead (of starvation) before his needs were supplied. Marsden had already been struck with the crudity of Maori implements. 'We saw with pain the hard toil they endured and the little progress they made in cultivation with their rude instruments, and were convinced by ocular demonstration that the earth can never be subdued and made to bring forth its increase to reward the sweat and toil of man without iron, and that this valuable article is the only thing in creation that can relieve the temporal miseries of this people.'
Marsden was ever on the look out to experiment with the farming possibilities of New Zealand. Early in the eighteen-twenties he sent over cattle. Thomas Kendall, cantankerous 'man-on-the-spot' if ever there was one, complained that these went wild for want of grass, and suggested that his superior officer's energies would be better employed in founding churches and schools. The missionaries could have led an easy life simply trading with the natives, an activity Marsden used all his authority to prevent. They had not Marsden's belief in the value of agriculture as a civilising agency. Nor had they Marsden's preference for the immediate practicable minimum. 'If you wait,' he answered Kendall from New South Wales, 'for churches and schools until you get good, pious men to build them from hence, I fear they will not be found in my day. The cattle I have at my own command, and I have sent them without application from any person.... I have seen want enough in this Colony to convince me of the vast importance of cattle in a new settlement.'
It was part of Marsden's intention that the missionaries should make themselves independent of native supplies of food by developing their own farms. He was always inspecting the soil wherever he went and estimating its capabilities. Thanks to this close interest the missionary farms at Keri-Keri and Waimate were eventually established, the latter eminently successful and a forceful example to the natives. It was at Keri-Keri in 1820 that the plough was first used in New Zealand. 'I felt much pleasure in holding it,' wrote the missionary Butler, 'after a Team of six Bullocks—brought down by the Dromedary— I trust that this auspicious day will be remembered with gratitude and its Anniversary kept by ages yet unborn'. Others too rejoiced at 'the sight of the British plough breaking up the deserts of New Zealand', for this was, in the opinion of the Rev. William Yate, the most pleasing of all prospects that could meet the eye of the philanthropist in this country. There was no anticipation in the minds of these earnest lovers of men that the very comeliness of the sight of the good New Zealand soil bringing forth its plenty was to be, with the incoming race, the ruin of the Maori people they were bending all their energies to help. From some points of view the plough and the spade were far more dangerous to the Maoris than muskets, rum, and European disease.
The whole basis of Maori society was shaken by the contacts, increasing year by year, with European civilisation. For his place and time Marsden's recipe for transition, that the Maori should learn European farming, was the most liberal as well as the most inspired possible. He had an obstinate faith in the power of industry to promote regular habits and moral conduct. Had not this recipe turned convicts into useful labourers in New South Wales? In the same way surely the Maori might become a different character, for even Marsden admitted that he was in his rude state somewhat excitable and scatterbrained, an opinion held even more strongly by the missionaries continuously resident in New Zealand. Hall felt that 'Their natural fondness for a rambling and active life must be brought by degrees to yield to more steady occupation. They are . . . easily induced to assist in agriculture.'
There seems indeed to be abundant evidence for the opinion that the Maoris, however much inclined to prefer immediate gratification to distant benefits, had a real talent for agriculture. The average Maori obeyed the commands of his chief. The chiefs were converted to European agriculture as well as to European religion. The rank and file of the tribes followed suit. As was their custom, the Maoris worked together at the tasks of farming, rather than individually, the only exception to this being the smaller groups working for the missionaries on their farms—but these men merely worked under a white chief instead of the ancestral chief. Whatever limitations this system of working as a community under the direction of their chiefs might have imposed on the Maori in later years when the example of the white man's individualism was more apparent, in the forties and fifties it was admirably suited to Maori talents and temperament. The flowering of Maori agriculture in these two decades disposes of any suggestion that the Maori was by nature incapable of the steady and continuous effort needed for successful farming of European type. On the contrary the Maori in these years gave evidence of a natural genius for agriculture and the management of stock which makes the decline of Maori farming after the wars of the sixties among the most tragic results of those deplorable conflicts.
As early as 1845Dr Martin, a rather iconoclastic commentator on young New Zealand, remarked that the natives produced food so cheaply they would ruin the white settlers' market. The white settler had his own place for the Maori in the scheme of things, and it was certainly not that of a competitor. The Maori was expected rather to be the willing accomplice in converting his forests into the white man's farms. It is well to remember that a great deal of hard manual work was in fact carried out by gangs of Maoris, by Maoris rather than by the labourers imported for this purpose as part of the Wakefield scheme of colonisation. Maoris made roads, felled and cut up timber, built raupo cottages, lifted potatoes, harvested corn, rowed boats (and water communications were relatively much more important in early New Zealand than they are to-day), acted as porters, and did all at a lower rate of pay than a white man would have accepted, though not always without resenting this disparity. To the Maori money itself was still novel enough to draw him from his own pursuits even on poor terms. The Maori was an indispensable tool in the white man's first exploitation of the resources of New Zealand. But this widespread co-operation should not distract attention from the enormous strides being made by the Maori's own independent agriculture.
The early Maori was more than self-supporting: he supported the white man. The early Maori was young, eager, as full of hope in the efficacy of farming prosperity to promote the good life as Samuel Marsden himself could have wished; the early Maori in fact regarded himself as on the threshold of a new era of comfort and happiness, through his imitation of the white man's modes of living, both for production and for pleasure.
Lady Martin, wife of the Chief Justice who fought for the rights of the Maori people against a majority of his fellow colonists, has written a magnificent description of Maori farming in its hey-day, in the early fifties. 'Our path lay across a wide plain, and our eyes were gladdened on all sides by sights of peaceful industry. For miles we saw one great wheat field. The blade was just showing, of a vivid green, and all along the way, on either side, were peach-trees in full blossom. Carts were driven to and from the mill by their native owners, the women sat under the trees sewing flour bags; fat, healthy children and babies swarmed around, presenting a floury appearance. . . . We little dreamed that in ten years the peaceful industry of the whole district would cease and the land become a desert through our unhappy war.' This account of a smiling countryside—in the Waikato—developed by Maori hands is echoed by more matter-of-fact writers. William Swainson gives a picture of the Bay of Plenty, Taupo, and Rotorua districts, showing what success had been achieved by a native population estimated at something over 8,000. 'In the year 1857,' he wrote, 'the natives of these districts alone had upwards of 3,000 acres of land in wheat, 3,000 acres in potatoes, nearly 2,000 acres in maize, and upwards of 1,000 acres planted with kumeras. They owned nearly 1,000 horses, 200 head of cattle and 5,000 pigs, four water-mills and 96 ploughs. They were also the owners of 43 small coasting vessels, averaging 20 tons each, and upwards of 900 canoes.' These instances of the developed state of Maori farming could be multiplied, but enough has been quoted to show that it was not, in Lady Martin's words, 'mere child's play'. There was nothing primitive and hand-to-mouth about this phase of Maori life.
Although the Maori excelled at growing wheat, since crops were nearest to his own traditional conceptions and his custody of his pigs in the old days had been of the most elementary, he was also capable of turning his hand to pastoral farming. The Rev. Thomas Samuel Grace, established at the mission station at Turanga (the modern Gisborne) in the fifties, had commented in his reports on the development of wheat-growing in that district. Later in the fifties when he had transferred to the Taupo station, he was able to record that the Maoris in that district had collected £220 to buy a flock of sheep. In this instance the hopes of the earlier missionaries that new habits would make the Maori more moral were fully realised. 'The introduction of sheep has at last come in real earnest and, with the blessing of God, will be productive of many and great changes for the better in their social condition. One benefit is already apparent—the rooting out of the old jealousies which had for so long existed amongst these tribes. In order to purchase sheep they have formed themselves into a sort of company, so that now they cherish a common interest—a state of things hitherto unknown to them.'
In 1862 when the main tragedy of the Maori wars had already been enacted, an even more remarkable moral result was attributed to the Taupo flocks: they had kept their owners out of the wars. Gorst had commented on the state of the Waikato in the agricultural slump of the late fifties, when the price of corn dropped from twelve shillings to three, that 'the extreme poverty of the Waikato natives is one of the chief obstacles to their subjugation. There is very little in their villages which they would mind losing'. This poverty following on a riot of prosperity had in fact helped to embitter the natives. What little food they did grow—for they had returned to their ancestral subsistence farming—was wasted 'at some great meeting for establishing that Maori nationality which is their one absorbing object.' At Taupo, however, the 2,000 sheep to which the original purchases had grown by natural increase were a substantial hostage to fortune. The Maori Messenger could not forbear to moralise on this lucky theme: 'The Natives at Taupo did not assist in the Taranaki war. We have heard that it was the sheep which kept them away; for they said, "why should we fight about Waitara; perhaps by and bye, if we do, the Governor will come and take away our sheep." Thus sheep were the means of maintaining peace; those quiet gentle animals . . . kept down the angry passions of those who would otherwise perhaps have dipped their hands in blood.'
It should not be thought that this venture of the Taupo natives in pastoral farming was the only stock farming undertaken by the Maoris. From their first importation into the country the Maoris had a pronounced weakness for owning horses, paying for them at extortionate rates, merely for the pleasure and sense of power of being able to ride, and on occasion to race their steeds. (Ninety years later the motor car gives the satisfaction once given by the horse.) This was, however, a social rather than an economic phenomenon. In early New Zealand it was oxen rather than horses which drew the plough, for Maori as for European. Lady Martin mentions that the Waikato natives had bought cows and that every village had a supply of milk. Home-baked bread had replaced the old order of potatoes for breakfast, dinner, and tea. Maori diet had radically changed, though there is no evidence that beef or mutton was extensively consumed. On the contrary it is much more likely, since the Taupo natives farmed for wool and the Waikato cattle were used to provide milk or to draw the plough, that the Maoris regarded their beasts as too valuable to kill for the immediate gratification of a different meat course on a few days in the year, especially as pigs were still very extensively bred for the sole purpose of providing meat.
It is typical of the thoroughness of the early Maori in all he undertook that Grace's Taupo natives should have striven to learn to weave, so that they could turn their own wool into blankets. But then Grace had already been able to testify that the Maoris were 'the most practical people in the world. They will listen to theories with delight, but that is all. When they see a practical demonstration they get to work at once. This has been seen in the erection of flour mills.' Grace here referred to the widespread 'mania'—this word was fairly used to describe the epidemic enthusiasm for a new facility—among the Maoris of the fifties for erecting flour mills. Every village had to have its mill, usually water-driven. In the fifties the government sent round an inspector to see these mills were kept in good working order, a necessary service, since when his office was discontinued, there were frequent complaints that mills had ceased working through mechanical defect beyond the power of their native owners to remedy. A mill might cost as much as £360. Indeed, the profits of the first flush of Maori farming prosperity went into mills, horses, and farming implements rather than into consumption goods, evidence again of Maori ability to plan for long-term results, for the horses alone could have been considered as luxuries.
Marsden had been besieged for spades and hoes. Grace was held to ransom for ploughs. 'When I wanted a store built at Matata, two ploughs were the stipulated payment—nothing else would do. Again, when I found it necessary to buy a canoe for the river, I was obliged to pay with a plough.' It was spade husbandry which was killing the Maori people, in Grace's opinion, curiously echoing Marsden's thoughts on the effects of work with crude wooden implements on an earlier generation. For such a practical people as the Maoris to have seen the improved implement, whether iron spade or ox-drawn plough, was to have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 'No sooner did they see it [the plough] in the hands of a Maori than they threw away their spades and would not touch them.'
Grace, who perhaps more than any other missionary carried on in the practical spirit of Marsden, described the working out of an entirely new economy among the Maoris of Poverty Bay. At a hui held to celebrate the 1852 harvest home at the Turanga mission, after the abundant fare provided by the industry of the people on the mission land, many speeches were made, whose tenor was very clear. 'Their motto was, "Ploughs, sheep and ships", as a basis upon which was to be established a civilization like unto that of the Pakeha.' Again he thought it was 'beginning at the wrong end to teach these practical people occupations in which they feel they are as skilful as we—namely, the planting of food, etc. They need to be schooled in various industries, so that they may meet their growing wants.' The Maori had, in fact, begun to base a very full and increasingly complex economy on his success as a farmer. Apart from his eagerness to begin ancillary industries, like the milling of his own wheat and the weaving of his own wool, he developed his natural desire to take his own produce to market into a large-scale transport industry. The Maoris owned a fleet of small coasting craft, which, with their canoes, represented a considerable proportion of the carrying trade entering the port of Auckland. At that port alone in 1858 fifty-three small vessels were registered as being in native ownership, and the annual total of canoes entering the harbour rose to over 1,700. These facts are drawn from Swainson, for whom figures talked in unmistakable language of the prosperity of the natives. Other writers confirm the opinion that the Maori was developing a talent for shipping that might soon have equalled his prowess as a farmer.
The Maori farmer was not backward as a business man, although his business ability occasionally had curious results. Grace declared, in 1852, 'The use of money and figures is doing much to enlighten them, and, if they persevere with the Corn Market already commenced by them, they will soon understand the art of dealing.' In an able contribution to The Maori People TodayHarold Miller quotes a remarkable passage from an anonymous official's report on a visit to the Waikato. From this it is apparent how deeply prices and the cash nexus had influenced Maori life. 'They now have wise men among themselves to calculate the cubic contents of a heap of fire-wood, the area of a plot of ground, the live weight of a pig. . . .' Gorst reported the reverse side of the new business keenness of the Maoris. 'It is well known to settlers that Maories will let their corn and potatoes rot, rather than take a less price than they consider just.' A people which could starve on potatoes, with a full granary of corn reserved for sale to buy horses, was quite capable of making nothing at all when a fair profit was not obtainable. By 1859 production had so dwindled that grain had to be imported from Australia.
The Maori's farming methods often brought him into conflict with his white neighbours. Indeed there is the testimony of Gorst that the farming principles of the two races were mutually antagonistic and bound to lead to disputes. The native cultivations of wheat, potatoes, or maize were defended 'only by a rickety fence of small sticks tied up with flax', very vulnerable to the inroads of the European farmer's cattle, which ranged at large over the open countryside. The Maori's pigs returned the compliment to the settler's crops and newly grassed paddocks 'setting hedges, ditches and dogs at defiance'.
Another Maori habit which aroused the horror of the settlers was the traditional native cropping of the best soil until it was exhausted, after which they passed on to another tract of virgin country, leaving the old ground to be smothered in weeds of European origin. As early as 1844Octavius Hadfield had suggested to the Otaki natives that it would be well to sow wheat in their abandoned potato grounds. The Maori Messenger, an indefatigable counsellor of the Maori people in the affairs of this life and the next, all through the fifties advocated closer attention to the rotation of crops. It was even so bold as to hint that the sums so eagerly spent on mills might better have been used in getting practical instruction in 'farming, rotation of crops, importance of grass and fallowing, draining and irrigation.' Again the natives were admonished for insufficiently manuring their ground. But when the Maori people had only just realised and adopted the routine of European farming, it was hardly to be expected that soil management would be immediately undertaken.
The flourishing of Maori farming in the forties and fifties had in it the seeds of the salvation of the race. The break-up of the tribe as the unit of social life under the pressure of European individualism was postponed by the new unity imposed by communal farming effort. The New Zealander in 1856 referred appreciatively to the Maoris as 'landholders, farmers, graziers, seamen, shipowners, labourers and artizans'. It is plain that the principal benefit to them of this early success as farmers was to give the Maori people a secure place in the new society the white man was acclimatising in New Zealand, a place not of inferiority, but of partnership and self-respect.
2Early Settlement and Farming
Farming by Europeans in New Zealand before 1840 did not have any important effect on farming practice in succeeding years except through its influence on Maori agriculture. The missionaries, although they avowed the intention of instructing the Maoris in the arts of civilisation, were not themselves masters of the arts they taught—not at least of the art of farming. As farmers on their own account —apart from whatever good they did merely by introducing new seeds, stock, or implements to the Maoris—their chief aim was subsistence. They had, on the one hand, too often run the risk of real starvation in the course of fifteen years' residence between 1815 and 1830 not to realise the necessity for having their own secure food supply. On the other hand their children (and many of them had large families) were growing up. There was no useful trade to which their sons could be apprenticed in remote New Zealand. Farming offered these young men the best chance of a living and a dignified profession.
Missionary farms were hardly of great importance until the eighteen-thirties, in spite of the crops of wheat already grown at Keri-Keri. In 1835 their new farm at Waimate was flourishing exceedingly, according to the testimony of Charles Darwin, who paid New Zealand a short Christmas visit on board H.M.S.Beagle. Darwin was delighted with the well-dressed fields of Waimate. 'On an adjoining slope fine crops of barley and wheat were standing in full ear; and in another part, fields of potatoes and clover. . . . there were large gardens, with every fruit and vegetable which England produces. . . .' The missionaries in fact were growing both asparagus and hops, both 'gorse for fences' and English oaks. Their threshing barn held a winnowing machine, and they maintained a blacksmith's forge. With an abundant supply of labour and Samuel Marsden in New South Wales eager to send them every sort of seed, implement, or stock, the policy forced upon them by sheer necessity (dignified by the name of 'self-reliance') had advanced beyond its first intentions. Moreover, the missionaries, as well as others, had discovered that cattle could pick up a living in the bush, though this method of depasturing stock had grave objections on more than one ground. The beasts died of eating tutu. If not in the constant charge of a Maori herdsman, they went wild in the forest. Lieutenant McDonnell, on the Hokianga river in the eighteen-thirties, said he owned 300 'wild' cattle and twenty 'tame'. Trees like the karaka provided some sort of feed, however, as the Wellington colonists were to discover thankfully a few years later. Captain W. B. Rhodes had cattle running on the heavily bushed Banks Peninsula in the late eighteen-thirties and had stocked Kapiti island. In 1838 and probably earlier wool had been sent to Sydney from missionary farms and also from Bell's flock on Mana island, stocked in 1832 and for a variety of reasons a precarious venture. One reason was that Te Rangihaeata, who lived there, sometimes graced his feasts with the white man's mutton. The wool from New Zealand was well thought of in Sydney. Possibly it helped to precipitate the frenzied land-buying of the late eighteen-thirties, when speculators were so convinced of the eligibility of the islands of New Zealand for agriculture that by 1840 they had bought, in a number of dubious bargains with sharp-witted Maori chiefs, more land than the country was estimated to contain.
In 1839, however, there was still a vast acreage left for Colonel William Wakefield to buy on behalf of the New Zealand Company. The systematic settlement of New Zealand, a process already begun haphazardly by a growing tribe of traders and adventurers, must in the first instance be credited to the Company. The Company, dominated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield at least in the early phase, had for three years before 1840 conducted a vigorous propaganda in favour of New Zealand as a field for British colonisation. Consistently optimistic, incorrigibly exuberant, possessed, they felt, of a sort of magic formula which would at once turn the wilderness into a blossoming garden, the Company propagandists did at least advertise the country of their-choice. Their crime was their substantial ignorance of New Zealand conditions. That New Zealand was in fact the country perhaps best suited to farming among all the remaining uncivilised corners of the globe was a lucky accident for which the Company, with all its divine prescience, could hardly take credit. The Company's achievement was that it did induce a number of men and women of the best quality England had to offer to break with their homes and cross the world to settle in New Zealand.
The Company sent out its first emigrants in 1839 (they reached Port Nicholson in 1840) without having made any decision as to where they were to settle, although it did at least decide in advance that the settlement would not be located on the only land it then possessed in New Zealand, the property at Hokianga and Kaipara bought from Lieutenant McDonnell and the land, also in the north, acquired from the first (or 1825) New Zealand Company. If Colonel Wakefield, sent on ahead in the Tory, had failed to make a satisfactory purchase from the Maori chiefs, the four shiploads of emigrants would not have had a place to lay their heads, let alone land to farm. Many of the settlers' troubles in the decade after 1840were in fact due to the shaky title created by this initial irresponsibility and to the fact that no settlement had enough land to carry out the prearranged allocation of sections. The Company's emigrants were the real pioneers of white settlement in New Zealand. They came to farm. They were carefully chosen. The Company had sound ideas, on paper. It wanted to plant communities and to avoid the mistake made in some of the Australian colonies of scattering a few settlers over a vast area in which they lost all the amenities of living together and gained nothing but a precarious self-sufficiency. The Company settlements were meant to be compact towns surrounded by rural lands owned by the citizens, for the Company definitely designed to bring two main classes to New Zealand—capitalists and labourers. Partly to this end a fairly high price was charged for land and some of the funds were used to help immigration.
The Company settlers cannot be seen in proper perspective without some scrutiny of their origins, and of the forces winch induced them to seek a new home at the ends of the earth. The capitalists (for it is convenient to see the settlers through the eyes of the New Zealand Company) were men of good middle-class position, many of them retired from the army or navy. Most of them had spent the greater part of their capital when they bought their land-orders from the Company. A Port Nicholson landorder for £100 gave its owner a section of one acre in the new city and 100 acres of rural land, and also entitle to a first-class passage, valued at £75. For Nelson and New Plymouth there were similar, though not identical, provisions. The labourers or 'emigrants', as they were called, might be brought to New Zealand by the Company or by the capitalists, for a capitalist who had not exhausted the credit towards passages created by the land-orders he had bought in bringing out his own family, might use the balance to bring out labourers. All these people, whether nominated by the capitalists or the Company, were carefully chosen—indeed the standard set was so high it seriously embarrassed the Company's agents in their task of recruiting. It was the general intention of the Company to bring agricultural labourers, but artisans of every sort might go. Although it was not until Canterbury was settled that there was expressly formulated the often quoted idea that the new settlement should transplant a 'vertical cross-section' of the England it had sprung from, it was an idea implicit in the earlier phase of colonisation.
Most of the capitalists were men who would normally have gone into the professions; a minority had already had actual experience of farming. They preferred and intended to rely on the labourers to start their farms. One of the Nelson settlers, Constantine Augustus Dillon, a retired army officer, wrote home proudly in 1844, some eighteen months after his arrival: 'I am beginning to learn my trade of farmer and can do most things myself, such as ploughing, milking, looking after stock and so forth'. The main reasons that would induce such men to emigrate were ambition and a love of adventure. They expected to make their fortunes through the rise in the value of land following colonisation, a pernicious tradition that still clings to this country after one hundred years. Some had a real desire to farm for the sake of developing untrammelled a fertile, new country. Many were political liberals, filled with mercantile pugnacity, inclined to radicalism in politics, though not in economics. Most could have made a living at home if they had been prepared to sacrifice their social pretensions, though England was in 1840 suffering from a surplus of men and of money that it was thought could be remedied only by emigration.
As with their social and economic superiors, the pressure on the labourers who did emigrate was not so much the direct pressure of want as the general lack of opportunity for personal advancement. The average labourer who came up to the high standards demanded by the New Zealand Company was at the top of the working-class scale: he was not the dregs of the newly impoverished peasantry. Cobbett had written in 1830 that it was the 'sensible fellows', often with some small capital, who were emigrating. But what was the economic storm from which both capitalists and working men were fleeing for shelter to the unknown hazards of a scantily explored country at the furthest end of the earth?
By 1840 England had gone through two revolutions. The first and best-known was the 'Industrial Revolution'. But if England was to feed its rising population in the new industrial towns there had also to be an Agricultural Revolution. Great advances in the technique of agriculture had been made during the later eighteenth century. These, combined with the expansion of the internal market, gave a new impetus to agricultural development. An indispensable condition for this advance was the enclosure of the remaining open fields, representing the survival of the methods of cultivation practised in the middle ages, and the commons. The process of enclosure had been going on gradually for centuries. It was not a new idea. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was a new incentive to enclose: the inefficiency of the old agricultural methods that could not be altered so long as the fields were open, open to other men's stock, open to the weeds in other men's cultivations, open to every sort of trespass, flooding, or contamination. Though enclosure, a troublesome and expensive legal process, was inevitable, the manner in which it was carried out over the greater part of the still unenclosed tracts in the Midlands quite ignored the welfare of the peasantry. Cottagers in the unenclosed villages had the right to use the common to pasture their stock. Generally there was no limit to the number of stock any one person with common rights might run—a fruitful source of abuses, of which the least was overstocking. The process of enclosure evicted the small man from these common rights without compensation. Thus the average cottager throughout the greater part of England had been gradually, but surely, deprived of his two main sources of livelihood: the Industrial Revolution had taken industry out of the hands of the cottage pieceworker; enclosures took away his small-holding rights. The social consequences of enclosure were deplorable—rural depopulation, the pauperising of millions, and the closing of the land to countrymen whose life had been farming for centuries.
The agricultural revolution itself has a direct bearing on the settlers of 1840, for New Zealand was colonised after its first phase had been accomplished. Improvement in agricultural technique had gone about as far as it could go by empirical methods, and the next advances had to wait on the chemist and the biologist. In 1840 it was a hundred years since the death of Jethro Tull who invented the seed-drill and studied the problems of plant growth. To farming he left the drill, greatly economising seed, and the working of the soil about the roots of growing crops, which the drill made possible. He was the first man to use a horse-drawn hoe. He discovered incidentally that husbandry with drill and hoe was a substitute 'not only for fallows, but for farmyard dung,' which he dreaded as a weed-carrier. In the seventeen-thirties Lord Townshend formulated the famous Norfolk four-course rotation of crops. This rotation made new use of turnips and clover, saved the necessity of fallowing, and increased the number of stock that could be carried through the winter. Then Robert Bakewell in the seventeen-sixties revolutionised the breeding of stock. He was the first to adopt the principle of breeding 'in-and-in' to increase the qualities he wished to perpetuate in his animals. Before Bakewell began his experiments neither sheep nor cattle were bred for meat in England. Sheep were valued for their wool and as a source of manure. Cattle were valued for their milk-producing qualities or their power to draw the plough. Bakewell's New Leicesters were compact in form, small in bone, fattening readily, and maturing early. His Craven Longhorn cattle were well-bred for beef, but lost in milking capacity, later being superseded generally by the Durham Shorthorns. But Bakewell had linked both sheep and cattle to the new needs of a growing urban population. Most important of all, he had shown the way to breed for definitely desired qualities. The changes he introduced into sheep-breeding had another effect on the destinies of New Zealand. The half-starved sheep of the English commons grew a light fine fleece, but Bakewell's heavier, better nourished animals had a longer and coarser fleece. This, combined with the growing fashion for finer cloths, provided an opportunity for the fine wools of the Pacific colonies. (Samuel Marsden already had his merino flock in New South Wales.) The improvements in breeding and in methods of cultivation were reduced to a routine by Thomas Coke of Norfolk, like Townshend a great landowner. Coke's part in the agricultural revolution was to draw together and put into common practice all that anyone before him had achieved.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century farming was a fashion with English noblemen and statesmen. Burke and Fox dabbled in it. George III had his merino flock at Windsor and busied himself with agriculture more enthusiastically than with matters of state. Coke, a practical propagandist where the traveller, Arthur Young, was merely a journalistic propagandist, was from 1778 to 1842 the acknowledged leader in the new agriculture. How far he had converted all his contemporaries by 1840 is problematical. He himself complained that his improvements travelled at the rate of a mile a year. In spite of the use he made of such manures as bones, his introduction of better grass seed, his mixing of soils, his pioneering of oil-cake and the new spirit of co-operation with their tenants which he inaugurated among English landlords, there were still men in the England of 1840 farming substantially as their ancestors had done since the thirteenth century. Ploughs, drills, and harrows depended still on the talents of the local blacksmith. Wheat was still being harvested with sickle or scythe, though a crude threshing machine had begun to be used. A mechanical reaper was invented in 1828, but Cyrus McCormick in America did not market his improved reaper until 1851. Bullocks still drew the plough, as they frequently did for two decades more in New Zealand. The English roads were so bad in most districts that the lack of them in New Zealand cannot have been either a great surprise or an unusual inconvenience to travellers in early New Zealand.
It is appropriate to consider how far the New Zealand Company settlers had available to them the basic necessities for successful farming. The basic necessities may be crudely defined as access to land, with security of tenure implicit, a reasonably realistic technique, an assured market, and energy and initiative. It is customary to credit the pioneers with the last-mentioned qualities almost by definition. This is perhaps due to the habit of contemplating exclusively the successful examples. It is, however, well to remember, if mildly treasonable, that the first twenty years of farming in New Zealand were a time of experiment, that there were conspicuous failures, and that occasionally failure was due to lack of energy as much as to mistaken judgment.
In regard to access to land it would appear that the first New Zealand settlers had ideal conditions. There was any amount of good land, uncultivated and awaiting their efforts: but this land belonged to Maori tribes, whose rights were jealously guarded by the Treaty of Waitangi itself. The New Zealand Company had made extensive purchases, but the Land Claims Commissioner reduced the 20,000,000 acres it claimed to 283,000. The government was definitely hostile to the Company in the earliest phase of New Zealand's history and did nothing to help it in its difficulties. The disastrous effect of the Company's failure to give possession of their promised sections to its settlers (a failure partly due to delays in survey) are described by many writers, but perhaps no account is so clear and damning as Thomson's picture of the country in 1842 in his The Story of New Zealand: 'At Wellington, Wanganui, New Plymouth and Nelson, the settlers were living on their own resources, from not having got possession of their lands; some were frittering away their lives in idle pastimes, while torpor and drinking had taken possession of a few. There was little land under cultivation, farming implements were rusting for want of use, and money was spent in purchasing what labour should have supplied.' Possibly the settlers could have done more for themselves. Some did. Young William Deans paid his way cultivating some leased land on the shores of Port Nicholson, before, with his younger brother John, who had found Nelson wanting, he sought pastures new on the Canterbury Plains. But there is a sharp contrast between the high hopes of the emigrants and the reality. Even for those who had possession of their land, security of tenure was only comparative. The troubles with the natives during the forties created uneasiness and for a time paralysed Wanganui and Wellington. On the other hand it was by no means a novelty to most settlers to defend their title to land by process of law or to acquire land by legislative devices: in the fullness of time some groups of colonists legislated themselves into wide acres and so recouped the disappointments of the early years.
New Zealand at least was free of the vexatious burdens upon agriculture which were to prove so especially burdensome to the English farmer during the nineteenth century. In England the Poor Law rates and Tithe (which, though supporting the Church of England, fell upon all denominations alike), the incidence of taxation, and the legal difficulties of large owners were a heavy load for farming to carry through good times and bad. The Game Laws annoyed both the tenant farmer and the poor labourer who so frequendy risked dire penalties to increase his food supply by poaching. To the liberals of 1840 New Zealand must have seemed gloriously free of the weight of custom and oppression.
The New Zealand settlers, one must suppose, would be well informed in matters of farming technique, and here the inexperience of many of them would not be a disadvantage in view of the intense conservatism of many professional English farmers. The implements they brought, purchased from metropolitan manufacturers rather than from local blacksmiths, would be the latest on sale. In one respect, however, they were ill-equipped: they had come with the intention of engaging in arable farming, without consideration of whether this was suitable to New Zealand conditions. Here the Company had really very little certain information for them. It was impossible to forecast an agricultural economy for a country till then known only for its exports of timber, flax, and whale-oil. The arable farming of the early settlers, like that of the England they had left, made wheat the pivotal crop. To-day, in both England and New Zealand, milk production receives the emphasis once given to wheat. The first ships brought few animals—valuable horses, rams, and bulls rather than stock for general use. New Zealand was in fact largely stocked from New South Wales, a country that for some years was more important as a source of supply than as a market for New Zealand produce. Markets had to wait on the general development of agriculture on which the prosperity even of the towns depended.
It was probably inevitable that a pioneer community would go through a stage of dependence on food imports and food produced by the natives before its own agriculture had had time to develop. In part the farmer produces what he can of any nation's food supply; in part he produces what the nation demands of him. Although he exists to supply a demand, the means at his disposal alone make possible how far the demand will be supplied. Pork and potatoes had been the monotonous diet of the white settlers of the eighteen-thirties. This diet survived well into the next decade as the sheet anchor of many households. Pork and potatoes had not kept either the Maoris or the missionaries from near-starvation. Pork and potatoes were the staple food of Ireland, a country notorious for its famines. (Florence Nightingale, writing to Sir George Grey in 1863, accused the pig of being 'of all animals, the decivilizer'.) Wheat was evidently the crop needed to balance young New Zealand's domestic economy. But it was not the easiest means of producing an immediate improvement. For that the settlers had to pay greater attention to their stock, particularly to the milk supply for food and to wool for a marketable export.
The character as well as the capital of the early settlers decreed that their society was to be more complex than a series of simply self-sufficient farming communities. The export of produce was a necessity both temperamentally and financially. Many, of course, made their own way, self-reliant and self-denying. Typical of the self-sufficient farmer, free of banks, polite friends, government, Maoris, and Company, was the establishment of the Sinclair family at Pigeon Bay, Banks Peninsula. Like William and John Deans on the Plains and their neighbours, the Hays, the Sinclairs had been inveigled to Port Nicholson by the alluring prospects held out by the New Zealand Company. All three families elected in 1843 to seek their own fortunes independently in the South Island. In 1844Edward Shortland, travelling through the South Island on government business, commented on the easy and contented household of the Sinclairs, where everything was made at home, even the family's shoes. The Hays too were well established. They had eighteen cattle running loose in the bush, including nine cows which gave twenty-five to thirty pounds of butter a week. Gebbie and Manson, employees of the brothers Deans, set up for themselves in 1845 at Teddington; they also were dairy farmers. What produce could not be sold to the whalers of the Peninsula was sent to Wellington by coastal schooners. Gebbie, who had landed in New Zealand without a penny, was worth more than £1,000 when he died in 1851, in spite of a serious loss in a wreck, so that it looks as if the successful self-reliant farmer could make the best of both worlds in early New Zealand. It is significant that the Banks Peninsula independents all kept cows.
Similar success attended independent farmers in early Otago. John Jones, an Australian whaler-merchant, who had long been familiar with the New Zealand coasts, established a considerable settlement near Waikouaiti in 1840, and by 1844 the surveyor Tuckett reported that he had there one hundred horses, two hundred cattle, and 2,000 sheep. Jones did not farm in person and was not at first even resident at this establishment. But he was the driving force, both managerial and financial, which ensured its success. When the Otago colonists arrived in 1848, Jones was able to supply them with fresh provisions from his cultivations and herds at Waikouaiti. Although he raised wheat crops, he practised a very balanced mixed farming from the first. Another forerunner of the Otago settlers was Archibald Anderson, like the Banks Peninsula and Canterbury pioneers a seceder from the Company settlement at Wellington. He made his home first at Waitati in 1845, farming with some thirty cows and 500 sheep. Native dogs soon obliged him to shift to what was afterwards Roslyn, where the Otago settlers found him. At Port Molyneux and also at the Bluff small settlements preceded the organised development of later years.
The more highly organised settlements, where much more depended on community as against individual success, went through some dismal days before they reached a degree of self-sufficiency in anyway comparable to that achieved by the Scots of Banks Peninsula. The first stock landed at New Plymouth were a few working bullocks, though later in the year sheep and seventy cattle were brought overland from Wellington. But the energies of the New Plymouth labourers had apparently been too closely engaged in cutting survey lines, for the harvest was a poor one. Without working cattle, the settlers had cropped only a small acreage, some of it infected with smut. At Nelson in the middle forties there was something approaching starvation among the labourers. They had been dependent on employment with the Company, for the abnormal proportion of absentee owners of Nelson land sections provided less than the designed amount of employment. When the Company stopped payment of wages and they had to shift for themselves, they had no land to fall back on, though twenty acre plots were lent to them to do what they could with. Seed potatoes were dug from the fields already in crop; native food like fern-root was tried. The capitalists, though they might have had enough to eat, were hardly prosperous, but they had cultivated some land. By 1844 Dillon had twenty acres in wheat, six in oats, eight in barley, and ten in potatoes, but he could employ four men on his farm and two indoor servants. His cattle ran wild and did for themselves, but this was a great waste of time and, he complained, their manure was lost. He had nine cows in milk and twelve working bullocks ready to sell. He was expecting 500 sheep from Australia. He could not recommend anyone coming out to New Zealand without capital. This was indeed a crucial problem. By the time they had spent two idle years without a return for their outlay on Company land-orders, many of the Wellington settlers were verging on bankruptcy. Besides, there had already been a minor land boom and a slump in values before any production to speak of had been begun.
The Company settlers had come out with the intention of engaging in arable farming, but it soon became apparent that they had an alternative—pastoral farming. It was the more wide awake who realised this fact ahead of their fellows, the men of capital to whom the New Zealand enterprise was a business proposition rather than a crusade, even as Gibbon Wakefield would have conceived a colonising crusade. In the Company settlements, hemmed in by the sea and the frontiers of still unextinguished Maori title, confined to an area much narrower than had ever been designed, there were lands that could be turned into farms, slowly and painfully with great labour and expense, while all around, outside the legal limits of these settlements, right at their back doors so to speak, were apparently unlimited expanses of natural pastures, pastures that could be grazed at once on payment of an almost derisive rental to a Maori chief. In the circumstances the choice between tillage and sheep and cattle farming must often have been dictated by the amount of capital in a man's hands. There was also the influence of temperament. Arable farming was considered a more certain profession, though one where the work was more constant and less agreeable than grazing stock on open pastures. But the grazier's pleasanter profession was liable to be adversely affected by fluctuations in prices and the competition of the older colonies in Australia, which could at any moment flood the market for stock in New Zealand.
Most of the land in the Company settlements was sold for £1 an acre (though this rose to £3 in the Canterbury settlement of 1850). This, the annual rental per acre of much farmland in England, seemed cheap enough, but there was still the expense of breaking it in, an item that a number of sanguine spirits had altogether overlooked. Land under heavy bush was the most expensive to bring into production. In the Hutt valley in 1844 felling, burning, and grubbing an acre was said to have cost £10, with another £5 in the second year, but Dillon had estimated £30 an acre as the cost of making the Nelson forest land ploughable. A later estimate was £60 an acre. Settlers were better advised to try fern land, which cost £6 an acre to break in, according to Dillon's estimate. Land growing flax was considered the best. The sterner critics of New Zealand farming declared that 'spade husbandry' was essential in conquering the waste and that land so cultivated was worth 'two of land scratched with the plough, for the operations of the plough in new land amount to little more than scratching.' If every acre had to be dug, the cost might well run to £30: even in a new country success had to be bought with both money and work.
There was still the cost of fencing. Though this was more elaborately conceived than to-day, it was relatively cheaper. An Auckland colonist of 1844 paid is 6d a perch for 'a ditch and bank, with a hurdle fence at the top. . . . The ditch is four feet wide at the top, nine inches at the bottom, and three and a half feet deep. Thus a farm twenty-eight chains long, and twenty chains wide, which would contain fifty-six acres, would cost, to fence in this way, £28 16s.' This is just over 10s an acre. Another Auckland colonist at the same date paid approximately £20 to fence thirty acres, style offence unspecified. Post and rail or a paling fence would be the minimum to content our ancestors, while many of them felt safer with a double ditch and a planted hedge on the bank in between.
Some Auckland colonists—and in Auckland in the forties land was generally also about £1 an acre when sold in small lots—claimed to have cleared on their first year's crops an amount greater than all expenses and the cost of the land and buildings. This could have been due only to unusual circumstances, for Australian and Maori competition in later years kept down the price of wheat. Moreover, these crops were not grown on stumped land, but on land previously used by Maoris to grow potatoes. The wheat had been 'chipped in', a process that in the Hutt valley cost 30s an acre. The plough was not put into the ground in Wellington until a year after settlement had begun. Nelson witnessed this exhilarating ceremony in 1842, when the Examiner recorded with sober gusto 'the first furrow in the Nelson settlement . . . was made on the acre purchased to be the site of the Bank'.
Although it was expensive to clear and crop new land in New Zealand, it was a process that favoured the small man. An experienced man could begin farming on ten acres with a capital of less than £100, while farming as an overseer rather than as an actual labourer on his own property was possible to a 'careful person' with only £300. A wooden house ('large enough for five or six people') could be put up in Nelson for £15, and in the warmer climate of Auckland a raupo hut would do, which cost about £3, even when it was embellished with sashes and a door on the European model. However, this type of farming did not give the quick returns that were being obtained by the pastoralists. The small acreages of nearly all the farms described in such settler's Baedekers as Jerningham Wakefield's Hand-book (1849) and Earp's New Zealand: Its Emigration and Gold Fields (1853), still reflect the small-farming mentality of the Company settlers.
The Wairarapa had first attracted the attention of the Wellington settlers bent on enlarged grazing activities. Clifford and Vavasour had taken sheep round the coast in 1844, and by 1847 there were fifteen sheep or cattle stations on the open natural pastures of this district, which was, of course, outside the boundaries of the Company settlement. Pharazyn, at Watarangi, a man who had previously tried both store-keeping and 'cultivation' at Wadestown, had an experience typical of these stations. The lack of fences was troublesome, although the grazing of cattle on native grasses and shrubs was the chief asset of the arrangement. Maori dogs were a source of loss, and in 1846 the dreaded scab first made its appearance,
But it was already known in Nelson:—'Uncle at my place scabbing sheep.' 18 June 1845, Ward diary.
the most considerable check to the prosperity of pastoral farming during the next thirty years. Scab could be discouraged by dipping in tobacco water, with spirits of tar added. Sheep cost £1 a hundred to shear. The wool had to go to Wellington in open boats from Palliser Bay. The fifteen Wairarapa 'squatters' (for here the word may be used in a literal sense), paid the Maoris £325 in rent for the grazing, in 1847, of 1,365 cattle, 13,011 sheep, and some seventy-three horses. Only twenty-five acres were under cultivation, to grow wheat and potatoes for the population of sixty odd. It is significant that names like Bidwill, Morrison, Barton, and Cameron, well known to-day in the Wairarapa, appear among the owners of the fifteen runs.
In 1847 two of the Wairarapa pastoralists, Clifford and Weld, began a station across the straits on the open tussock country near Cape Campbell. Soon there were 12,000 sheep in the South Island owned by Wellington settlers, in addition to the growing flocks of the Nelson men, who had been gradually filling up the Wairau during the forties, finding the Company's land far too narrow a bound to their ambitions. Pastoral farming had reached the status of a definite profession, and it is hardly a coincidence that the men who engaged in it were the top layer of the early colonists, the men of good family and education who afterwards took a prominent part in politics, both provincial and national. Wool was the only farming export of importance. In 1847 Nelson exported £80 worth of butter to £1,878 value of wool. Timber alone vied with wool as an export. Money invested in sheep 'doubles itself every third year.' Sheepfarm-ing, therefore, had the status of a business, while arable farming was still fumbling with the novelty of New Zealand conditions.
'The best interests of a farmer in a virgin soil,' wrote Earp, the guide and comforter, 'are comprised in one word—"experimentalize". Never mind one man's opinions, for no man has sufficient experience to form one worth hstening to.' The pastoralists had conducted a highly successful experiment. They had had capital and they had invested it in stock, not in land. The whole field of farming in New Zealand had to be tried out and the preconceptions of English practice accepted or rejected. The man new to farming would often do better than one with experience to unlearn. By the fifties the prospective immigrant was being advised not to bring out an elaborate armoury of agricultural machinery. The first settlers had imported 'half the patent implements of an agricultural show', only to leave them 'rotting on the beach'. A north-west gale was as good a winnowing machine 'as ever received the medal of the Royal Agricultural Society'. The first settlers certainly bought their experience in a costly school. They were, however, eager to carry out the precept to 'experimentalize'. Many of them planted linen flax. They tried different dates for lambing, from May to October, before they settled down to the later season. Their casualness on this point may, however, have been due to the difficulties of keeping rams and ewes separate on unfenced runs. The need to 'experimentalize' was accentuated by the marked differences of opinion among the colonists as to the best method of bringing the country into production. In Otago the News within a short time of the beginning of settlement repudiated the idea of agriculture altogether, advocating the development of pastoral farming as the only road to prosperity, an advocacy that so angered the citizens of Dunedin that the paper came to an end late in 1850 for lack of influential support.
The early settlers eagerly sought the best information available. They were equally eager to give it, as the number of books dealing with what a settler should know and do may testify. At quite early dates in their history the main settlements held agricultural shows or founded agricultural societies. As early as 1843 an Auckland society was in existence, advising its members to grow barley for export, to fatten cattle, and establish dairies. In 1844 a Nelson Agricultural and Horticultural Exhibition was held, prizes being offered in a variety of classes. A ploughing match was decided at Waimea in 1843 that induced the competition of eleven ploughs, seven with bullock teams, four horse-drawn. Prizes for agricultural exhibits in that year were awarded for the usual classes, sacks of wheat, sainfoin, vetch and ryegrass seed, turnips, rams and bulls, and—sinister portent—a pair of rabbits. The latter was certainly not a profitable line with which to 'experimentalize'. Thus at the earliest date it was the habit of the New Zealand farmer to learn from his neighbours, or if he could not do that, at least to exhibit his own achievements in competition with his fellows, a fashion fairly new in England itself.
If one considers how far the New Zealand of the forties and fifties had the minimum requirements for success in farming, there are a number of paradoxes to note. There was access to land for arable farming, but not to as much as the settlers wished. Access to land for grazing purposes had been gained simply by stepping round the formal difficulties. Since the graziers had their capital locked up in their stock, the insecurity of their tenure of their lands was not as great a worry as it would have been to a Company settler waiting perhaps twelve years to get a title to his land. Francis Fuller, in his New Zealand reminiscences published in 1859, suggested to the pastoralist who wished to control 20,000 acres for the purchase price of 5,000 acres the systematic 'spoiling' of the pasturage for anyone else by freeholding streams and other strategic areas. This may be taken as already current practice for the large sheepowner, whose problem of security of tenure during the first forty or more years of our history was to get legal possession, or at least effective possession, of land he already used. The conflict between the interests of graziers and small arable farmers was to be one of the main themes of political difference in later years.
The technique the settlers had brought from England, in spite of the fact that the England of 1840 led the world in agricultural skill, had to be modified in the new country. The chief modification was, of course, the development of a type of grazing farming more akin to the nomadic habits of the Bedouin than to keeping stock in the enclosed fields of England. Breeds of stock too were modified. The favourite sheep was the merino, brought to Australia from Saxony where it had been taken from its Spanish home. But in New Zealand the merino was crossed, three-quarters to one-quarter, with Southdown for increased size, greater hardihood, and 'a tendency to produce more twins'. It had been proved by experiment that the Scotch plough, with the 'foot of the plough, on which the share is fitted, made in a separate bar of iron', was the most practical. Wrought iron was generally preferable to cast in any case in view of the difficulty of making replacements, and a wooden plough was best for the first ploughing of new land for the benefit of its greater weight. Many other discoveries were made by the early settlers in the school of experience.
Markets were never very sympathetic to the early settler selling anything other than wool. Wool, being valuable for its bulk at is 6d or more a pound, could be raised in remote districts and show a profit after fairly long carriage by bullock dray to a port. Arable farming could be carried on only close to a town and port. So many competitors in the same lines—wheat, barley, and butcher's meat—would keep prices low. Meat was always liable to be undercut by salted beef from Australia, while local butter in the forties had to compete with the 'dumping' of butter that arrived salted in kegs all the way from Ireland. In two years the price of butter in Nelson sank from 2s 3d a pound to 9d. The internal market had to wait for the discovery of gold to reach a really economic condition.
The energy and initiative of the early settlers was shown most clearly in their adaptability, a by no means universal quality. The grazier had shown conspicuous courage and business acumen. The small farmer could break in forest or fern with a good deal of spirit, though there were not wanting grudging critics to point out how uneconomic this process might be. The colonial environment encouraged experiment, though some experiments might prove expensive: the large herds of goats owned by some early settlements—5,553 in Nelson in 1849—might be reckoned among these.
Socially farmers had in these first two decades of our country's history become divided into two sharply contrasted classes. The grazier was a man of capital, engaged in a profitable business, a business that provided him with an agreeable and adventurous mode of life if he wished it, but which equally provided him with the means of living in a town and of enjoying the amenities of its colonial society. The arable farmer, though he might, like William and John Deans in Canterbury, branch out into pastoral farming, was generally closer to the soil. Farming was his whole life. Often he was a labourer with a small section, still working for wages while he established his own farm. He aimed at a modest independence, at self-sufficiency and a little over. The future was his, for 'workmen cannot be considered unimportant personages in a new country'. The present, however, was full of struggle and uncertainty.
3Gold, Wool, And Wheat
The First Settlers had grappled with their environment. They had tested their farming preconceptions. They had attempted first, with equal energy and impotence, to tame the vast forests of the North Island. They had, almost reluctantly, turned their attention to the native pastures of the South Island, as a source of immediate income. Their first use of native pastures had been to run cattle, although they very soon saw the superior suitability of sheep. The whole of Canterbury had been taken up by 1858, the Wairarapa had been occupied and flockowners had begun to penetrate into Hawke's Bay. These areas, with the tussock lands of the Marlborough coast and North Canterbury, provided a natural pasture for sheep. It cannot be supposed that they were fully in use or even partially stocked until the sixties, but the scene had been set for the main lines of farming development during thirty more years.
The settlers did not yet have the security of tenure they wished. By a curious paradox the small farmer bent on subsistence was at last provided with facilities to get title to his land just at that moment when his type of farming was shown to be the most slowly remunerative. For the new fashion—the new necessity it would be better to say—was for running sheep for the sake of their wool, and this required vastly greater areas. At this stage in the country's development it would have been nearly impossible to make a profit out of grazing sheep if the land this required had had to be freeholded at the high prices still being demanded in most of the South Island. The pastoral lease got over this difficulty. But it did not give real security of tenure. The leasehold regulations made life precarious for the sheepfarmer, and put him on the defensive just at the time when he had become the economic backbone of the young nation. The regulations were framed with a view to allowing intensive cultivation ('farming as we do in England', as Samuel Butler aptly called it) to take precedence of pastoral farming. There was an intense suspicion of the aggregation of large estates, coupled with the still unextinguished Company notion that compact settlements promoted human welfare more readily than widely dispersed homesteads. Consequently the sheepfarmer might be turned off his holding by anyone with the cash to buy his land over his head. But there was a wide gulf fixed between the spirit of the leasehold system and its working in practice. The provincial councils, created in 1853, came to a gentleman's agreement with the central government, when it acquired full responsibility in 1856, to keep the disposal of their own lands in their own hands. This arrangement favoured the keeping of their stations by flockowners who, being the best educated, wealthiest, and most politically experienced section of the community, were the moving force in provincial politics. The aggregation of land in the hands of a few took place in spite of the regulations. The insecurity of their tenure led the squatters—for so the owners of large flocks were rather indiscriminately labelled—into legal subterfuges to which they would hardly have had to stoop if it had been realised by the founders of the colony that pastoral farming was to be for at least two decades the mainstay. They acted in self-defence, and their occupation of great territories did not become socially or morally unjustifiable until the expansion of population, wealth, and farming possibilities following on the introduction of refrigeration. The squatters have always had rather a bad press among economic historians of New Zealand. Their practices of spotting, gridironing
Spotting was the purchase on a block of leasehold land of the best sites for a homestead and other particularly important areas—on the boundaries and the beds of streams. Gridironing was the purchase of land in strips, so that access was blocked to the areas inside, or in Canterbury along a road to leave areas of nineteen and a half acres, just below the minimum of twenty acres that could be taken up by any settler.
, and securing pre-emptive rights over large areas by means of cheap and strategically placed 'improvements' seem to put them hopelessly in the wrong.
Yet in their hey-day they were obliged to have the control of large areas to carry on the one mode of farming that could pay its way. The second generation of large graziers rarely inherited either the charm or the education of their fathers, but at least they produced an increasing quantity of wool.
Two series of events revolutionised the market for farming produce in New Zealand and profoundly altered the whole economic structure of the country. One was the discovery of gold in Otago in 1861. The other was the later Maori wars which broke out at the end of 1859, and made the North Island a backward area for farming or settlement for more than ten years. In any case the great North Island forests were a severe obstacle to farming development.
The discovery of gold in Australia in the fifties had had some temporary effect on the New Zealand market. It had created a demand for flour, which the Maori farmer was better able to satisfy than the white man, and had kept up the price of stock. Preceded by other unimportant local discoveries, the Otago finds of the early sixties brought in a valuable addition to the population. In 1860 the European population of New Zealand was 60,000, which had risen to over 200,000 by 1868, the bulk of this increase going to the South Island, because the North was hampered in its development by the insecurity caused by the Maori wars, in the provinces of Auckland and Taranaki especially. This increase in population can only be attributed to gold—first, to the desire to find it; second, to the rise in prosperity brought about by its being found. Few grew rich from what they could win by crude alluvial mining methods; but the sum of many petty winnings gave the country new purchasing power abroad. Then local farmers were obviously given a much better market for all their produce—except wool, which was in any case marketed overseas. The wars themselves undid some of the harm they had wreaked on the hapless northern settler by providing him with an enlarged market. In fact, the British army officers engaged in the campaigns (the British troops were withdrawn gradually after the subjugation of the Waikato) were wont to accuse the colonists of prolonging the wars for the sake of their own pockets. Certainly the market for fat stock was vastly improved by army purchases. The northern settlers benefited in another way. The destruction of the military power of the Maoris meant their elimination as competitors in food production, a result partly due to the voluntary retirement of the Maoris after the wars.
The South Island, given a lead in population by gold, held it by reason of its greater production of the most valuable item of primary produce in the middle years of the nineteenth century, wool. Fortunately the whole phase of farming centred on wool production is well documented in the writings of men who led their contemporaries in this field. Frederick Weld, a premier of New Zealand and later a governor of several British colonies, was a pioneer in grazing sheep on the natural pasture of the Wairarapa and then of the South Island. In 1851 he published a pamphlet of 'hints to intending sheepfarmers' and re-issued it with very little alteration in 1860. Perhaps the chief interest of these pamphlets is the rigidity of Weld's opinions. In 1851 he believed the merino the best possible sheep for New Zealand conditions, and in 1860 he still upheld the pure merino against crossing it, as most of his contemporaries were coming round to doing, with 'the heavier breeds of sheep'. If a change was desired, try the Cheviot, he said. The merino, tricky to acclimatise, timid, and a bad mother, was a sheep for wool only. But even though Weld's mind ran on wool alone, he seemed here to be going against his own fundamental principle, 'adapt your sheep in any country to the peculiarities of that country.' Weld still clung to autumn lambing in 1860, because it interfered less with the best dates for shearing. In 1851 he could not advise anyone to risk more than £2,500 in a sheep station, but in 1860 a man should be prepared to spend £5,000. There is some slight hint that he realised times were changing, when in 1860 he advised the small capitalist to put his £2,000 into buying a few hundred acres of good land near a settlement and grassing it, the best of this land then carrying eight sheep to the acre. In the earlier pamphlet he disapproves of a mixed station —sheep and cattle together on the same run. There are at least hints in these pamphlets that the men who had pioneered sheep farming in New Zealand, cutting clean across the small-farming ideas of the Company settlers with great originality and acumen, were themselves becoming conservative in defence of the methods they had so successfully developed.
Samuel Butler, one of the most interesting personalities among the early settlers in Canterbury and perhaps the foremost man of letters to have lived in this country, wrote a highly interesting account of his experiences, A First Year in Canterbury Settlement. As this was written in the first two years of his five years' residence, it obviously embodied the ideas current among Butler's contemporaries rather than the fruits of his own experience. One of his first dicta was 'As for farming as we do in England, it is universally maintained that it does not pay.' He then qualified this by adding that it might perhaps pay a 'bona fide labouring man'. Moreover, laying down a farm in English grass might create a 'permanent estate' for anyone with experience. His first impressions of sheepfarming were the possibilities for profit, even with very little experience, for sheep could always be let out 'on terms'. This usurious arrangement could only have been entered into in an understocked country on a rising market. Ewes were lent to a station owner for a set term in return for 2s 6d a head annually on account of their wool. Then at the end of the term the sheep were returned with half the increase throughout the period, no deduction being made for losses from any cause. Even if one bought the goodwill of a run, and worked it in person, it would still be possible in a few years to enjoy an income of £2,000 a year for an investment of about £6,000. With these rewards in prospect it was understandable that all the land in Canterbury had been taken up by 1858; Butler made a number of exploratory rides up the great river valleys piercing the high country without finding any land worth taking up before he installed himself at Mesopotamia on the Rangitata by purchase. The cost of buying the goodwill of a leasehold run then ranged between £100 and £150 per thousand acres.
By 1860 when Samuel Butler began at Mesopotamia, sheepfarming had been reduced to a regular routine, a routine closer to the management of high country stations to-day than to our practice on better-class country. His account, those of Weld, and a number of other records, like surviving station diaries, enable a composite picture to be built up. To begin with boundaries had to be kept. The only fenced areas besides vegetable gardens and some acres of oats or hay were a few acres round the homestead for convenience in keeping within bounds their horses and — in the more advanced instances — a cow in milk. The best boundary was a natural one, a river or a range of craggy or snowy mountains. Otherwise one had to install a boundary dog, the wretched beast being tied up in a strategic position to bark the sheep back into their own run. Or on a big station the boundary might be patrolled by a shepherd with a hut of his own. But a good deal of time had to be spent in simply watching the sheep to see they did not get off the owner's vast and perhaps vaguely defined territory. Samuel Butler recommended that the sheep should 'always have peace on their own run, and none anywhere off it', then they would soon learn the boundaries. But when a south-west gale swept the island merinos would simply run before it, even deserting their lambs.
Though fencing was largely dispensed with, until the middle sixties, when wire began to work its revolution, there was probably more actual work on a sheep station of those times than to-day. On a well-run place like George Duppa's St Leonards, North Canterbury, in the fifties and sixties, the year was crammed with activity, beginning with burning off in February and March. The station diary, which comes down to us, relates this in detail. The flock was dipped, an operation that involved considerable haulage of the wood used to heat the witch's potion of tobacco and sulphur or spirits of tar that was supposed to be sovereign for the dreaded scab. Such fencing as was undertaken was a heavy job, whether it was the favourite ditch and bank surmounted by a live hedge (probably gorse!) or wooden post and rail. Ground had to be ploughed for the most important crop, tobacco. (This was to a great extent raised by station owners themselves to reduce the cost of the universal preventive treatment for scab.) Sheep that actually were seen to have scab were drafted out, carefully treated, the spots scarified, and then rubbed with spirits of tar. Housing, on most stations a backward department, was a task to fall back on when all else failed. The first sod or lightly thatched huts were, as the years passed, replaced by neat cob, to give place in their turn to the weather-board houses of the era of greater permanence in the last two decades of the century. These cob huts were cheap and cosy and many still remain standing to remind us of the days when the mere waterproofness of corrugated iron had not superseded the adventurous uncertainty of raupo or toe-toe thatch. On a station in a high wind the roof might very easily disappear, being 'in a measure' blown off, or there might be a call for emergency effort propping up the woolshed 'which is leaning over very much'. Both of these domestic crises occurred in one October at St Leonards. In those days of bullock drays and negligible roads a tremendous proportion of the time of the station manager and employees would be spent in transport, inwards of stores and outwards of wool and skins. The bullock team rarely moved more than twenty miles a day. It was the stock joke and the stock exasperation for the bullocks to escape from wherever the party camped at night. It was difficult to keep the bullocks yarded every night when they had to feed themselves on the landscape, and once a bullock was set loose on the unfenced plains it was natural for it to seek to browse the best pasture and to give free scope to its well-developed homing instinct. Bullocks might take days to recapture. In addition to the transport between the station and the outside world, on the station itself there was a great deal of haulage to be done of firewood, stores to outstations (shepherds' establishments) and building materials like raupo for thatching. The shepherds had to be constantly round the flocks, trying to strike the golden mean between not disturbing the sensitive merinos and keeping the main mob in sight lest it stray over the boundary or be attacked by wild dogs, against which a constant vigilance was needed, supplemented by an occasional special hunt.
Many of the problems of this sheepfarming were peculiar to that time and place. Scab, the grand enemy of the runholders, was known in the Wairarapa in 1846, but it was said to have travelled to Canterbury and Otago from Nelson. Naturally it would spread easily when sheep had to be driven through the unfenced runs, a travelling mob carrying or receiving infection wherever it passed. Thus it was an advantage to have a run far back: it was less likely to be on the way to somewhere else and therefore less exposed to infection. Woolsheds at first were primitive stores, and it was some time before the idea developed of having a shed full of sheep waiting overnight for the next day's shearing. The slatted floor of the woolshed was in use at St Leonards in 1857. One wonders when it first became general. It was usual to shear the sheep on a tarpaulin or a special boarded floor, even in one instance on a treasured drawing-room carpet turned upside down. The dip was excavated near a stream, with a boarded watertight platform big enough to hold fifty sheep beside it, so arranged that drips from them would drain back into the trough of the dip after immersion. Sheep were dipped to clean their wool before shearing as well as to exorcise the scab. After being dipped the sheep were passed into the stream to be cleansed. According to R. M. Burdon, whose High Country is invaluable on so many points of detail, it was in the middle sixties that sheep began to be shorn in the grease, the wool being left to be scoured after it was off the sheep in preference to this habit of washing it while still on the sheep. The habit of winter lambing (or at times of all the year round lambing) kept down percentages, even though some careful station owners 'had the kitchen full of them' on bleak days in winter — a practice that survives, thanks to the rigours of the New Zealand spring. Enough has been written of the inconvenience of unfenced boundaries. It is well to mention, however, obvious though they may be, the benefits of the increase in fencing which galvanised wire made possible. Time was saved on chasing errant stock, and the scab, so virulent in the sixties and practically unknown by the nineties, owed its disappearance largely to fences keeping stock from contact with infection. Fences also reduced the number of employees needed on most stations. A station with fenced boundaries was far easier to muster. On some Otago stations the difficulties of mustering were so great that sheep frequently had a two years' fleece before they were shorn.
The land, even rough hill country, was greatly improved by being stocked. Once the runholder had celebrated his arrival on his large sector of the landscape by firing the tussock, the land could no longer be regarded as prairie. Successive burnings eliminated much of the matagouri, toe-toe, and tutu, but from a long-term point of view might, on hill country, do harm. Stock trampling the ground made spongy areas firmer and tended to eliminate swamps.
In the North Island on the fern uplands of Hawke's Bay, a harder task awaited the sheepfarmer attempting to improve natural pastures—or in this instance generally the lack of them. H. Guthrie-Smith has written an epic account of pasture management on his own Hawke's Bay country in his Tutira, albeit he is describing a period twenty or more years later than the days when Samuel Buder hobnobbed with over-educated shepherds in Canterbury and George Duppa turned from the cares of St Leonards to the training of his redoubtable racehorses. Guthrie-Smith summarises the condition of Tutira station in these words: 'On eighteen out of its twenty thousand acres, it is no exaggeration to say that the surface had to be stamped, jammed, hauled, murdered into grass. It was only the low price of sheep that made such procedure possible.' Fern was burnt off in the autumn, grass and clover seed scattered on the surface, and a big mob of sheep turned into the burned area to eat and trample the young fern fronds. 'Without a big mob, the bracken fronds uncurl and become uneatable; on ground too heavily stocked, sheep fall away in condition'. Some sophisticated or dainty sheep, of course, 'would starve rather than eat the fern fronds.' As the fern was beaten down, second growth manuka advanced on the paddock, but this was only part of a long cycle by which successive burnings and stocking produced at last a sward that would winter a satisfactory number of sheep, though Guthrie-Smith himself realised that this profitable condition was not necessarily stable. Many men might have been discouraged by his station as he came to it in the early eighteen-eighties—devoid of grass, the climate wet, access bad, and the soil poor, quite apart from its record in having bankrupted a series of sanguine owners. Stock losses were heavy. A quarter of the ewes were lamed by foot-rot. In the wild scrubby hills the wool under the sheep's belly was usually torn away and lost. It was only the indomitable spirit of its owner and the rise in prices following refrigeration that made Tutira in the end a successful station.
Guthrie-Smith considered New Zealand a good country for recovering from a stumble. 'In Hawke's Bay, at any rate, I can hardly think of a prominent settler of early times who has not been at one time or another on his last legs.' These men who won through should not blind us to the large number who went under for lack of skill, shrewdness, or luck. (Capital, luck, and cheek were one recipe for colonial success.) Samuel Butler and Weld both painted a favourable picture of the possibilities of the sheepfarming industry in 1860, but it was the sixties which were to be the testing time even of the Canterbury men whose seed had by no means fallen on stony ground. It is significant that many stations changed hands during the sixties. A number are held to-day by the descendants, not of their original owners—for that is something of a rarity—but of their managers and head shepherds. In the fifties and sixties scab had ruined many. The gold of the sixties had given a stimulus to prices, but this could not last indefinitely. Some sheepfarmers on the plains changed over to wheat and mixed farming. Those who still specialised in sheep were at the mercy of natural calamity like the great snow-storm that swept the South Island in 1867 (whose effects were vividly described by Lady Barker in one of her books). Sheep were often lost in large numbers in smothers. Then the runholder was continually under fire from the man who coveted his land, sometimes a genuine small farmer in search of a holding, sometimes a speculator cheerfully reversing the process begun by the runholders themselves of buying up the best parts of a leasehold run, which the speculator would willingly sell back to the leaseholder at an enhanced price. Then came the rabbits. Whatever the date
Nelson settlers liberated rabbits as early as 1845 on the evidence of these two August entries in the Ward diary:—25 'Uncle and Henry were gone to try to kill a rabbit at top of Dick's Valley'; 29 'Turned out 7 rabbits up Valley.'
they were introduced into the country, rumour accuses the gold-miners of Otago of deliberately spreading them, to have fresh meat about their camps. By the middle seventies Burdon records that they were already a menace. In 1873 he mentions an export of 3,000 rabbit skins, rising to about a million in 1877 and passing nine millions in 1882, with what result to the quality of the country's pastures one can imagine. The prodigious snowstorms of 1895 killed many sheep; but they did more than many years of human effort to cleanse the country of rabbits.
All this piling up of difficulty and disaster was coincident with a steady fall in the price of wool, touching bottom near the turn of the century. The increase in the number of flocks had long outstripped the demand for meat and had become a problem whose acuteness was relieved only by the introduction of refrigeration. It is small wonder then that there were casualties among the sheepfarmers. Holdings indeed tended to become larger and owners fewer, but often by loan companies taking over from the first owners. There is little doubt that it required great tenacity and considerable skill to weather these financial storms into the twentieth century. The most fortunate sheepfarmers were those who sold out on the crest of the boom in the sixties, like George Duppa—popularly reputed to be the first man to make a fortune in New Zealand—who retired to England in 1864 with the fruits of over twenty years' sheepfarming. Many, who might have imitated him, remained to lose nearly all they had gained.
By the eighteen-seventies sheepfarming methods had altered considerably. Areas like the Canterbury Plains that were capable of intensive cultivation were either grassed or devoted to wheat. On a grass farm it was possible, though not yet very profitable, to fatten stock and in any case to run a good number of sheep to the acre. As the owners of leasehold runs gradually freeholded their runs, they felt it worth while laying them down in grass. According to Condliffe, in 1858 there were about 140,000 acres of sown pastures in New Zealand; in 1881 there were over five million acres. The average weight of wool per sheep had about doubled in the same period, a fact that suggests a marked improvement in sheep nutrition.
There had been a great improvement too, or at least a great adaptation, of the breeds of sheep. Even the earliest sheepfarmers, in defiance of Weld's advice, had mixed some Southdown or Leicester blood with the merino, to produce a less nervous sheep, with firmer virtues as a mother and a higher value—when near enough to a town for this to matter—as meat. The same tendency of adaptation that produced the crossbred, produced the distinctive New Zealand breed, the Corriedale. This inbred half bred sheep was specially designed to stock the intermediate hill country, which was neither high enough for the merino nor as flat as the Plains where the merino was less suitable than the heavier English breeds. The breed takes its name from the property in North Otago on which James Little in 1866 first crossed Romney Marsh rams with merino ewes. James Little inbred the product of this cross. He was a shepherd on another man's station, and later this first Corriedale flock was dispersed. In 1878 at Annandale, North Canterbury, Little recommenced his experiments, substituting Lincolns and then English Leicesters for the Romney Marsh rams he had first used at Corriedale. In 1874W. S. Davidson had also experimented along the same lines at the Levels, South Canterbury. He crossed Lincoln rams with merino ewes, and inbred from their offspring. Other breeders developed the same idea, although it was not until the coming of refrigeration in 1882 that the advantages of the breed for mutton production were fully realised. The Corriedale to-day clips a heavy fleece. Its dual purpose qualities give it increas-ing popularity, shown by its export to most of the other sheep-breeding countries of the world.
In the Wairarapa, in Hawke's Bay, in Otago, and particularly in Canterbury there was a distinctive type of society associated with the pastoral industry which in many ways left a permanent mark on the New Zealand community. The men who took up the early sheep stations were often people of education, belonging to families of English country gentry, or at least to those connected with the services and the professions. In the early years these men did not hesitate to put up with extremely crude living conditions—the slab or cob hut thirty miles from a neighbour. Men reading Latin or Greek for pleasure lived the hard, self-sufficient life of the back country with gusto, still hoping great things for the future. Weld astutely remarked that a man needed 'resources in himself' for success at New Zealand sheepfarming, and advised his readers to keep up their hobbies and intellectual interests to offset the dreariness of the colonial environment. Lady Barker, author of two inimitable accounts of the life of the squatter in Canterbury in the sixties, advised the squatter's lady to cling to the elegancies of life in the wilds. Lady Barker's own experience is evidence of a certain decline from the Homeric simplicity of the male establishment when a wife and family were added to it. She lived in a house, pre-built in Christchurch and dragged across the Plains by bullock wagon in its separate pieces to be erected on her husband's station at a convenient distance from the woolshed, the men's quarters, and the unsavoury gallows bearing recently slaughtered carcasses. Distances and the transport problem dictated a much humbler abode for most squatters, however mighty they might be in flocks and herds. In a refreshingly flippant account of the life of the 'wool kings' in George Chamier's novel Philosopher Dick, a homestead is described containing 'polished cane furniture, a kerosene lamp and some crockery-ware—a degree of civilisation which had gained for Marino station a widespread fame.' In spite of their distance from one another the sheep-farmers kept up a surprisingly full social life. Picnics in the bush with a white tablecloth on the moss and the champagne cooling in a nearby stream (the veriest depth of roughing it!), eel-fishing, pigsticking, skating, and reading were the favourite amusements, especially reading. Lady Barker lent books to her husband's shepherds and busied herself to coax the bishop to visit them, for religion was vitally important, and failing more professional assistance, her husband read prayers for the men on Sundays.
Near Lady Barker's home was a 'nest of cockatoos', a village of small settlers, shepherds who had saved their wages or immigrants with a little capital, trying to make a living from twenty or thirty acres bought out of the larger leasehold territories of some squatter and trying to make a home in a two-roomed sod hut thatched with toe-toe. There was a certain amount of antagonism between the average runholder and these people who had nibbled away an insignificant few of his best acres. But the general relations of one man with another were democratic from the first, for as Lady Barker said 'This is a country where every man is ready and willing to help his neighbour, without any enquiry as to who he is.' Hospitality was boundless and indiscriminate, a numerous tribe of swaggers exploiting the station owner's bounty without shame or subterfuge. This burdensome hospitality was more than mere good nature, however, until the country was more closely settled and accommodation houses were available at easier stages, for a man on horseback could alone hope to pay for each night's lodging on a journey. Many of the swaggers were simply wandering labour—carpenters, brick-layers, and such seasonal labourers as shearers and musterers in quest of work. Others, who were on their way to the goldfields, were a hated tribe to the squatter in spite of their-raising the price of stock.
The permanent employees on a sheep station were a superior type, in contrast with itinerant hands. Wages had risen from £60 a year and 'all found' in the fifties to over £100 a year and found in the seventies. Many shepherds were men of education, unfurnished with the capital to become squatters on their own account. It was quite possible to save money to set up a small farm. The shepherds were nearly all great readers, a necessary standby in their loneliness. Some, when they took a holiday from what Edward Wakefield called 'the regular and decorous' life of the larger sheep stations, could not resist 'knocking down' their annual cheque at the nearest hotel. The same writer, however, commenting on the eighteen-eighties, mentions the increasing respectability even of nomadic labour. Shearers and musterers had for years been noted for their Bohemian ways, their-language and contempt for 'swells', as they termed anyone with conspicuous social pretensions. One of their favourite pastimes was 'capping yarns', described as 'trying to tell the most outrageously improbable, indecent or revolting story'. Their living conditions were crude. Chamier wrote of the 'long, low, straggling building, made of sun-burnt bricks, with a shingle roof', the men's kitchen and their leisure abode, for they slept in a number of lean-to sheds furnished with a double tier of bunks, calico windows and 'plenty of ventilation'. It was the general absence of women in rural society which made life both uncomfortable and, for the weaker-minded, brutish. As settlement progressed the farm hand had a better chance of founding a home of his own, and conditions, as Edward Wakefield noted, improved, until the days when the only causes of death in the back country had been 'drowning and drunkenness' were gone for ever.
Farming began to depend less on wool production even before refrigeration. Coincident with the gradual fall in wool prices, the more accessible and better leasehold land was being freeholded for closer settlement. Otago exported its oats to Australia, and in Canterbury a new golden age dawned, the age of wheat. Of course, there was throughout the country a progressive increase in mixed farming, spreading out from the main towns and along the new railways being built with Vogel's borrowed money. The public works of the seventies did much for the small man, but they could hardly create a market for his miscellaneous produce. Even horse breeding, a profitable sideline whether the product was a hack or a racer, was a speculative addition to more regular sources of income rather than a main occupation. Dairying suffered from the narrowness of the local market, and the production of meat was similarly handicapped in spite of valiant attempts to export it tinned during the seventies.
Wheat production had always been the nostalgic yearning of the first pioneer farmers. Wheat was grown in the fifties and sixties in places where it has never since been attempted, usually for the farmer's own consumption, for the transport facilities were so limited that wheat-growing was always severely restricted to a local market, and at the same time was forced upon people who had no other means of obtaining their daily bread. The production of grain for local consumption could, however, reach considerable proportions when a market was reasonably accessible. An Otago pioneer, Donald Reid, whose career gave evidence of a precocious ability in the management of farming property—he was farming 200 acres at the age of twenty—began his largest enterprise at North Taieri in 1856. Reid was a man without any backing of capital, and he had therefore to make his farming pay its way from the first. In the early sixties he had 500 acres cultivated. In common with others he reaped an immediate benefit from the discovery of gold in 1861, but his lucrative cartage contracts to the diggings and high prices for every type of produce from fat cattle to potatoes were a flash in the pan, and he based his continuing prosperity on his proximity to Dunedin itself. As behoved a young man challenging fortune, he was always ready to try new agricultural machinery. In 1861 he bought a reaping machine: it belonged to that strenuous old type from which the cut grain had to be raked off sideways. He soon replaced this with a back-delivery reaper. In 1862 he used his profits from gold, including a share in an actual claim, to buy machinery in quantity—a chaff-cutter, a corn-crusher, a threshing machine, and a steam engine. There was already a more powerful steam threshing plant at work in the Taieri, but Reid preferred to be able to do his own work in his own time and to hire out his own machinery to others. From about 1865 he gradually changed over from cropping to sheepfarming, his first highly profitable herd of cattle having suffered a good deal from a stock disease. This flexibility is typical of the most alert farming minds in early New Zealand. No doubt Reid resumed the production of grain on a larger scale in the seventies, when it developed to the proportions of an export industry. Meanwhile the pastures he laid down in English grasses carried increasing flocks of sheep.
Reid's experience foreshadowed the development of the grain-growing industry which was to mean so much to Canterbury and Otago in the eighteen-seventies and eighteen-eighties. This industry started with crude equipment. The single furrow swing plough was in nearly universal use. Bullock teams were preferred on virgin soil, though horses generally carried out later ploughing. Drills were rare, though not unknown, and the seed was generally sown broadcast by hand. The back-delivery reaper was not superseded by the wire reaper and binder until well into the seventies. This machine was soon replaced in its turn by the superior binder which tied the sheaves with twine. Stooking and stacking were done by hand. In the sixties threshing was generally done by horse power, as the scale of operations rarely made a steam engine justifiable. A cheerful omen was the emergence in 1869 of the ingenious tine harrow of James Little, of Woodend. But on the whole, the sixties, when some newer districts, like South Canterbury, actually imported oats and flour from the older seats of settlement, hardly gave clear promise of the great expansion of the seventies.
The real development of the grain industry, like that of wool, was carried out by large owners with ample capital to match their spirited enterprise. In 1867 some flour was exported from Canterbury to England, and the next year wheat made the same long journey. This was a speculative trade, the wheat fetching, after payment of expenses, sometimes a few pence more than the current local price, sometimes a few pence less. Australia was the main market for New Zealand's export of grain in its hey-day in the next two decades. As wool prices gradually declined it was natural that farmers should seek these alternative lines of development, for the New Zealand farmer is usually ready to try new methods. Canterbury and Otago were naturally suited to growing grain and by the beginning of the seventies eighty-three per cent of the country's requirements came from them. Moreover, these two provinces were already the wealthiest and had the greatest opportunity of putting their capital to work. The great estates, mostly in the hands of self-made men, led the way.
John Grigg first took up land at Longbeach in 1864. He had had some experience raising potatoes for export in the Auckland district and growing hay to supply the needs of the army. At Longbeach he first ran sheep and cattle. The drainage of the unpromising-looking tract of peaty swamp was a long but steady process. As it proceeded land was sold off, these sales whittling down the original 30,000 acres to half that area. Gradually cereals and later root crops were grown, until between four and five thousand acres were cropped each year, the harvest sometimes employing as many as 350 hands in spite of the fact that the whole cycle of production was now highly mechanised and only mechanisation had made it possible. This was no exploitation of virgin soil, like so much of the cropping of the seventies and eighties: yields remained high, wheat averaging fifty bushels to the acre and oats surpassing this. This extensive cropping did not mean that sheep and cattle had gone by the board. Very large flocks were still carried, and it is noteworthy that John Grigg played a leading part in the development of the new freezing industry.
At Springfield, Methven, Duncan Cameron was grappling with a problem the converse of Grigg's at Longbeach. Longbeach had been a swamp; Springfield was unconscionably dry. Cameron began building water races in the early seventies and, encouraged by the success of his irrigation system, by 1880 he had forty miles of races on his land. Needless to say his example was soon followed by others, and to-day one of the most certain agencies for bringing the Plains into fuller production is the extension of surface irrigation. To-day, however, the state undertakes for the common good what Cameron had begun for his own purposes. At the peak of the grain-growing boom there were 5,500 acres under wheat at Springfield and 1,200 under oats. Right through the nineties at least 4,000 acres were devoted to wheat. At harvest time as many as thirty-five reapers and binders were at work on these immense fields. Again grain production did not mean that the 20,000 acre estate was cleared of stock. In 1902, after the wheat industry had begun to fall into a decline, 19,000 sheep were being carried, in addition to cattle and the draught horses for which the station was famous. Cameron, like Grigg, helped to pioneer the frozen meat industry.
It would be easy to multiply examples of large-scale production made possible by improvement in the mechanical aids to sowing and harvesting and made desirable by changes in the market values of other produce. Menlove at Windsor Park, Oamaru, in 1874 had 1,800 acres in wheat, as well as considerable areas in oats and barley. Menlove had also some 19,000 sheep on the rest of his 14,000 acre station, over 2,000 acres of which were grassed. On Studholme's property at Willowbridge in 1883 there was one field of 3,500 acres in wheat, another of 1,200 acres in oats, and 400 acres in barley. Ten years earlier 12,000 acres were 'under cultivation' at the Levels under a contract system then in vogue. This gave the contractor breaking in virgin soil a certain remuneration and the right to grow a crop of wheat, grass being sown later. The main object of this system was, of course, to convert native pastures into grassland, but it was equally well a preparation for using the land for arable farming.
During the seventies the areas under wheat increased greatly, and with them the number of acres of wheat to every hundred inhabitants, which in 1880 reached the high level of nearly seventy acres to every hundred people. Although wheat was the most profitable crop at this time, it was not because the price of wheat was high. In the sixties the local price was about 4s a bushel, but in the next twenty years the average was more like 3s 4d, according to Dr F. W. Hilgendorf's Wheat in New Zealand. It was the volume of low-cost production made possible by the relatively highly mechanised state of the industry which gave wheat its eminence. The low price of wheat also favoured the growth of the export trade. In 1883 grain was the second most important export. In 1893 it had sunk to half the value of 1883 and had taken an inferior place. To-day New Zealand is hardly self-sufficient in growing wheat.
A certain amount of the grain production of this time undoubtedly exploited the fertile vitality of land never previously cropped. William Bateman in The Colonist, 1881, stated that no manure was ordinarily used 'except the refuse of the straw stacks'. A six or seven year rotation was practised. The land was pastured by sheep for three years, then ploughed out of grass and sown with wheat. Oats followed wheat, and barley oats, before a new sowing of grass seed.
Some critics assailed the excessive breaking up of the Canterbury soil, and their complaints might have been more vehement if refrigeration had not arrived to put a new emphasis on meat production and necessitate not less, but more, cropping. The figures of the area under turnips and rape climbed steeply in the late eighties, when the system of alternative grain and root crops came into greater use, harnessing the ideas of Coke of Norfolk to the needs imposed by advances in the science of agriculture of which he could hardly have dreamed. The fattening of lambs tended to oust wheat for both practical and market reasons. But the two aims were not incompatible.
The large landowners probably grew the bulk of the wheat during the two decades of its special importance. Studholme hired a ship to export 1,500 tons of his own wheat and 150 tons of his own flour. Cameron had his own 90,000 bushel store at Lyndhurst railway station. But the times were not altogether unfavourable to the small man. Favourable conditions were being prepared for the emergence of smaller holdings, dependent in part on wheat, in part on stock. The small man benefited technically by remaining as ploughman to a Grigg or a Cameron, for it was the bigger men who carried the risks of experiment, in the use of new machinery, in irrigation, in drainage, and finally in bringing in refrigeration. Mechanisation favoured co-operation just as much as it favoured the exploitation of large holdings. The fact that it was still possible for a man to save from wages to set up on his own account meant that the small man would not be for ever a labourer in someone else's vineyard.
Wheat is still an important South Island industry, though it is no longer an export industry. The wheat-growing lands of the Canterbury Plains have developed a distinctive social pattern, that takes its main shape from the self-reliance of the small farmer rather than the centralised cultivation of large estates. In the wheat-growing areas for the first time in New Zealand there emerged the chance for a father to hand on to his son substantially the same methods of farming and a conception of farming at once socially healthy and as stable economically as farming ever can be.
The most consistent feature in New Zealand farming until the end of the nineteenth century was its liability to change, in methods and in aims, and to change quickly. Men had come to a new country which had to be tried out. Then events beyond their own choice, like fluctuations in world prices, demanded change with bewildering insistence. The men who farmed in New Zealand before the coming of refrigeration were no less resourceful, no less up to the minute, than those who came after that agrarian revolution. In some ways they were amazingly modern, anticipating by many years the mass-production methods achieved, with some self-congratulation, in the factory. No factory could surpass a woolshed in the rationalisation of effort, the speeding up of all processes, and the securing of a maximum of production from each worker engaged. Similarly the mechanised large-scale wheat industry first brought into being in the seventies and eighties is a tribute to the natural inventiveness constantly demanded of the New Zealand farmer and not demanded in vain.
The New Zealand farmer has been remarkable also for two things—an ability to organise his farming as an industry and a considerable degree of social conscience. These qualities, with that of versatility already cited, came into prominence during this middle era of wool and wheat production. Only organisation made possible the great wheatfields that excited the admiration of travellers and the flocks running into tens of thousands pasturing on hundreds of thousands of acres without either type of holding becoming unwieldy. Even the humble potato could be organised into a profitable export, by using Aspinwall's potato digger, admired by William Bateman, and by hoeing and harrowing instead of using expensive artificial manures. The social conscience is best shown in the series of regulations governing access to the land.
When one remembers the great aggregation of estates in spite of the law and the conscientious scruples, wrenched awry by private interests, that had dictated the law's form, it may seem ironic to talk of easy access to the land. Yet throughout the greater part of our history, even in the days of the 'squat-tocracy', the man who could make the best use of the land economically could usually get possession of the area that would serve his purpose. With the development of more intensive farming methods, first on the wheatlands and then everywhere after refrigeration had come in, the large holding became both socially and economically undesirable and, partly by political action on behalf of the community, it was broken up. Yet even though the country had to 'take a stick to' the large landholder during the eighteen-nineties, it is doubtful whether this gentleman had outlived his usefulness by very many years. His pioneering in many important departments of agricultural effort was invaluable, and it was only where a large holding was accompanied by an inefficient farming method that the case for eviction became overwhelming.
Large-scale wheat cropping existed side by side with the small man's cropping helped out by itinerant threshing mills. The big man did not smother the small man, if for no other reason than that there was still land available, for the breaking in, in the North Island. Many farmers in a large way were remarkably liberal in their attitude towards their employees. Donald Reid had weaned his men from an immediate stampede to Gabriel's Gully by organising at a convenient time an expedition in which they were equal partners and from which all in fact derived profit. The record of a man like James Gammack, of Springston, a self-made successful farmer, who, at his death in 1896, left money for scholarships and library books, shows the pioneer in another socially valuable mood. He loved reading himself and therefore assisted others to read. Nearly all the wealthier farmers of this era of expanding achievement were generous to churches. Thomas Holloway, an English working man who toured New Zealand in 1874 under official auspices to report on irnmigration possibilities to the agricultural labourers of Britain, commented on one of the blind spots in an otherwise generous-minded proprietor of a great station. He pointed out that though this man provided excellent accommodation and fare for single men, he gave no thought to the possibility of employing married men. Donald Reid had made such provision in the sixties, but he was an unusual character. Holloway was disturbed by the size of the large estates he saw over, although their owners were obviously leaders in the technique of production. He believed in giving the small man a bigger chance, and fundamentally he was right, as the conscience of New Zealand was soon to endorse. But this conscience, as is the way of consciences, did not work very vehemently until it was plain that large individual holdings constituted an economic as well as a social bottleneck.
4The Farming Industry
Before1882 New Zealand had two primary exports, wool and wheat, produced by the farmer. After the introduction of refrigeration in 1882, the possibilities were immensely expanded. For not only the frozen meat industry, but the export of dairy produce and fruit also, depended on the perfection of this long-sought-for means of converting the meat surplus of the new countries into the food of the old. Refrigeration effected a revolution in farming in New Zealand, but it was itself only part of the world-wide harnessing of science to industry, including the farming industry, which was altering standards and ways of life everywhere. Refrigeration cannot be separated from the rest of the improvements effected by science in every branch of technology, although the problem it solved was of a quite individual character.
By the eighteen-eighties the industrial type of society England had developed was in its second and third generation. England had led the world not only in its industrial revolution but also in its agricultural counterpart, by which improvements in technique enabled the British farmer to support the quickly expanding urban communities at what was, on the whole, a rising standard of living. But the complex and highly geared organisation of large-scale industry depended more and more on imports of food from the newer countries overseas. Wheat came to Britain from the prairies of America. Meat, however, could not make the same journey on a scale large enough to affect prices (there was a certain amount of transport of live meat across the Atlantic). The high price of meat in England was due to a shortage of supply. The demand was ready. The supply existed in superabundance, but many thousand miles away. The problem that exercised the minds of both scientists in England and farmers in all the colonial countries was to take the meat from where it was an embarrassment to where it was urgently needed. Refrigeration was not achieved by accident. It was the fruit of long and careful research and the untiring efforts of men who sacrificed to it, like Mort in Australia, both the work of a lifetime and their whole private fortunes. From 1869 tinned meat had been exported from New Zealand. From Australia at an earlier date an experiment had been made with the export of boned meat packed in lard, a successful experiment producing an article which gained ground as slowly as tinned meat. Experiments with machines for producing low temperatures had been conducted during the whole of the nineteenth century, but it was not until 1877 that French investigators fitted two ships with a mechanism that kept meat at a low enough temperature for it to survive the voyage from the Argentine to France. This meat was frozen hard, earlier attempts having been to convey it at a 'chilled' temperature. But in spite of this success with the Frigorifique and the Paraguay, the French pioneers, frustrated by the high protection given to French farmers, gave place to men in Australia and New Zealand in the establishment of refrigerated transport as an industry. In 1880 the Strathleven reached England from Queensland with a cargo of frozen meat, and two years later the Dunedin sailed from Port Chalmers carrying with it the first frozen meat shipped from New Zealand. The cargo had been collected thanks to the enterprise and vision of two men—W. S. Davidson, manager for the Australian and New Zealand Land Company (which undertook the venture), and Thomas Brydone, the Company's superintendent in New Zealand, who personally supervised the killing and dressing of the meat. His novel cargo caused Captain Whitson, of the Dunedin, some anxiety, as during the voyage he had to effect repairs to the mechanism for the circulation of air through the freezing chambers. Frozen himself in the main air trunk in the course of this work, he had to be rescued by being dragged out by a rope tied to his legs. The meat sold well in London, and even this pioneer voyage showed a profit. The Albion Company's Dunedin was soon followed by the New Zealand Shipping Company's Mataura, also a sailing ship; thus the two shipping companies most closely associated with the transport overseas of exports from this country were instrumental in beginning the trade which was to have such an important effect on the national economy.
It would be well to glance at the condition of things which refrigeration abolished in New Zealand and the other great farming countries of the world. By 1871 the 233,000 sheep of 1851 had increased to 9,701,000, and were to be over 17,000,000 in 1891 when refrigeration had turned the surplus into a main source of profit. The increase in flocks between the end of the eighteen-fifties and 1881 had been eightfold. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the market for store sheep was negligible and that the sinister shadow of the boiling-down works, symbol of waste and the crude attempt to save something from the wreck, cast itself over the land. It is interesting that Samuel Butler in 1860 had projected his nimble mind forward to grapple with this problem of the seventies and eighties. The only remedy he could suggest offhand for the overstocking he conjectured might come about was to convert the meat into portable soup, but it was 'a matter which might well attract the attention of scientific men in England'. Guthrie-Smith in his Tutira describes what a stock-owner actually did with his worn-out ewes no longer worth feeding. He sold them for a few pence each to a neighbour who fed them to his pigs. The return from boiling down a sheep for the sake of its tallow was about one and sixpence. In 1882 the average price of butcher's meat in Great Britain was about 8¾d a pound. Moreover, before the days of refrigeration the market for butter in New Zealand was severely local. A little salted butter was sent away in barrels to Australia, but its quality varied with its makers, and farmers in the more remote districts had small chance of taking part even in this meagre trade.
The introduction of refrigerated transport made the profits from farming more assured than ever before. It was more or less inevitable therefore that able men should turn to farming as a profession, and it was more or less inevitable that they should find the considerable obstacles placed in their way when they sought to get land so intolerable as to need a remedy by political action. The great estates built up during the seventies and eighties were held together not so much by the wealth of their owners as by their poverty. The bigger landowner, especially when his country was more suited to grazing than cropping, had fallen into a decline with the drop in the price of wool. He was in debt to his bank or his stock and station agents, often so hopelessly that he could never hope to extricate himself or his backers, who kept him on, however, because a forced sale would register their loss of capital. Pember Reeves summed up the impasse when he wrote 'Prices would not rise until a good proportion of the land was cut up and settled. The owners could not afford to cut it up till prices rose.' This then was the first legacy of refrigeration, the revolt of the landless. The Liberal governments of the nineties behaved with characteristic vigour, imposing a graduated land tax and then—to hasten matters—introducing the compulsory purchase of large holdings for closer settlement. This policy had its beneficial effects, encouraging more intensive use of the land and allowing land prices to rise. Compulsory purchase was carried on steadily into the twentieth century, though its original leasehold provisions were modified in favour of freehold tenure. The best of the land in the country had been freeholded before 1891, that is before the Liberal government took power and its energetic Minister of Lands, John McKenzie, began the purchase of large estates. The estates that passed through the government's hands in the process of cutting up were let on lease. When, however, the rise in the value of land through the increased productivity stimulated by refrigeration provided a new opportunity for speculation, the men on the land preferred to have the freehold of their properties to be able to market them without restriction. In 1912, with the return to power of the Reform party, which reflected the point of view of the practical farmer, the freehold finally evicted the lease-in-perpetuity. This had been the device of the Liberals to ensure the most socially useful development of the land, intended also to favour the farmer with small capital. New Zealand was for the next twenty years run primarily for the benefit of the farmer. The farmer was the economic backbone of the country during this period. He was also the political power.
It would be ungrateful to the 'squatters', as the large runholders were termed, whatever the origin of their occupations, to regard them purely as brakes on the wheel of progress which none the less turned until it had put many men on farms in place of few. The squatters had been in the forefront of pioneering the introduction of refrigeration. They had advanced the technique of agriculture as well as the techniques governing the distribution of produce overseas. Grigg of Longbeach and Cameron of Springfield, together with the directors of such a large-scale enterprise as the New Zealand and Australian Land Company, had advanced matters in the frozen meat, the wheat-growing and the dairying industries in a way that would hardly have been possible for men with smaller resources behind them. The Company's Edendale dairy factory was very important educationally in the developing dairy industry.
Dairying grew up under the wing of the frozen meat trade, a forgotten Cinderella soon to outstrip its elders, wool and mutton. Even before refrigeration made possible on a vast scale the export of butter to Britain, there had been some organisation of the dairying industry on factory lines. A cheese factory had begun operations on Otago Peninsula as early as 1871. Local farmers had combined on a more or less co-operative basis to work this factory, securing an average of 6d a pound for their cheese. Cheese was considered a more profitable product than butter as late as 1890, when Sawers, a government expert, told an audience that 'he did not think that even 3d a gallon could be expected if butter were made', but cheese-making could not be developed in areas where the farms were scattered, as the collecting centre for milk had to be more accessible than a collecting centre for the lighter weight of cream intended to be manufactured into butter. (This differentiation, of course, followed after the introduction of the centrifugal separator about the turn of the century.) The development of the dairying industry is one of the most striking results of the increasing application of science to industry, including the primary producing industries. Parallel to the new type of sheepfarming, based on a smaller area of good land farmed intensively to produce lambs for fattening, with wool as a secondary receipt, it created a new type of even smaller holding, the eighty acre dairy farm, whose produce was measured in pounds of butter-fat rather than in pounds of wool, or the dead weight of a lamb's carcase.
Success in farming is intimately linked to ease of access. Refrigerated shipping had solved the major problem of transport overseas. Successful dairying depended far more on good local access than did sheepfarming. There was a limited market for butter when the farmer lived near a centre and was prepared to accept the low prices which generally ruled. In the new phase of dairying development, when the country began to be dotted with dairy factories—the very emblem of the new prosperity—easy transport to a factory was the essential element for success. To achieve the large-scale organisation of a dairy export industry an extensive educational programme was first needed. The government appointed the first dairy instructor in 1899. Experts were imported from Denmark and from Canada. Acts passed in 1892 and 1894 introducing a grading system and the supervision of every phase of dairy production, combined with factory processing, established standards of quality that steadily made their way in the English market.
There were many men who contributed to the development of the dairy industry. One of the most unusual but not the least determined of them was Chew Chong, the Chinese storekeeper who built a butter factory at Eltham in 1887, among the earliest dairy factories established in Taranaki, the most specialised dairying district of New Zealand. Like so many of his race, Chew Chong had been attracted to the southern hemisphere, to Australia at first, by the discovery of gold. In New Zealand he had earned a living as a trader, hitting on a natural export that in thirty years brought over £300,000 to Taranaki settlers—the fungus which could be gathered in the bush fringing most settlements, and which was a table delicacy in China. Chew Chong bought this for cash for the same price—4d a pound—that the local storekeepers gave, in the form of credit, for the settlers' butter. Chew Chong turned his attention to the export of butter during the seventies and eighties, his interest—an expensive interest, since he lost money on several of his shipments and finally a large sum on his dairy factory—being drawn to factory methods of producing butter by the need for a uniform quality if an export trade was to be built up. His efficient proprietary factory was displaced after a few years by the co-operative factories that became such a nearly universal feature of the New Zealand landscape.
The career of Chew Chong bridges the period of transition from pre-refrigeration days to the stirring times that followed its introduction. New Zealand in 1882 was a country of large overstocked grazing runs, with a sprinkling of struggling small farmers near towns—or not always near towns, if we remember the settlements in the bush of which Norsewood and Dannevirke may serve as types. Everywhere, even on the big sheepfarming holdings, efficiency was retarded by distance from markets. The Scandinavians in their special settlements in the seventies were expected to carve forty acre farms from the virgin bush, sustained only by a meagre allowance of soon-accomplished work on the roads. The advancing railway system later supplied them with employment cutting timber for sleepers from the bush, but it was not till dairying and lamb-fattening developed that these groups were able to stand on their own feet with any steadiness. Typical of group settlements, Scandinavian Dannevirke and Norsewood demonstrated once again what had been so often shown by earlier special settlements—the Nova Scotian settlement of 1853 at Waipu, for instance—that farming even for mere self-sufficiency was hopeless without a reasonable chance of marketing produce.
The essential conditions of pioneering, extending even to the same difficulties through isolation in outlying districts, have lasted right down to the present. The North Island was opened up largely during the eighties and later. The railways begun during the Vogel loan boom of the seventies had laid an indispensable foundation for closer settlement whenever that became economically possible, but the Main Trunk railway that was to give access to several of the best districts of the centre of the North Island was not completed until 1908. Edward Wakefield, writing in the late eighties, before refrigeration had yet conjured away the effects of the long slump of that decade, had pointed out that the small man who wanted a farm did not have to wait despairingly for the squatters to disgorge their land. There was a harder road he might travel with a fair prospect of reward at the end. 'It may be said broadly, that any man who chooses to spend three years in breaking in a bush farm in the North Island of New Zealand, having selected his land with reasonable judgment, will have a valuable property under his feet, and one which will make him independent of the world, if he be not encumbered with debt to start with.' Although one rather doubts if many of the bush settlers could have escaped unscathed from the last-mentioned shadow over their efforts, it is at least certain that many turned the heavy forest of the Manawatu, Hawke's Bay, and the King Country into prosperous farms between 1870 and—it may be said—1940. Edward Wakefield himself described the lives of some of these settlers in terms that partly contradict the opinion cited above of the possibilities of breaking in bush. In dairying districts a whole race of farmers existed, plentifully supplied with food, but with very little money, rarely able to make any even by casual labour unless a railway were coming in their direction. These men, in Wakefield's opinion, had to rely on having large families for the chance of making money—a reliance hardly extinct to-day.
There was a regular system for reducing bush to farmland. Under favourable conditions it took three years for the standing bush to be turned into grass, for the majority of bush-farmers wanted grazing rather than arable farms. The first things to do were to inspect widely and select wisely. The type of bush on the property was a good indication not only of the quality of the land but also of the degree of trouble likely to be encountered in felling and burning the block. Tawa land was on the whole the best. White pine and pukatea denoted even better soil, but these trees were more difficult to burn off. Rimu was to be avoided. The bush was then felled, or 'falled'. In felling it had to be borne in mind that a large fire was needed to get as clean a burn as possible. Some men cut the small timber only, leaving trees over three feet in diameter, the derelicts later proving a nuisance. Others cleared everything. If this work were done by contract, it cost, last century, from 18s to 45s an acre, according to the size and type of the timber on the place. Underscrubbing—cutting out the smallest creepers and supplejacks—had to be done with meticulous care. Felling was best done in November or December to leave at least six weeks between falling the timber and carrying out the burn, the most critical operation in the series.
The burn was generally considered best done in March, for it was desirable to have at least a fortnight's continuous fine weather to dry up the fallen bushes and timber—some practical men said a minimum of three weeks, even more difficult to obtain. The day for a burn should 'blow like a steam-power bellows'; the dead mass of vegetation had to be fired as evenly as possible as soon as the dew had dried off it; a torch made of splinters or a piece of pumice dipped in oil with a wire handle proved useful for the purpose. Some said, light the fire on the windward side; others, more cautious, preferred to light up on the lee side, so that the fire never really gathered too much speed. Caution was needed indeed when the block being burned marched with land already broken in, which had fences and buildings on it. The burn was carefully supervised, however. Some men liked to keep belts of bush for shelter, but it was difficult to manage this if the burn proved unruly, unless a wide balk were ploughed round the chosen groves beforehand. Many thought it better to grow pines and macrocarpa afterwards; there was the added inducement that they 'tend to beautify the place'.
After the burn the well-advised farmer cleared tracks among the charred stumps for ease in getting about. Then the grass was sown broadcast on the blackened surface. The basic element in the mixture recommended was perennial rye, with cocksfoot and Italian rye in lesser amount and a small amount each of white clover, alsike, and timothy. Good seed was of such prime importance—since the farmer would be committed to his first sown sward for a number of years, and would have to plough to alter it—that if possible he should buy the right to harvest personally the seed he intended to use.
Land might be bought in the Woodville district (where an interesting pamphlet on bush-farming was published in 1891) for 25s an acre. Five hundred acres, felled, burned, grassed, and fenced, cost, including the building of a house, about £5 an acre. Another estimate for 300 acres gave approximately £3 an acre, for the cost of the farm, fences, buildings, and stock. Plainly the cost must have varied very considerably with the type of bush being broken in and the degree of thoroughness demanded by the new owner. In the Dominion of 10 October 1939, a farmer estimated that the cost of bringing bush land in the Upper Wangaehu valley into production had risen to £7 an acre to-day, without reckoning the cost of fencing and buildings, or of the land. The farmer had, of course, to keep himself during the period of breaking in his property, another considerable addition to the budget. The commentator of 1939, a man who had himself taken up 13,000 acres of bush in the nineties, agreed with the Woodville farmers of 1891 in believing the task of bush-farming a heavy one. The three years from bush to grass was evidently an optimistic estimate, for one writer in the Woodville pamphlet said the bush farmer would be fully occupied getting established for his first four or five years and would have no time for digging and grubbing. Another said that 'ten years from starting he will be practically over the shoals of trouble', while a particularly candid, though successful, bush-farmer was even more explicit: 'The Bush Farmer's prospect for the first few years of his occupation is nothing but heavy expenditure, hard work, excessive and interminable patience. Compared with the outlay of money, talent and labour, the returns are so small that they test the endurance of a man to the utmost limit.' But there were rewards, not exclusively material. One bush farmer exclaimed 'If a man does not make his home a paradise on earth it is his own fault', for 'everything around is ready to bow to his will—plants, animals and birds'.
Most bush farms were first stocked with sheep in an effort to get the quickest return. This worked well on good flat country not cursed with swampy or porous soil. But in many districts it was better, if the long-term interests of the land itself were properly considered, to stock with cattle, which 'consolidate the country and promote the growth of grass'.
The key to the obvious disparity between the very high estimates of the cost of breaking in forest land made by the early settlers (Dillon had put it at £30 an acre) and the estimates of the nineties lies in the change in the method of farming. The early settlers wanted the land stumped and ploughable. The later generation of bush farmers merely wanted the land grassed and did not mind a considerable number of big logs being left on the ground. They stumped a small area near the homestead for a vegetable garden, but any attempt to dig and grub was, as we have seen above, postponed. There was never any attempt, at least at first, to imitate the arable farming of the early settlers, as the bush farmer could not possibly compete on equal terms with the open land farmer.
This process of pioneering bush land goes on into the present, on the fringes of more easily worked or less remote districts. Even the pumice lands of the high centre of the North Island have been successfully brought into production, as may be learned from E. Earle Vaile's Pioneering the Pumice (1939), the account of the strenuous breaking in since 1908 of a tract of over fifty thousand acres, which was, however, nearly all ploughable once it had been burned off. Vaile's experience leads him to recommend cutting the scrub, burning off, sowing with rough grasses, and then leaving land so treated for three years. A heavy girder harrow passed over the land, with the specially concerted removal of any remaining stumps and any large lumps of pumice, prepared the ground for the plough. Heavy crops of turnips could then be grown, and the growth of grass, sown as a permanent pasture after the first cropping with turnips, was phenomenal. This heroic and fortunate enterprise shows the possibilities of a type of country previously written off as desert and has led to increased settlement of pumice areas, which suffer, however, from their remoteness from the transport system of the Dominion, as well as from a stock disease known as bush sickness, successfully combated now by a 'lick', discovered by the research of experts of the Department of Agriculture.
This survival of pioneering conditions into the present has strongly coloured New Zealand rural society. The advance of science and the greater diversification of produce have promoted more intensive use of the accessible, long-settled land. Then swamps have been drained and dry land irrigated to bring land into production. There is still ample scope for the farmer with a zest for initiating the conquest of the wild; the means at his disposal, thanks to improved implements and transport, are encouragingly greater to-day than they were for an earlier generation which went into the bush with the self-dedication almost of missionaries going into the jungle. New Zealand evidently has still some surplus of energy and initiative left over after dealing with the ordinary tasks of farming that has fallen into a routine.
Few farmers to-day would cheerfully stomach the word 'routine' as a label for their activities, and it is in fact only relatively accurate. One of the most striking features of modern New Zealand farming is its flexibility, and the readiness to 'try anything once' or to 'give it a buck' when some innovation swims into its ken or when a fluctuation of the market suggests a change. (The French economist, Siegfried, noticed this quality about 1900, and called it, more gracefully, the 'empiricism' of the New Zealanders.) Steadily rising prices for export fat stock will encourage the diversion of land from wheat to fattening crops; falling prices promote a reversal of the process.
Dr Hilgendorf in Wheat in New Zealand (Christchurch, 1939) has published an interesting graph showing the effect on Canterbury's wheat acreage of autumn fat stock prices.
Many farmers a few years ago changed from dairying to sheep; some whose mortgage conditions bound them to keep a stated number of cows on their farm (for 'property' is here hardly the appropriate word) were barred from making the change. Then too farming practice is influenced by fashion, particularly in the choice of breeds of stock, but this is hardly a reproach when it is remembered that even stocks and shares sometimes enjoy a vogue for largely irrational reasons.
Modern farming in New Zealand is not so much an industry as a collection of industries. Specialisation has been carried to great lengths, even in sheepfarming. Increasing diversification and specialisation reflect at once the intelligent use of the aids science has placed at the disposal of the farmer, a close scrutiny of market conditions, and the desire to use the holding for the type of farming best suited to its individual capacity. One feature of the present organisation of the pastoral industries of the Dominion is, however, particularly striking: the fact that in nearly every industry a subsidiary manufacturing process comes between the farmer and his customer. In dairying the cheese or butter factory manufactures the farmer's milk and cream into exportable produce. (Indeed, dairying depends on the factory for its existence.) The freezing works kills and dresses the farmer's lamb and mutton and freezes it for export. The freezing works incidentally produces a wide range of by-products—wool, pelts, hides, preserved meats, tallow, sausage-casings, bone-dust and other manures—amounting to about one-third of the total value of production. Even wool, the only product that is exported as a raw material, is taken from the sheep's back by a process which, though it depends, even when machines are used, on the individual skill of the shearer, is closely organised to eliminate wasteful effort and maximise unit production.
The dairy industry depends for its prosperity on the maintenance of standards of quality. Everything in the present organisation of the industry tends to serve this end. No butter or cheese is exported which has not been made in a dairy factory. These are comparatively small units (but proportionately much bigger than similar factories in Denmark and the United States) placed where they can best serve local needs. There are 121 butter factories in New Zealand, 242 cheese factories, and thirty-nine which have dual plant installed. Just under 65,000 suppliers keep these factories going, and as a high proportion of these suppliers will be engaged only in dairying, it is plain that more individuals are engaged in this than in any other branch of farming. Rigid standards of government inspection at every stage from the milking shed to the boxes of butter and cheese packed into a ship's hold ensure that these farmers maintain a high degree of efficiency, a relentless efficiency that turns the average New Zealand dairy farm into a factory for producing milk rather than a farm in the full sense of the word. An interesting feature of the dairy industry is that practically all the factories are co-operatively owned by their suppliers. Thanks to co-operation in production and marketing the New Zealand farmer receives eighty-five per cent of the wholesale selling price of his produce.
Sheepfarming and raising cattle for beef have been tremendously expanded since the introduction of refrigeration. The thirty-eight freezing works (including three recently installed specially to handle pork) are distributed to serve local needs, and few farmers have now to submit to the inconvenience and expense of long droving of their animals to reach the works, though often they will need to send them by railway trucks. The motor truck provides a convenient means of taking small drafts of sheep to the works. The fattening of stock has induced new methods of pasture management and the increased growing of clovers and lucernes. The taste of the English consumer has dictated a fall in the weight of lamb carcasses exported. Lamb that matures quickly is now an important point in the breeding of sheep. Wool has by no means sunk into a secondary place. It is second only to butter as the most valuable single export. Sheep and cattle farming methods have changed less than dairying, but both have become more intensive. The North Island, besides having the major dairying areas, now has more sheep than the South Island and more sheep to the acre.
Since 1882 science has increasingly come to the aid of the New Zealand farmer. Dairying has specially benefited. The Babcock test for butter-fat content, which began to be used here in 1892, introduced a standard of quality on which payments could be made by dairy factories to their suppliers, though the grade of milk is now taken into account in addition. About the turn of the century the centrifugal separator made its appearance, bringing a great saving in transport and labour. The smooth steady pulsation of the milking machine, accompanied by the lively throb of the oil engine, changed and shortened the long silent hours of hand milking of the past. Electric power, as it became widely available, replaced the oil engine. All these applications of power to the work of the farm replaced labour and enlarged the earning power of the family farm unit. The factories have increased the moisture content of butter to sixteen per cent, resulting in increased payments to dairy suppliers. Herd-testing is the sole reliable method of telling the value of each cow in a herd, for it was proved quite early by experiment that farmers could not pick the animals most productive of butter-fat in their own herds with anything approaching scientific accuracy.
Then the remarkable development of top-dressing grass has benefited the dairy industry more even than it has the sheepfarmer fattening his lambs. Top-dressing has replaced the fodder crop on many dairy farms, greatly reducing labour. The sheepfarmer on first-class land can top-dress with artificial fertilisers, particularly superphosphate, instead of ploughing and re-sowing his pasture every few years. Farmers on all types of holding have benefited enormously from the general improvement of internal communications effected by the motor car. Mechanised agriculture has brought easier transport from farm to dairy factory, as well as the saving of labour by the use of tractors in farm operations. The wide availability of electricity that has come about in the last twenty years has also brought in machine shearing. Even before public supply of electricity reached them, many farmers had their individual plants. Research in refrigeration has led to a great diversification of exports, most important among the new exports being chilled beef, first carried to London in 1933 on board the Port Fairy. Beef that has been chilled is much more palatable than frozen beef, but chilled beef keeps fresh only for a limited period. Thus only the fastest ships on the Panama Canal route can carry chilled beef, but New Zealand's share in this trade, originally exclusively in the hands of the Argentine, is growing steadily. The use of carbon dioxide gas in the freezing chambers has made possible the improved carriage of other produce besides chilled beef—eggs, apples, pears. Research has even been able to differentiate between the keeping qualities of apples according to the soils in which the trees are grown, phosphates and potash favouring long keeping in contrast with nitrate-supplied soils.
The state has increasingly taken part in research on behalf of the farming industries of the Dominion. Up to 1920 the development of dairying, for instance, had been largely practical, but the need for greater research began to be felt by the farmers themselves. In 1921 the New Zealand Co-operative Dairy Company (the largest dairy organisation in the country, operating nineteen butter and seventeen cheese factories) established a laboratory at Hamilton. The Federation of Taranaki Co-operative Dairy Factories in 1925 set up another laboratory at Hawera, with the assistance of a subsidy from the government. Shortly afterwards the Dairy Research Institute was founded at Palmerston North in association with Massey Agricultural College. Lincoln College
Canterbury Agricultural College, Lincoln.
had long been a centre of general agricultural research. The Wheat Research Institute, financed by the government, the wheat-growers, millers and bakers, is another important research institution devoted to the problems of the wheat-growing industry. The Cawthron Institute has carried out valuable research into the control of insect pests and the special needs of the fruit industry.
Both the Chemistry and the Veterinary Divisions of the Department of Agriculture have in recent years been more and more in the forefront of agricultural research, the latter Division largely controlling the laboratory at Wallaceville. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research shares with the Department of Agriculture the many tasks that await the research worker helping the farmer to overcome the problems that never fail to crop up in practice. Research in every subject from plant breeding to soil survey has greatly helped the farmer in the past, and its results are quickly publicised by the Department of Agriculture, which has brought to a high state of efficiency the agricultural education, not only of the farmer-to-be, but also of the farmer already at work for better or worse on the holding that inheritance or purchase has given him.
The increasing certainty of the returns from farming has had a buoyant effect on land values. This increase in the price of land has in itself forced a greater efficiency on the farmer whether he likes it or not. Science has put at his disposal machinery and techniques that greatly reduce the physical labour of his work, but just as 'modern conveniences' form an ever greater and greater proportion of the cost of a house, so every improvement has added to the amount of capital the farmer has to have at his command. The credit structure—for few purchasers of farm property at modern prices can put down the whole price of a holding in cash—has been elaborated to the point where the farmer is hardly even allowed to manage his own farm according to his own ideas, so firm a grip on him have his creditors. The state is not the least benevolent of the agencies lending money on the security of farm property. When the prices of farm produce fall sharply, as they did in the world slump of the early nineteen-thirties, the farmer is hard put to it to fulfil his obligations, and his only resource seems to him to lie in a desperate attempt to increase production, for this was what happened in the slump. The price of land is high in New Zealand; so too are wages. It is sometimes puzzling to the outside world just how our farming budgets are balanced. The answer lies in the very high volume of per unit production, made possible largely by two factors: first, the natural advantage of being able to run stock out of doors all the year round on grass that grows throughout the year; second, the early use of every scientific improvement and modern labour-saving device that comes into existence. Evidence for the value of science to the farmer is implicit in the increasing yield per cow in butter-fat. In the 1919-20 season the yield per cow was only 152 pounds butter-fat; but ten years later the yield had risen to 218 pounds, and has remained at substantially this level, or a little higher, with only seasonal variation.
The importance of farming exports to New Zealand, besides the fact that the whole financial structure of the country is based on the prices obtained for them, as well as the increasing concern of governments everywhere with economic problems, has inevitably led to growing intervention by the state in the marketing of produce. The first active intervention became necessary during the 1914-18 war, and the new conflict has seen a similar taking over of the responsibility for disposing of the major items of New Zealand produce, the Imperial government again being the universal purchaser. But state control of marketing has, in the period between the two wars, become part of ordinary policy. The Meat Export Control Act 1921-22 set up a board to control the export of meat in the interests of the producers. The board was instrumental in reducing freight rates, and regulated the seasonal shipment of meat to the British market, besides engaging in valuable advertising campaigns. The Dairy-produce Control Act 1923 set up the Dairy Control Board which, until 1936, engaged in supervising the marketing of butter and cheese overseas. It has now been superseded by direct state control under the Minister of Marketing in accordance with the provisions of the Primary Produce Marketing Act 1936. This Act originated the principle of the guaranteed price, which may be summarised as the principle of a state guarantee of a definite price each season to dairy farmers for their butter and cheese and the taking over by the state of the responsibility for marketing these products overseas. Wool, except in time of war, has always been sold without state intervention. The state has subsidised the export of apples and pears by means of a minimum guaranteed price.
The most important of these state interventions in marketing is the guaranteed price for dairy produce. It has behind it the whole history of the slump, when export prices fell about forty per cent, as it affected the major industry—from the point of view of the number of producers engaged in it—of the Dominion. Mortgage legislation had helped the small farmer to weather the storm of falling prices, but there was a general feeling among dairy farmers—indeed among all farmers—that the return for their services in terms of standards of living as compared with other sections of the community was scarcely adequate. Land prices remained high. Costs, particularly wage costs, had increased. Prices, however, though there had been post-slump recovery, were much the same. The guaranteed price took into account the obligations the farmer had to meet, and what might be considered a fair return for his labour. The immediate benefit of the guaranteed price was a sense of greater stability. One of its first critics, an American visitor, the sociologist Edmund de S. Brunner, commented on the difficulty of fixing the real costs of farmers, but his main objection was that the guaranteed price must tend to rise. Any benefit from the price itself is likely to be capitalised in land values and the prices of cows.
These items are again translated into costs for the purpose of calculating annually what shall be the guaranteed price, and thus raise it. But with the increase in the control by the state of the whole economic structure of dairying and all farming industries, Brunner's objections become less tenable. It is important to remember, however, that in the early stages of the modern development of farming in this country, between 1893 and 1910, there was a lag in the rise of the prices of manufactured goods as compared with the rise in the prices of farm products. This movement would have placed the farmer in a favoured position, if it had not been for the fact that these good prices and low costs were always capitalised in high land values.
The paramount economic importance of the farming industries to New Zealand makes it impossible for the state to leave their welfare to chance, hope and the satisfaction of political prejudices. The farmer is New Zealand, so far as the outside world is concerned (except in time of war, when New Zealand is also effectively represented by soldiers, sailors, and airmen). New Zealand is the world's largest exporter of mutton and lamb and also of cheese. In 1938 this country was second only to Denmark as an exporter of butter and indeed exported more butter to Britain than any other country. Apart from gold and timber, which are exported on a small scale, practically the whole export trade of New Zealand is in farm produce. Although New Zealanders have probably the highest standard of living in the world in regard to the consumption of food, the country consumes less than twenty per cent of the food it produces. The farmer, in fact, pays for all imports and foots the bill for interest on New Zealand's overseas debt. On his productivity and the continued desire of Britain to buy his produce depend our place in the world. Three factors may adversely affect the farmer's position and so that of New Zealand: increasing competition from the British farmer, favoured by tariffs and quotas; the declining and aging population of Britain; and the tendency of our own population to become static.
Our dependence on the sale to one customer of a fairly restricted range of agricultural produce is naturally a matter that has already received earnest attention. Wool alone is sold on a truly international market, but our best customer is again Britain. New markets have been sought, and more products have been exported. A little butter has been sold to China. Apples have gone to Canada and to the Continent. The seeking of new markets for our main products has been interrupted by war, but the war has brought at least one new industry to this country—the growing, at the request of the British Government, of linen flax for the manufacture of aeroplane fabric. The earliest settlers had successfully grown linen flax. Now nearly one hundred years later it is being grown again. A linseed oil industry is likely to be developed as an ancillary to the production of linen.
Many important small farming industries depend almost entirely on a local market. About two-fifths of the apple and pear crop was exported, until in 1939 the shipping space was required for war purposes. Stone fruits, small fruits, and citrus fruits are practically entirely absorbed by the local market. The Dominion acreage of commercial orchards exceeds 21,000 acres. The tobacco crop is locally consumed, though an export trade has been begun. Hops provide a small surplus for export. Grass seed and a portion of the pea crop are small but steady exports. Though poultry farming is essentially a local industry, eggs are being exported in shell. Honey from the clover lands of the dairying districts is a growing export. Pork is being increasingly exported, and it is probable that the number of pigs raised will increase, since pigs may so readily be kept in conjunction with dairy cows. New Zealand has not reached the same position as Denmark in the running of pigs and dairy cattle on the same farms.
The wheat industry is probably the most important that exists entirely on a local market. Wheat-growing is now confined almost entirely to Canterbury and northern Otago. The main reason for the decline of wheat from the days of the export boom last century was the vanishing Australian market. Also stock farming had become much more profitable, and good wheat country was also good fattening country. Bushel yields per acre are very high, attesting the fertility of New Zealand's wheat lands. Oats are also extensively grown for horse fodder. The greater part of all crops raised in the country are, however, raised for farm consumption. Still by far the most valuable of all local crops is grass.
Perhaps the best customer for the local oat crops, as well as for most of the hay that is actually sold, is the racing industry. The breeding of thoroughbred horses for racing or trotting, and the parallel business of training them, are important activities in a country so fond of racing as New Zealand. New Zealand has more racing and trotting courses for its population than any other country, a fact just as symbolical of the decentralised character and vigorous local feeling of the New Zealand community as the wide distribution of dairy factories. The breeding of pedigree stock is another important branch of farming, the pure-bred flocks and herds continually replenishing the strength of the rank and file of stock on the farms of the Dominion.
It is in market gardening alone that the native-born New Zealander sensibly feels the competition on his own ground of an outsider, though the industrious Chinese who dominate the main production in this industry are so well-recognised a feature of the scene as almost to have lost their foreignness. The European market gardener has, however, his place in what is on the whole a profitable field for effort, particularly in tomato-growing. The increasing prosperity of market gardening depends on the urbanisation of New Zealand. But in both town and country it is still the hobby of most New Zealanders to grow their own vegetables. The potato crop alone has export prospects.
The basis of modern New Zealand farming is the family farm of ninety to one hundred acres, probably devoted to dairying. In the eighteen-forties the high wages in the new colony had already decided many proprietors who had planned to develop arable farms to let them on lease or otherwise reduce their area. The small family farm replaced them, but for many years it provided only a precarious subsistence. With the development of dairying and fattening on first-class land the family farm has really come into its own. If the farmer can find his labour in his own family he has a good basis for prosperity, though it is arguable that the younger members of dairying families are too much exploited by the regime of perpetual milkings to which their parents have bound themselves. The more intense development of the North Island has resulted in a most significant population shift. The old pre-eminence of the South has given place to a two to one majority in favour of the North Island, while in the North Island itself there has been a northward movement of population. With the greater improvement in roads and transport generally, rural life has acquired much more amenity; it has, in fact, become urbanised to a remarkable degree, the conveniences of the town being very generally available to the country. There is still, however, the distinctive task for the farmer, in accomplishing which he cannot be spoon-fed. He is still at the mercy of his climate and environment, still faced with the same responsibilities for beast or crop, the same need for the use of his individual skill and judgment.
5The Farmer and the World
New Zealand is a high country. Two-thirds of it ranges between 650 and 3,500 feet in height and another eighth exceeds this latter height. But a big proportion of this elevated ground can be used by the sheepfarmer, while the lower land has a marked capacity for dairying. The height of the land, however, makes valleys and plains narrow and communications expensive in relation to the small and scattered settlements they serve. The climate is not unlike that of Britain, but with shorter and less severe winters, so that the grass in most districts grows throughout the year, merely slowed down by the ground frosts of winter. The annual rainfall is high, and it is remarkably constant from year to year. Although it may show great variation month by month from the average, there is a very even distribution throughout the year, with the winter increase associated with the Mediterranean type of climate marked only in the North Island. Only a very few areas, Central Otago, Hawke's Bay, and Canterbury, ever suffer from drought in the late summer, and these districts are comparatively lightly affected. Summer and winter temperatures are closer to each other than in most countries, the summer temperatures being particularly low for the latitude. But New Zealand averages more than 2,000 hours annually of bright sunshine. Together with the regularity of strong winds, this abundance of sunshine to some extent counterbalances the high rainfall, rapidly drying the land after showers. Of all the characteristics of the climate the winds alone really harass the farmer, though the lateness and occasional malevolence of spring weather may perhaps be added on the debit side. As early as 1845 Dr Martin had remarked on the colonists' attitude to the prevalence of wind: 'In speaking of the climate of New Zealand so favourably, I should not however conceal from you, that certain persons, generally speaking not long resident in the Colony, complain somewhat . . . of the frequency of smart gales of wind.' A longer residence has not cured the third generation of native-born New Zealanders of querulousness about these smart gales.
New Zealand is specially suited to pastoral industries. These have reached a stage of great productive capacity in a comparatively short time, so that the farmer has been compelled to practise the 'empiricism' noted by Siegfried in the late eighteen-nineties. New Zealand farming should be considered as beginning in 1882 rather than in 1840, though the first forty years of practical farming supplied the earlier settlers with invaluable experience in adapting their habits to those of the climate. But it would be more correct to speak of the climates, for New Zealand's thousand miles of latitude and its rugged relief create a multitude of local climatic variation, and it grows produce varying from the thick fine wool of the wind-harried, mountain-walking merino to the oranges and lemons of the north. Like the climate, the soils of New Zealand show considerable variety. The farmer has, however, made a thorough study of their eccentricities in the course of a hundred years of farming. He has not generally asked of them the high fertility of ancient arable lands, the Nile delta or the Ukraine. He has been content if they could grow grass for him that would maintain his ever-increasing flocks and herds, and in this the soils of New Zealand have not disappointed him. The more detailed knowledge being made available by a thorough and scientific soil survey has in part been anticipated by experience.
It is no disparagement of the New Zealand farmer, the man who wrestles with the good and bad qualities of the New Zealand soil and climate, to say that he is primarily a business man. His farming is industrial farming. To carry on his profession he borrows money, a larger amount than is needed, proportionately to output, in almost any other business. He is nearly always a specialist in one type of farming. He is highly efficient in the production of a marketable commodity, and he demands the maximum of output from his land. His borrowing and the interest to pay on this commands his utmost efforts, just as the production of the country as a whole is stepped up to pay interest on its overseas debts. This businesslike attitude to the land makes him eager to adopt whatever science can do for him to increase production, but it is an attitude that has in it certain dangers, both material and spiritual.
The material dangers are most clearly indicated by the grave losses from erosion. New Zealand has never suffered for the destruction of its forests to provide pastures on the same scale as the colossal erosion of the 'dust bowl' in the United States, which has devastated millions of acres. One reason is that the New Zealand farmer has made much more moderate demands on his land. He has burned off bush in order to sow grass, not to set the soil violently in motion by ploughing up land already grassed. But though it is on a small scale, the erosion of much New Zealand hill country is a thing actually taking place. Apart from the slow erosion of hillsides—
'Besides what the grim wolf with privy pawDaily devours apace, and nothing said'—
the destruction of the original forest or fern covering, holding together the headwaters of rivers, will sometimes take a dramatic toll on the land, as it did in 1938, when the fertile Esk valley in the Hawke's Bay-was abruptly flooded and left with a covering of silt. But the whole problem of erosion is intimately linked to the soil itself. Erosion is a natural process only accelerated or misdirected by human agency. The silting river plains may be of no value to this generation, but in a hundred years' time they will be fertile land. In the present, however, we are pardonably more concerned with the loss of good grassy slopes turned into mud or shingle, and it is not a very vivid consolation to us that the mudbanks accumulating at the mouth of some swift, steep-falling river may be a valuable property to our great-grandchildren. Erosion need not even be dramatic to be serious. In North Auckland 'pin-point' erosion, the minute attrition of the topsoil accelerated by wind and rain beating on steep man-created pastures has presented a problem that can be solved only by finding a grass mixture to give a better holding sward. The loss of fertility, whether it is spectacular or invisible, is a serious matter for the farmer bound to a definite level of production.
It was inevitable that in the process of 'land taming' the two parties—man and the soil—should each suffer to some extent. Just as some of the social consequences of the pioneering effort have not been happy (isolation for men, women, and children has led to physical and mental hardship of many kinds), so the battle for the soil has left its wounds on the land's surface.
Not all of New Zealand's usable land is covered with a protective green carpet of grass or with crop. Land has been virtually lost to blackberry, gorse, ragwort, and other noxious weeds, has been allowed to go back to fern and second growth, and to become swampy through lack of draining.
There have not been wanting critics to point out the dangers of soil depletion through the businesslike farming practised by the New Zealand farmer, and indeed by practically all farmers everywhere in the world. Lord Northbourne, in his vigorous tract for the times, Look to the Land, puts this point of view in what is perhaps its extreme form. He shows that loss of fertility throughout the world is vastly more common than erosion. He lays great stress on the value of humus and assails the excessive use of chemical fertilisers. 'Farming cannot be treated as a mixture of chemistry and cost accountancy.' In violent reaction against industrial farming based on saleability rather than on the long-term welfare of the land, he accuses the exporters from colonial countries of squandering the fertility of their own soils to satisfy the demands of the overseas bond-holder. It is certainly possible that New Zealand's productivity has been over-stimulated by such methods as topdressing with mineral fertilisers, but there is as yet no sign that this has caused soil exhaustion. Lord Northbourne unconsciously expresses the resentment of an English farmer undersold by colonial produce on his own market.
His advocacy of more intensive use of the land, aided by a better understanding of its nature, implying the return to the soil of many 'natural' manures now wasted, may be of great service to British agriculture. But so long as New Zealand is a major exporter of farm products, our farmers must gang their own gait.
Lord Northbourne is, however, perhaps more acute as a critic of the spiritual dangers that lie in making too much of a business of farming. Many of the New Zealand Company settlers, possibly because they were mostly townsmen in retreat before the industrial revolution, had a definite feeling that it was good to get back to the land, to make a livelihood by what is even to-day the most natural way of life open to man. Since then the farmer in this country has become more preoccupied with the prices of his products and the costs of producing them. But he is not wholly a business man, any more than a doctor, who lives by disease, surreptitiously propagates it. New Zealand is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Few parts of it are out of sight of the sea or of the mountains. Many farmers are as vividly aware of the beauty of their surroundings as they are of the growth of feed on the portion of the landscape they happen to own. Many farmers have gone into farming with their eyes open, realising that its satisfaction as a way of life, which demands the highest exercise of their mental and physical powers, is greater than its eligibility as a profitable profession.
Others have at least considered these intangible factors in making their choice of a calling. Much dairy-farming, however, is unlikely to satisfy the mental needs of its participants over a long term, and it is at least a warning for the future, if a criticism of the present is unnecessary, to state the case against industrial farming as the farming idealists feel it.
Though Lord Northbourne is not alone in his detestation of the excessive industrialisation of farming, he perhaps takes a broader philosophic view than any other writer. He links up the decay of farming in Britain ('farming has become more and more a dying science and less and less a living art') with the declining health of the population, and points out, inter alia, that the British bill for public health expenditure alone reaches £275,000,000 a year, exceeding the total value of home agricultural production. He believes, in fact, that the produce of industrial farming has a lesser food value than 'natural' produce. For him 'The chief characteristic of real farming is that it is a way of life rather than a business.' The American economist-philosopher, Ralph Borsodi, has also attacked the cornmercialisation of farming, which, incidentally, he views as part of the process by which the state, in the democracies as well as in the totalitarian countries, is daily encroaching on the means of livelihood of the individual. He believes that the high degree of specialisation practised in modern farming is not even efficient—that it plunders fertility and still more plunders life. The use of mechanical aids by the farmer may mean a high standard of living, but this may not be living at all. He himself established a small farm and ran it with his family as a leisure-time occupation. He advocates the small self-sufficient farm as a way of life, and as a defence against the increasing insecurity in the world. There may have been some social loss in the specialisation and division of labour that characterise industry in the modern world, including the farming industry, but few would believe with Borsodi that these methods have been proved uneconomic except when applied to heavy industry. (He is, however, able to prove that roller-milling of white flour is more costly than milling locally, or at home with an electrically operated plant.) All the weight of evidence leans the other way, and however much we sympathise with Borsodi's desire that men should lead more natural lives—which, good fellow, he would accomplish only by persuasion and never by governmental coercion—there can be no putting of the clock back to-day, any more than there could be for William Morris, who deplored the passing of the old crafts under the impact of industrialism. William Morris made the best of things, by persuading industry at least to abandon ugliness. Similarly we will have to make the best of the new industrialisation of farming, which has reached New Zealand only as an economic fact and not yet as a social fact, and, if the profession of farming has become as unsatisfying as Borsodi and Lord Northbourne allege, we must solace ourselves for it in leisure-time compensations, like the rest of mankind.
New Zealand is happier than the rest of the world in that its favourite unit is still the family farm, and it is extremely doubtful if this country could with profit reach a much greater stage of industrialisation of farming than is in being to-day. There is evidence
See Peter F. Drucker, 'The Industrial Revolution Hits the Farmer', Harper's Magazine,November 1939.
that the increasing industrialisation of an essentially individual industry has affected farmers in overseas countries. Heavy subsidies have had to be paid in Germany, Italy and France, and to a lesser extent in England, during the last ten years, to support the smaller European mixed farmer who has been gradually squeezed out by the increasing use of large-scale production methods. Even in England the farm population has declined twenty-five per cent in a decade, without a fall in production, representing unemployment produced by advancing technique. In Russia the collective farms with central machine stations have enabled a great reduction in the number of farm workers: collectivisation was, in fact, carried out there to release workers for industry. Fortunately the machine can only replace the farmer in the production of bulk crops on an extensive basis, wheat in particular; and New Zealand's specialties, sheep and dairy farming, are most unlikely to gain in economy from increases in the size of the unit. The family farm is the most common type of farm holding in New Zealand, and in fact we might well tender ourselves to the world as a laboratory experiment in the most natural type of farming unit. For in New Zealand the measure of industrialisation brought into farming has so far been, not the ruin, but the making of our farmers. The most important element in this industrialisation—the freezing works and the dairy factory —deal with the farmer's product only after he has taken it off the farm, and thus primarily affect distribution rather than the actual processes of production. From the community the New Zealand farmer receives a measure of subsidy: fertilisers are sold to him cheaply; his mortgage debts have been adjusted; he is exempted from Sales Tax and Customs duty on goods he needs to carry on production; he is guaranteed a price for his dairy produce, wheat, barley, fruit, tobacco, honey and, now under war conditions, for his meat. Neither this assistance, nor the maintenance of the Department of Agriculture, nor the development of roads and railways directly benefiting the farmer, can be considered as a subsidy in the same sense as the payments made to the sugar beet industry in Great Britain, for instance, when set against the wealth the farmer is creating for New Zealand.
Though the industrialisation of farming may jeopardise the economic status of the individual farmer in many parts of the world, simultaneously the farmer is entering into a new partnership with manufacturing industry. Henry Ford—appropriately enough—has been a pioneer in the industrial use of farm produce. From soya bean oil the enamels and varnish needed in his cars have been manufactured, and from soya meal—the part of the bean remaining after the extraction of the oil—have been made plastics, represented in such parts of the car as steering wheels, horns, switches and buttons. Ford looks forward to a time when industry will draw its raw material, no longer from exhaustible forests and mines, but 'largely from the annual produce of the fields.' (The soya bean is a crop that might well be tried more extensively in New Zealand. Its food value is almost unique in its galaxy of vitamins, high proportion of protein and mininium water content. With its great oiliness it is among the best stock fattening feeds in the world, has been manufactured into human foods, ranging from diabetic foods and macaroni to a 'butter', and enriches the soil with nitrogen into the bargain.) Compressed casein has been used for more than a quarter of a century for such purposes as the handles of knives, while as long ago as 1907 the American negro chemist George Washington Carver extracted the makings of soap, ink, cosmetics, axle grease, dyes, and insulating board as well as food products from the peanut and performed similar prodigies with the sweet potato. Large quantities of corn are now turned into ethyl alcohol for 'blending' with benzine to produce an improved motor spirit. It is only in the last decade, however, that the new science of 'chemurgy' has been given the status of a name and a movement in the United States, and this new alliance between the chemist, the manufacturer, and the primary producer is vigorously, if uncritically, celebrated by Christy Borth in his Pioneers of Plenty, which astounds the reader with the range and complexity of the utilisation of farm products in modern industry. While the main output of New Zealand farms at present would not lend itself to any great expansion in the production of materials useful in 'chemurgy'—after all, the freezing works already processes a very wide range of byproducts — there will in the fullness of time undoubtedly be new opportunities for New Zealand farmers, thanks to the magicianly activities of the modern chemist.
In large-scale industry it is still customary to guard a new scientific discovery with a vigilant, if unbecoming, jealousy. There are even instances where discoveries of the greatest value to humanity are suppressed lest a vested interest totter. In farming, however, every interest supports the pooling of knowledge and the quickest employment in practice of a new device, a new crop, or a new method of production. In New Zealand the Department of Agriculture performs an indispensable service in making knowledge available to the farmer, quite apart from its functions in carrying on research and supervising production in the interests of a marketable product, free from blemish or disease. The Live-stock Division of the Department is primarily concerned with animal health and husbandry, inspecting all meat killed in the freezing works of the Dominion. Its experiments at the Wallaceville Veterinary Laboratory are of great value in combating diseases of stock which have always to be treated empirically to begin with in any new country with its own conditions. The Dairy Division, besides advising in the production of butter and cheese, grades this produce. The Fields Division, whose aim is the improvement of farm practices, also carries out valuable seed-testing work and seed certification, maintaining a seed-testing station at Palmerston North; it experiments with land utilisation and takes the lead in working out the methods of raising new crops in the manner most appropriate to New Zealand conditions. The Horticultural Division is concerned with fruitgrowing and also beekeeping. Its work includes the inspection of all fruit sold. The head office of the Department, including the important Chemistry Section, co-ordinates the work of its branches, which may be summed up in the one word 'propaganda' in the best sense of that contaminated word. Through the Journal of Agriculture, its instructors, veterinary surgeons, scientists, and experts, the Department is engaged in ceaseless propaganda to help the farmer to adopt the best technique and to get the most out of his land. The Department's work is human and realistic. With its intimate contact with every type of farming throughout the country, as well as its leadership in innovation, it possesses the confidence of the farmer, which could alone make its work fruitful, and which is the emblem of its success.
Although the major educational function of the Department of Agriculture is concerned with the farmer who is already at work on his holding, it also undertakes the education of the young man wishing to make farming his profession. More elementary instruction is given at Flock House Station, Bulls, while the Ruakura Farm Training College, Hamilton, trains farmers' sons up to a higher standard. There are other important educational institutions. Lincoln College and Massey College have the status of independent university colleges, affiliated to the University of New Zealand, and are subsidised by the state. They provide advanced courses both in practical farming and in the scientific background of farming. The Department of Agriculture and the two agricultural colleges all make a special feature of short courses suited to the needs and the leisure opportunities of the working farmer. Agricultural subjects are taught at some technical schools. The Young Farmers' Clubs movement is another important means of educating the young farmer, in this instance of self-educating him. The entry of new recruits into farming is a problem that has more and more concerned the state in recent years. In the past most farmers were the sons of farmers, and this is still how a majority of men become farmers. But even the home-taught farmer is more and more supplementing his knowledge with a course at an institution. In 1937 the government initiated a scheme for paying a subsidy to farmers willing to train inexperienced youths, amounting to rather more than a third of the wages payable to them. This subsidy has since been increased. Even though it is easier to teach a theoretical knowledge of farming than a practical knowledge, it may be said that nothing is left undone to educate the farmer for the tasks that he has before him.
The technical education of the farmer is well organised and effective. His broader cultural interests have, however, until recently been left to look after themselves. It is one of the claims made for rural life by idealists like Borsodi that the farming life is so engrossing and delightful in itself that the farmer has no wish to draw a line between his leisure and his work. His work is his pleasure, and his soul requires no other exercise. This is hardly a realistic approach to the conditions of modern farming, which is an integral part of our economy and society. There can be little doubt that rural life is not considered as attractive as town life by a great many farmers and their families. There is a growing reluctance to enter the profession among its natural recruits, the children born and brought up on farms. The excessive employment of children to milk cows before and after their hours in school was complained of vehemently by school inspectors as early as 1905 and is still complained of by teachers, though parents are more alive to-day to their responsibilities to their children. It is both natural and graceful that a man's children should help him in his work, and most children enjoy the tasks of farming when they are not sickened of them by overwork. But the financial pressure that makes the labour of the farmer's children his only hope of getting on in the world is hardly likely to benefit the children. In any case when there are an increasing number of occupations open to young men and women at high wages, the largely unpaid help given on the home farm can have no compelling attraction, and children who prefer to strike out for themselves cannot be accused of filial ingratitude. Nevertheless, this is not in itself a reason why the children of farmers should increasingly seek other openings, especially employment in towns. For they could instead seek paid employment on other men's farms, as indeed many do. There still remains the need to make the farming life more attractive, to give it the social amenities of the town. Of course, there is a good deal of misplaced nostalgia in the farmer, and more particularly the farmer's wife, yearning for the fuller social opportunities of the town. (They already have on the farm in many parts of New Zealand, especially in closely settled dairying districts, most of the conveniences, like electric light and power, associated with urban living. On the other hand the use of these conveniences is undoubtedly being retarded by lack of money in individual homes, and the material standard of living on farms in everything but food could still be greatly improved.) The farmer tends to exaggerate the pleasures of town life, seeing it too often through the amiable haze of his visits to buy or sell, when he goes to the pictures and amuses himself with a sense of holiday release which the jaded townsman could certainly not imitate. Yet there remains a solid basis of justification for this attitude, even though the farmer's 'town-hungriness' is increased by inexperience of the dullness and narrowness of most town living. His social instincts are left only partially appeased.
It is desirable that all the organisations concerned with the farmer, from the Department of Agriculture itself to the local Young Farmers' Club, should give much greater consideration to the best use of the farmer's leisure. With the development of the government's Correspondence School to cater for children too remote to attend a local school there is less and less disparity between the educational opportunities of the country child and the town child. But there is still a considerable disparity in fruitful social opportunity. Through such agencies as the Women's Institutes, the Women's Division of the Farmers' Union, the Workers' Educational Association, and the government's Country Library Service, new leisure-time occupations and functions are being placed at the disposal of the country dweller. The experiment of a Community Centre attached to the Feilding Agricultural High School, has proved how rich a field waits on the encouragement of fashion and a well-organised movement. The motor car, when peace-time supplies of petrol are available, provides new opportunities for meetings of every sort in the country and points the way to a closer-knit community, more aware of itself and of the life around it, and able to find inside its own social unit a satisfaction possibly greater and more genuine than any association of human beings in a town. Man is naturally gregarious, and it will be the increasing concern of those who value the farming life to give the farmer's gregariousness better scope than it is afforded to-day by his usual associations, factory meetings, A. and P. shows and sale days, valuable as these are as a means of meeting his fellow beings. It is probable that the greatest advance will be made by combining all existing organisations into a comprehensive whole, with dependent groups to serve particular interests such as play-acting, reading, crafts, and discussing things. The community centre on winch this ideal organisation should ideally be based would become the heart of rural self-contentment, and a new rhythm in rural life would begin, assuring the farmer even more than a livelihood from his holding—a living tradition of country society.
Russell Lord, writing of the tribulations of the American farmer in his book, The Agrarian Revival, describes a measure of frustration never approached in this country. 'Our country people want more money out of farming and more joy out of life. It used to be thought that if they could get the money the joy would follow. "Give us the money and we'll lead the life!" a Virginia farm wife cried to an assembly of the American Country Life Association.' The New Zealand farmer has possibly been too inclined to think of his own welfare in terms of money and not enough in terms of joy. But often the way of life has swept him into its vortex when he bargained for farming merely as a business. It would be a mistake to think that the New Zealand farmer is in any measure disheartened by the considerable problems, market and social, that confront him. He still has in over-flowing measure the vigour and enthusiasm of the whaler, Johnny Jones, establishing a farm on the whild shore at Waikouaiti in 1840, the courage and enterprise of the Deans brothers, colonising the Canterbury Plains in 1843, the tenacity of the far-wandering Nova Scotians, settling at last at remote Waipu in 1853, the foresight of Thomas Brydone selecting during 1881 the flock that was to provide the first cargo of refrigerated mutton. Unlike the average English farmer, who is an overseer, rather than a worker in person, the New Zealand farmer nearly always works with his own hands as strenuously as anybody in his employment. He is intelligent and adaptable. If he were not, he would not survive. Usually he is extremely articulate. It has been truly said that the country is the real New Zealand, and certainly the strong, independent, patient, and self-reliant spirit of the farmer colours the whole of our society. Even the town-dwelling New Zealander shares vicariously, if only because he happened to be born on a farm, in most of the difficulties and triumphs of the farmer.
In the past the farmer has been the leader in New Zealand society. To-day his leadership is more hesitant. World markets have moved against him, and his costs are rising. He is prone to seek a political solution for problems fundamentally economic. In this he has shown the realism that might have been expected of him, for throughout the modern world economic problems are everywhere shaping the policies of states, both internal and external. Yet the real welfare of the farmer is in his own hands. Su Shih, the Chinese sage, declared in the eleventh century, 'The persistence of nations in history depends upon the quality of their national life and not upon their economic status.' Up to the present the farmer has been an efficient custodian of the quality of our national life.
A Note on Sources
1. The Maori Farmer
The Writings of Elsdon Best provide the most authoritative accounts of pre-European Maori agriculture, especially his monograph, Maori Agriculture (Wellington, 1925). The more dogged student will find material of value in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute (Wellington, 1869-) and the Journal of the Polynesian Society (Wellington, 1892-).
John Savage's Account of New Zealand (London, 1807), the first description of New Zealand after Cook, provides an interesting account of the importance the potato had assumed in Maori economy by 1807. Savage describes, of course, only the Bay of Islands where the natives were most closely in touch with European civilisation, a qualification that must be made in regard to most early missionary narratives of New Zealand life. The contribution of the missionaries to Maori agriculture is splendidly drawn in Dr J. R. Elder's Letters and Journals of Samuel Marsden (Dunedin, 1932) and Marsden's Lieutenants (Dunedin, 1934). Here in picturesque procession pass Ruatara, Hongi, Pomare, and the missionaries who helped or disapproved of them. The Rev. William Yate's Account of New Zealand (London, 1835) contains references to missionary and Maori agriculture, but he was regarded as unreliable by his contemporaries. Dr S. M. D. Martin, author of the vigorous and often critical reminiscences, New Zealand (London, 1845) should not be confused with Sir William Martin, Chief Justice and the husband of Lady Martin, from whose Our Maoris (London, 1884) a striking passage has been quoted. William Swainson, more matter of fact, chimes in with an admirable piling up of detail about the scope of Maori agriculture in his New Zealand and its Colonization (London, 1859). The story of the East Coast and Taupo natives' stock-farming is eloquently told by the Rev. Thomas Samuel Grace in A Pioneer Missionary among the Maoris (Palmerston North, 1928). Sir John Gorst's great book, The Maori King (London, 1864) with its penetrating and sympathetic study of the Waikato tribes, contains much information about agriculture.
Dr A. S. Thomson's thorough and competent history, The Story of New Zealand (London, 1859) throws light on every phase of Maori and European life. Alfred Saunders, in the two volumes of his History of New Zealand (Christchurch, 1896 and 1899) occasionally considers farming matters, both Maori and European, but his partisanship and haphazard selection of material diminish the value of his work.
The files of The Maori Messenger (Auckland, 1849-61), one of a series of bilingual or Maori newspapers published with the express intention of helping the natives to civilise themselves, contain much news of their agricultural affairs. There are, of course, many valuable references to both Maori and European farming in early newspapers, such as The New Zealander (Auckland), the Nelson Examiner, and the Port Nicholson and Cook Strait Guardian.
2. Early Settlement and Farming
Charles Darwin's well-known description of Waimate is from Vol. iii of Narrative of the Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle (London, 1839). Charles Darwin paid a short visit to New Zealand in December 1835; he had sailed as naturalist in the Beagle.
There is ample literary material for building up a conception of the vicissitudes of early European farming. A great number of early settlers published books giving accounts of their experiences, while the Company's servants were positively strident in their voluminous descriptive writings, aimed at that unprotected target, the prospective settler. The classic among these experiences, for its manner as well as for its matter, is that amusing and insouciant chronicle, Adventure in New Zealand (London, 1845) by Edward Jerningham Wakefield. He was further the unacknowledged author of a Handbook for emigrants (London, 1848), which with G. B. Earp's New Zealand: its Emigration and Goldfields (London, 1853), and its earlier editions, existed to smooth the path of the would-be settler. These publications are just as interesting for what they allow us to read between the lines as for their main story. This too is the merit of Francis Fuller's observations on Canterbury in his Five Years' Residence in New Zealand (London, 1859). William Brown's New Zealand and its Aborigines (London, 1845) mentions early farming in Auckland. Edward Shortland's The Southern Districts of New Zealand (London, 1851) shows the success of the Scots who broke away from the Company settlements to colonise Canterbury before the Pilgrims, a theme developed even more fascinatingly in the robust letters of William and John Deans printed in Pioneers of Canterbury (Dunedin, 1937), which make one regret that more of the descendants of their contemporaries have not published their family papers, or at least given copies of them to libraries. Excellent exceptions to this dismal rule of indifference to the value of original historical material in private hands are James Hay's reminiscences, Earliest Canterbury (Christchurch, 1915), George Rhodes of the Leve's and his Brothers by [Mrs] A. E. Woodhouse (Christchurch, 1937), and Bidwill of Pihautea (Christchurch, 1927) by W. E. Bidwill and A. E.Wood-house. Among the richest of the material evoked by an English appeal on behalf of Centennial history, an appeal answered more generously by the English descendants of pioneers than by people in New Zealand, are the Dillon letters, referring to the decade 1843-53. There is already in the Alexander Turnbull Library the interesting Pharazyn diary, and another Centennial acquisition, the Coote diary, also contains some slender gleams of farming interest. The Ward diary throws vivid light on pioneer farming in Nelson in the forties. The early days of Otago are chronicled in Dr T. M. Hocken's Contributions to the Early History of New Zealand (London, 1898). A small pamphlet published in Dunedin by the Otago Early Settlers' Association in 1903, Early Days in Otago, contains the cautionary tale of a newspaper that flouted influential public opinion on an agricultural topic.
The development of farming in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is admirably related in that classic, Lord Ernle's English Farming Past and Present (revised edition, London, 1936).
3. Gold, Wool, and Wheat
Throughout this chapter R. M. Burden's High Country (Christchurch, 1938) has been a useful source of material. It draws largely on the private papers of the Tripp family, and is so good on practical matters that one regrets that so much of its short space is devoted to a conspectus of the general history of New Zealand. Frederick Weld's Hints to Intending Sheep-Farmers in New Zealand was first published in 1851 (London); it was altered somewhat in the third edition, that of 1860. See also The Life of Sir Frederick Weld (London, 1914) by Alice, Lady Lovat. A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (London, 1863) is absorbingly interesting for its matter, though it is obviously of very slight literary importance if set beside Samuel Butler's later works. One questions whether Butler himself would have despised it quite so heartily, if it had not been so closely associated with his father, who had edited it with a heavy hand. The diary kept by the managers of the St Leonard's station, North Canterbury, for the owner, George Duppa, has much interesting detail on the routine of early sheepfarming operations. The classic story of an individual New Zealand station is to be found in H. Guthrie-Smith's Tutira. The best edition is the second, (London, 1926), but the author was at work on a revised edition in 1940 when he died. L. G. D. Acland's The Early Canterbury Runs (Christchurch, 1930) is an invaluable source of information on its subject.
The volumes of The Cyclopedia of New Zealand (Wellington, 1897-1907) form a garrulous chronicle of both farming and urban success. In spite of the uncritical and even childish tone of this work it contains a good deal of interesting information about the careers of prominent pastoralists and wheat-growers. Thomas Holloway, who journeyed through New Zealand in the early seventies as the guest of the government, has left interesting diaries which have been copied by the National Historical Committee. These contain frequent references to farming conditions. J. C. Andersen's Jubilee History of South Canterbury (Christchurch, 1916) contains a good deal of farming information, especially on wheat-growing, as does Dr F. W. Hilgendorf's Wheat in New Zealand (Christchurch, 1939). William Bateman's The Colonist (Christchurch, 1881) and Donald Reid (Dunedin, 1939) also throw light on the wheat production of the South Island, though the latter (a biography of a noted Otago pioneer, written and circulated privately by his descendants) refers to an earlier period than the hey-day of wheat-growing in the seventies and eighties.
The general economic conditions of the farming of this period (and of the whole hundred years of New Zealand's existence) are succinctly summarised in J. B. Condliffe's New Zealand in the Making (London, 1930). The problems of land aggregation are treated in W. P. Reeves's State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (London, 1902) and in State Socialism in New Zealand (London, 1910) by J. E. Le Rossignol and W. Downie Stewart. Both Reeves and Downie Stewart were cabinet ministers, the former before and the latter after writing these books.
Social life on the early sheep station is described with spirit and perhaps excessive taste by Lady Barker in her Station Life in New Zealand (London, 1870) and Station Amusements in New Zealand (London, 1873). George Chamier in his novel, Philosopher Dick (London, 1891), looks back to the same halcyon days. The hardships and humour of station life were also exploited to excellent effect by L.J. Kennaway in Crusts (London, 1874), which has much of both the seriousness and the crudity of the Victorian practical joke.
4. The Farming Industry
Perhaps the best account of the development of refrigerated transport is to be found in A History of the Frozen Meat Trade (London, 2nd edition, 1912) by J. T. Critchell and J. Raymond. A work of similar value, but exclusively concerned with New Zealand, is H. G. Philpott's A History of the New Zealand Dairy Industry (Wellington, 1937). W. D. Powdrell's Dairy Farming in New Zealand (Wellington, 1920) is an interesting practical handbook for farmers, which points out, inter alia, that the city-dweller with a large family is misapplying his labours: in the country the family would become an asset instead of a liability.
Edward Wakefield in his New Zealand After Fifty Years (London, 1889) describes conditions before the beneficial effects of refrigeration had properly gathered momentum. A vivid account of breaking in bush, written by the men who had carried it out in practice, is contained in Essays on Bush-Farming by W. F. Doney and others (Woodville, 1891). E. Earle Vaile's Pioneering the Pumice (Christchurch, 1939), shows how land once deemed practically valueless has been brought into production. It also shows the sturdy character of its author with a good deal of candour.
The economic structure of the farming industry to-day is surveyed exhaustively in the monumental symposium Agricultural Organization in New Zealand (Melbourne, 1936) published by the Institute of Pacific Relations. The portions of W. P. Morrell's New Zealand (London, 1935) which deal with the modern farming industry form an admirable summary, while The Pastoral Industries of New Zealand (London, 1935) by R. Ogilvie Buchanan, contains some interesting material, particularly on the interrelation of climate and types of farming. Small Capital Land Occupations in New Zealand (Wellington, 1922), published by the Department of Agriculture, discusses the prospects, substantially the same to-day, in some of the subsidiary types of primary production.
Since its first publication in 1892 (Wellington) the New Zealand Year Book, published annually by the government, has provided a series of statistics of the greatest value to the economist studying the farming capabilities of the Dominion. The articles on special subjects are excellent, and the comprehensiveness of the picture of all phases of life in New Zealand which can be reduced to number and measure gives this fascinating publication—truly a neglected classic—its unique quality and authority. The New Zealand Journal of Agriculture (Wellington, 1910-), a monthly which has been brought out in a more popular format since 1938, is a government publication of great merit and interest.
André Siegfried, a Frenchman who visited New Zealand about the beginning of the century, made some acute observations on post-refrigeration New Zealand in his Democracy in New Zealand (London, 1914), the English translation of his book published in Paris in 1904. Edmund de S. Brunner expressed his opinion of some aspects of our life and economy in Rural Australia and New Zealand (San Francisco, 1938): he has not hesitated to make up his mind on account of the briefness of his visit.
5. The Farmer and the World
This chapter is weighted with American experience because the United States provides the most conspicuous and melancholy example of farming in decay—farming, that is, tied to the cash nexus and the accountancy version of success so despised by the Englishman, Lord Northbourne, in his Look to the Land (London, 1940). Americans too have repudiated the base suggestion that farming should, like other businesses, pay its way, financially rather than spiritually. Typical of them is Ralph Borsodi, author of Prosperity and Security (New York, 1938), and collaborator with O. E. Baker and M. L. Wilson in the symposium, Agriculture in Modern Life (New York, 1939). Another American, Russell Lord, has discussed the havoc caused by erosion and the technique of soil conservation in Behold Our Land (Boston, 1938), while in The Agrarian Revival (New York, 1939) he considers both the social and economic plight of the American farmer. Christy Borth's Pioneers of Plenty (Indianapolis, 1939) will possibly do a disservice to the chemurgy he is so infatuated with, though no doubt he and his publishers have correctly taken the pulse of the American reader. In spite of the 'believe it or not: truth is stranger than fiction' tone of his book, the developments he describes are too important to be ignored.
W. T. Doig's Standards of Life of New Zealand Dairy-farmers (Wellington, 1940) embodies the fruits of an extremely interesting attempt to assess the standards of living of the New Zealand dairy farmer. H. C. D. Somerset's excellent Littledene (Wellington, 1938) is concerned with the cultural standards and opportunities of people in the country.
IndexAdaptability,47–8, 83–4, 104, 122, 141Agricultural education, 111, 135–6Agricultural revolution in Great Britain, 30, 31, 88Agricultural Shows, 49Agriculture, British, burdens on, 36Agriculture, Department of, 111, 131, 133–6, 138Anderson, Archibald, at Waitati, 40Auckland, 44–5, 49, 56, 78Babcock test, 108Bakewell, Robert, 32Banks Peninsula, 25, 39–40Barker, Lady, 67, 71–3Barley, 24, 41, 49, 80, 81Bateman, William, 81, 84Bay of Plenty, 14Bluff, 40Boiling-down works, 90, 91Borsodi, Ralph, 128–30, 136Borth, Christy, 133Boundaries unfenced, 48, 60–1, 63, 64British farming, advances in technique, 30–4, 88Brunner, E. de S., 114–5Brydone, Thomas, 89, 140Bullock drays, 51, 62–3, 71; plough-teams, 10, 16, 17, 34, 40, 49, 77Burdon, R. M., 64, 68Bush, burning off, 99–100, 103; farming, 98–103; felling, 12, 43, 99Bush sickness in stock, 103Butler, Rev. J. G., 10Butler, Samuel, 54, 59–61, 65, 67, 90Butter, export, 47, 91, 106–7, 113, 115, 116; imported from Ireland, 51Cameron, Duncan, of Springfield, 79–80, 82, 93Canterbury, 28, 36, 43, 52, 53, 59, 61, 63, 67, 70, 71, 75, 77–83, 121, 140Carver, George Washington, 132 Cattle, 21, 24, 25, 32, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 49, 59, 76, 77, 78, 80, 102, 107Cawthron Institute, 110Chamier, George, 72, 74Cheese, 105, 106–7, 113, 115; factory at Otago Peninsula, 1871, 94Chew Chong, 95–6Chilled meat, 109; early attempt, 89Clifford, Sir C., 46; at Flaxbourne, 47Climate, 121–3Clover, 32, 66, 100Cob huts, 62, 71Cockatoos, 72–3Coke, Thomas, of Norfolk, 33, 82Community Centre at Feilding, 139Compulsory purchase of land, 92Condliffe, J. B., 69Correspondence School, 138Corriedale breed, 70–1Country Library Service, 139Dairy experts, 94, 95Dairy factories, 93, 105, 106, 108, 131; co-operative, 94, 96, 107, no; Edendale, 93Dairy-farming, 38–9, 41, 47, 75, 93–6, 97, 98, 105, 106–7, 108–9, 130Davidson, W. S., 70, 89Deans, William, 35; William and John, 39, 52, 140Dillon, C. A., 28, 41 Dipping of sheep, 46, 61, 64Draining, 21, 78, 82, 104, 126Dunedin,89, 90Duppa, George, 61, 65, 69Electricity used, 108, 109, 138Enclosures in Britain, 30–1Erosion, 124–6European farming before 1840, 10, 23–5, 38Experiments by pioneers, 47–8, 52; see also AdaptabilityFarming a business, 123; not a business, 126–30, 140Farming for industry (chemurgy), 132–3Fat lambs, 82, 94, 97, 107, 109Fencing, 44, 61; wire, 61, 64–5, 101Fern, burning off, 2; trampling, 66Fertilisers, 109, 110, 126Flock House, 135Foot-rot, 66Ford, Henry, 132Freezing works, 106–7, 131, 133Fruit, 87, 110, 114, 116, 117, 123, 134Fuller, Francis, 50Fungus exported, 96Gammack, James, 86Gebbie, J., 39Goats, 52Gold, discovered, 56; raises prices, 57Gorse, 24, 61, 126Gorst, Sir John, 15, 20, 21Gourd, 3Grace, Rev. T. S., 17, 18, 20; at Taupo, 15; at Turanga, 14Graduated Land Tax, 92Grass, 21, 33, 49, 58, 59, 66, 69, 80, 81, 98, 100, 101, 102, 109, 112, 117, 118, 125Gridironing, 50, 55Grigg, John, of Longbeach, 78–9, 80, 82, 93Guaranteed price, 113, 114–5Guthrie-Smith, H., 65–7, 90Hadfield, Rev. Octavius, 21Hall, W., 11Harrows, 34; tine, 77; girder, 103Hawke's Bay, 65, 67, 71, 98, 121, 125; stocked, 53Hay, E., 39Herd-testing, 108Hokianga river, 24, 26Holloway, Thomas, 86Hongi, 4, 5, 6, 7Horses, 37, 46, 49, 60, 80; thorough-breds, 118Housing, 45, 62, 71–2, 86, 138Hurt valley, 43, 45Industrial revolution in Britain, 30, 31, 88Irrigation, 21, 79, 82, 104Jones, John, 39–40, 140Journal of Agriculture,134Kapiti island stocked, 25Kendall, Rev. Thomas, 9Keri-Keri farm, 9, 10, 24King Country, 98King, J., 6ko,2, 3kumara,1, 2, 3, 14Lambing dates, 48, 58, 64Land, access to, 34–6, 41–3, 49–50, 53–6, 84–5, 91–3, 98; buying, 25, 26, 35, 43; cost of clearing, 43, 99, 101–2; speculation in, 25, 29Large families a help, 98, 119, 137Large scale production methods, 83–4, 130Levels, the, 70, 80Linen flax, 48, 116–7Lincoln, Canterbury Agricultural College, 110, 135Little, James, of Woodend, 77Little, James, sheepbreeder, 70–1Lord, Russell, 140Mcdonnell, Lieut. Thomas, 24, 26McKenzie, John, 92Mana island stocked, 25Manawatu, 98Manson, S., 39Maori and iron tools, 8, 18; and ploughs, 18, 19; as farming com-petitor, 12, 57; business men, 20; cultivation of potato, 4, 7, 14, 20, 44; diet, changes in, 17, 38; exports, 4, 56; maize-growing, 14; mills, 14, 17–8, 19, 21; owning cattle, 14; owning horses, 14, 16, 20; owning pigs, 14, 21; owning ships, 14, 19, 20, 22; pre-European food of, 1; religion and crops, 2; wheat-growing, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15; working as tribe, 11, 22; working for Europeans, 12, 13Maori Messenger,21Maori People Today, The,20Maori Wars, 12, 15, 16, 56Market-gardening, 118–9Marlborough, 47, 53Marsden, Rev. Samuel, and Maori farming, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 18; and missionary farming, 24; mentioned, 33; sends cattle, 9Martin, Lady, 13, 14, 17Martin, Dr S. M. D., 12, 122Massey Agricultural College, 110, 135Mataura,90Meat, frozen, 87, 89, 93, 113, 115; shortage in England in mid-nineteenth century, 88, 91; tinned, 75, 88Menlove, of Windsor Park, 80Merinos, 33, 50, 58, 123; crossed with Southdown, 51, 70Missionary farming, 9, 10, 23–5Navigators bring seeds and stock, 3Nelson, 28, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 63, 68New Plymouth, 28, 40–1New South Wales, stock from, 9, 24, 37, 41, 43New Zealand and Australian Land Company, 89, 93New Zealand Company, 25–30, 35, 37, 39, 40–3, 54, 59; its emigrants, 26–30, 34–7, 127New Zealander,22North Auckland, pin point erosion in, 125Northbourne, Lord, 126–8Noxious weeds, 126Oats,41, 60, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 118Otago, 40, 48, 56, 63, 65, 68, 70, 71, 75–8, 80, 121Otaki, 21Palmerston North, 110, 134Panama canal, 109Pastures, natural, 24–5, 42, 46, 53, 80Pharazyn, C. J., 46Ploughs, 34, 43, 49, 51, 100; introduced, 10, 18, to Nelson, 45, to Wellington, 45Pomare, 8Pork, 38, 117; Maori export of, 4Port Fairy,109Port Molyneux, 40Port Nicholson, see WellingtonPotatoes, 38, 46, 76, 78; export, 84, 119Poultry farming, 117Poverty Bay, 19Pumice land, breaking in, 103–4Rabbits,49, 68Railways, 97–8Reaping machines, 34, 76, 77, 80Reeves, W. Pember, 92Refrigeration, 55, 67, 68, 75, 79, 82, 83, 87–95, 97, 109–10Reid, Donald, 76–7, 85, 86Research, agricultural, 109–11Rhodes, Capt. W. B., 25Rotation of crops, 21, 32, 81Rotorua, 14Ruakura farm, 135Ruatara, 5, 6, 7St Leonard's, 61, 62, 64, 65Scab, 46, 61–2, 63, 64, 67Scandinavians at Dannevirke and Norsewood, 96–7Science helping farmer, 111–2, 124Scientific and Industrial Research, Department of, 111Seed drills, 31, 32, 34, 77Self-sufficient farming, 24, 38–9, 98, 119, 129Separator, centrifugal, 94, 108Shearing, 46, 58, 64, 106Sheep, 15, 16, 19, 25, 32–3, 40, 41, 42, 46–7, 48, 49, 50–1, 53–6, 58–74, 78, 80, 84, 102, 105, 107, 130; on terms, 59; population, 90, 93Siegfried, André, 104, 122Sinclair, F., 39Snow-storms, 67, 68Social opportunities, 136–8Soya bean, 132Spotting, 50, 55Squatters, 46–7, 50, 52, 55–6, 71–3, 85, 93, 98State marketing, 113–5Station amusements, 72; life, 71–4Story of New Zealand, The,35Studholme, J., 80, 82Subsidies, 130–1Swaggers, 73Swainson, William, 14, 19Taranaki,56, 95–6, 110taro,3Taupo, 14, 15, 16, 17Threshing machines, 24, 34, 76, 85timo,3Tobacco-growing, 62, 117Top-dressing, 109Townshend, Lord, and Norfolk rotation, 32, 33Tuhoe tribe, 1Tull, Jethro, invents seed-drill, 31Turnips, 32, 49, 82, 103Tussock, burning off, 65Tutira, 65–7, 90Vavasour, W., 46Vogel, Sir Julius, 75, 97Waikato, 14, 15, 17, 20, 57Waikouaiti, 40, 140Waimate farm, 10, 24Waimea, 49Waipu, Nova Scotian settlement, 97, 140Wairarapa, 45, 53, 58, 63, 71; stocked, 46Wairau, 47Wakefield, Edward, 74, 97–8Wakefield, E. G., 25, 42Wakefield, Col. W., 25, 26Wallaceville laboratory, 111, 134Wangaehu valley, upper, 101Wanganui, 35, 36Ward, Joseph, diary of, 46, 68Weeds, 21Weld, Sir F., 47, 57–9, 60, 67, 70, 71Wellington (Port Nicholson), 26, 27, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 46, 47Wheat, 6, 7, 24, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 46, 49, 51, 67, 69, 75–85, 87, 88, 93, 105, 117–8; exported, 78, 81, 82; prices, 81Wheat in New Zealand,81, 105Wheat Research Institute, 110Wild dogs, 40, 46, 63Women's Division of Farmers' Union, 138Women's Institutes, 138Woodville, 100–2Wool export, 25, 38, 47, 51, 57, 87, 107, 114, 116Woolsheds, 62, 63–4Workers' Educational Association, 139Yate, Rev. T., 10Young Farmers' Clubs, 135, 138
The Type Used In This Book Is MonotypeAldine BemboOf Which the Text Is Set In 13 Point * The TypographyWas Arranged ByJ. C. Beaglehole * The whole was printed and bound in New Zealand byWhitcombe & Tombs LimitedChristchurch