Pasture, present and future – A brief history of pastoralism in New Zealand
Surprisingly little has been written about the history of pastoralism in New Zealand, despite its huge economic importance. Professor Tom Brooking, from Otago University, explores the development of pastoralism in New Zealand.
Sales of meat, wool, hides, butter, cheese and tallow earned 93 percent of New Zealand’s export income at their peak in the early 1920s. These products along with venison and fish still constitute our biggest export earners, outstripping the unpredictable tourist industry in most years. Yet much of this fundamentally important story is described only in very outdated material, scattered through local and family histories, hidden in university theses across a range of disciplines including history, geography, sociology, anthropology, agricultural science and ecology, or locked up in official reports which are hard for most to decipher.
The outlines of the development of pastoral farming are, however, clear. Six main chronological phases can be readily identified even if there is a degree of overlap between them.
Early experimentation
First, a long experimental phase lasted from about 1845 to 1882, during which wool production outstripped wheat farming as the key engine of the colonial economy. Wealthy settlers opened up the southern North Island for sheep farming from the late 1840s before moving into the South Island in the early 1850s. By the time gold production peaked around 1865, New Zealand had become something of a giant sheep run, carrying more than nine million animals.
This first phase involved dramatic ecological modification of New Zealand’s landscape. Firing the high country tussock and running sheep where ruminants had never grazed before brought about a rapid ecological transformation. The complex under-story of plants and the unseen microbial community experienced massive disruption and biological carrying capacity fell. Chronic rabbit infestation from the 1870s exacerbated soil erosion. Despite such difficulties, farmers adjusted their practice to cope with very different environmental conditions from those of Britain and Australia.
Maori meantime, who had become successful grain farmers by developing their long-established gardening skills, struggled with unfamiliar stock animals, under-capitalisation and land loss.
The advent of refrigeration and the first grasslands revolution
Refrigeration revolutionised New Zealand farming as settlers converted New Zealand into Britain’s specialist grassland farm. Initially, this transition proved difficult because cumbersome technology made exporting frozen meat and butter difficult and expensive. The great majority of settlers lacked the capital and expertise to convert bush, swamp and tussock into pasture. Most had to learn from scratch how to become dairy farmers. Low prices for wool, meat and butter persisted until 1896 and compounded their problems, until falling shipping costs and the rising standard of living of the British working classes came to their rescue.
In the 1880s, the New Zealand Government helped struggling settlers make the transition to modern farming by bringing in Danish, Scottish and Canadian experts on dairy farming. The Department of Agriculture, set up in 1892, provided further advice and instituted rigorous quality control regimes. From 1894, the Liberal Government offered cheap loans under the Advances to Settlers scheme, and worked with big business to subdivide greater estates into middle-sized family farms.
Taranaki dairy farm, c. 1900
Part of Pascoe, John Dobree 1908-1972:Photographic albums, prints and negatives
(PAColl-0783) Photographic Archive: Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New
Zealand
The Government, farmers and seed merchants also worked hard to lay down artificial English pastures (mainly rye grass, cocksfoot and white and red clover). By 1920 about 18 million acres in New Zealand had been covered in the green swards of England. Remarkably, this area was greater than the entire pasture lands of England itself. Some historians have labelled this achievement the “first grasslands revolution”.
Once the land was cleared, the major problem for farmers proved to be declining soil fertility. Farmers and agricultural scientists struggled to find a single, cheap and easy to use artificial fertiliser. Waste from the rapidly increasing number of freezing works proved more effective and cheaper than Chilean guano and safer than blood and bone from India (which sometimes contained anthrax) – but such fertiliser had to be augmented by slag from German factories. When the slag dried up during the First World War, the search was stepped up for alternatives.
The second grasslands revolution, consolidation and the Depression
Acquiring cheap phosphate supplies from Nauru in 1920 ushered in the so-called “second grasslands revolution” and confirmed New Zealand as Britain’s specialist, far-distant stock farm.
Britain had learned during the First World War that food from its colonies proved critical in the defeat of Germany. British officials and scientists came to New Zealand to help increase agricultural productivity. In the case of grassland farming, New Zealand led Britain rather than the other way around. Famed agrostologist (agricultural botanist) Sir George Reginald Stapledon, who visited in 1926, became a follower of the powerful agricultural scientist and bureaucrat, Bruce Levy. Under Levy’s influence British farming came to rely much more heavily on rye grass after Stapledon’s visit.
This third period of development saw an entrenching of earlier patterns and the centralising of dairy factories, made possible by motor transport. But farmers struggled between the wars, despite increases in productivity resulting from improved technology and agricultural science (which came with the establishment of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in 1926 and Massey Agricultural College in 1927, along with an upgrading of Lincoln, founded in 1878). Prices plummeted in the early 1920s and again in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
As a result, the overall cultivated area declined somewhat as marginal farms reverted to so-called “scrub” and erosion ravaged the east coast of the North Island in 1938. Inflated land prices, induced by the high prices paid for wool, butter, cheese and meat under the commandeer system during the First World War, bequeathed hefty debts to many returned soldiers who became settlers. About a third of these men failed (meaning, of course, that two-thirds succeeded or got by). This failure, although exaggerated by mythology, proved the greatest in New Zealand’s relatively short farming history.
In the 1940s, the Labour Government determined that farming would be given much more assistance in adjusting to the traumas of post-war conditions than had been the case in the 1920s. World War Two induced high prices, but also ran down the industry to a considerable extent. What turned it around – especially in the South Island, which had reached its environmental limits as early as 1900 – was a better means of delivering super phosphate to the high country; that is, aerial topdressing.
The third grasslands revolution and the golden age of pastoral farming
The Korean War wool boom also helped revive farming and a record number of farms were in operation by the late 1950s. Sheep numbers soared from 32 million in 1949 to 70 million by 1980, and cattle numbers from four to nearly eight million.
Farm amalgamation accompanied the resurgence in sheep farming and South Island farmers closed the gap on the larger North Island flock. Beef cattle numbers also increased significantly.
Britain’s negotiations with the European Economic Community, and the collapse of commodity prices from 1967, forced further efficiencies. Many smaller dairy farms disappeared along with scores of local dairy factories. Early attempts at diversification occurred from the late 1960s, including farm forestry, the domestication of deer for venison production and growing kiwifruit.
Challenges of the neo-liberal era, 1984–2000
The grasslands revolutions and high productivity could not overcome difficulties in marketing produce, especially at a time of collapsing prices and escalating labour and fuel costs.
The then Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas, forced further efficiencies by completely removing farm subsidies. Douglas disagreed with earlier views that New Zealand could expand its animal production exponentially, and instead hoped that stock farming would become a “sunset” industry.
Sheep numbers fell substantially to under 50 million and machinery began to replace labour. Farmer confidence and rural communities shuddered and shed even more population.
New Zealand’s stock farmers, apart from those with very high debt levels, defied the experience of other western farming industries by surviving without subsidies. Meantime new markets were slowly opening up in Asia and Europe for increasingly sophisticated products.
Two women crutching sheep, 1940s
Part of Original photographic prints and postcards from file print collection,
Box 12 (PAColl-6348)
The dairy boom, 1995 to the present
Since 1995, dairy farming has boomed while deer farming has struggled. Sheep farming revived rather spectacularly around 2000. Dairying, assisted by irrigation, has once again moved into traditional sheep farming areas such as North Otago and Canterbury. Herd sizes have expanded dramatically, with some operating several thousand animals on large farms. High commodity prices encouraged this development, which has placed a strain on New Zealand’s water resources and created new challenges in protecting lowland water quality.
Questions now loom as to the sustainability of farming in the face of rising fuel costs, reliance on imported oil and dependence on expensive inputs such as fertiliser. Yet New Zealand stock farmers have overcome many challenges before. Provided they can continue to move towards more sustainable farming methods and keep marketing their products with skill, they should succeed in a hungry world.
| Professor Tom Brooking Otago University |
|
| Professor Tom Brooking has
a personal chair in History at Otago University, and is a part of the
university’s Sustainable Agriculture Research Cluster. Professor Brooking has
expertise in the history of rural society, land use and environmental change. He
is the author of six books and numerous articles including a biography of
Liberal Party land reformer Jock McKenzie, an environmental history of New
Zealand and a book on the making of rural New Zealand society. |
 |
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