Advisory Services and the Grasslands Revolution 1924-1929
If more space has to be devoted to the Fields Division in the 1920’s it is not the result of an assumption that its work was more important than the others, but because it was more directly involved in the "grasslands revolution", and the diffusion of the farm management ideas that flowed from it. The fact that Cockayne was directly in charge of the Fields Division between 1923 and 1929, and that he had such a strong influence on the ideas that influenced the evolution of grassland farming, makes his views of special importance. For example, they were set forth in 1925 in an appendix to a report by a committee set up by the Minister of Lands on the deterioration of Crown Land in inland Taranaki and parts of the King Country (AJHR 1925). Farmers, including ex-soldiers, found great difficulty in coping with reversion and as many of them had always lacked the capital needed for development their prospects grew increasingly precarious. The Committee was concerned only with Crown leases or with those who had recently purchased their blocks from the Crown. Bruce Levy, the Fields Division’s agrostologist — a recently coined term — was a member of the Committee.
Cockayne finds his metier: Its report was reasonably optimistic about the long term prospects for this class of country, but in the meantime the main recommendations were that substantial assistance be made available to those at risk. Cockayne’s views were noteworthy, not only for his comments on hill country management, but for his suggestion as to the form assistance should take. In this respect his influence was felt for many years. He began by pointing out that "hill country grassland can be divided into two great groups — that where the objective of management is to maintain and increase the percentage of the best grazing grasses such as rye grass, cocksfoot, poa protensis, crested dogstail and clover and that where the objective is to secure and maintain as complete a grass sward as possible irrespective of what grasses it may be composed of. In the first case the objective is to keep out as much as possible grasses such as danthonia and brown top which, when dominant are not conducive to high carrying capacity of wet stock. In the other case the objective is to avoid dominance of fern or scrub".
He also stated that topdressing was expensive and generally confined to the flats and lower slopes, leaving the steeper country to revert. The same process was encouraged when occupiers, endeavouring to generate revenue, began running dairy cows or a breeding ewe flock. Cockayne recommended that no rent should be charged for land which had completely reverted, that expenditure on fencing seed and fertilisers be accepted in lieu of rent or interest, that mortgages should be scaled down to the point that they did not exceed the current value of the land, and servicing a mortgage prevented the occupier from gaining a reasonable income. Other recommendations were that Government advance money for the purchase of cattle - to be used as an aid to management, rather than a source of revenue — and that free railage of fertiliser be introduced.
Suggested remedies: A special board to investigate all cases was suggested. These various ideas were incorporated in some form or another in Government policy over the next 40 to 50 years, e.g. the 1937 mortgage adjustment legislation, but it was hardly surprising that they were a bit much for the Government in 1925. Some help was provided in the Deteriorated Lands Act 1926, by way of deferment of interest and rent payments and the Lands Department also established a demonstration farm to show the possibilities of managing land subject to reversion. Fields Division staff, including Levy, laid down a number of trials on this farm though it would be hard to show they had much long term impact. In his 1926 annual report Cockayne confined himself to stating that trials in inland Taranaki had "...given much useful information" and that "...there are many points that should be investigated". (AJHR 1926).
All these statements help to show the state of the art in the mid 1920s, even if they deal with a class of country that had generated a series of seemingly intractable problems. No part of the country has been more sensitive to any worsening of the farmers’ terms of exchange than inland Taranaki.
Moves were made by Government, however, to reduce the price of fertiliser to the farmer. Since the signing of the Nauru agreement [1920] farmers had been hoping for a large drop in superphosphate prices. Though this did take place, it took rather longer than many farmers expected and not until new superphosphate plants came into operation in various parts of the country in the early 1920’s. Sales speeded up markedly in 1926/27, when a price war erupted over a claim by the NZ Co-op Dairy Company for a rebate. With the ex-works price dropping to less than £4 per ton farmers boosted their purchases. When the manufacturers resolved their differences, the Government introduced a rail subsidy the cost of which was shared by the Agriculture and Railways Departments.
For the 1927/28 financial year some £81,500 was included in the Agriculture Estimates, about one fifth of the total vote (AJHR, 1928). The combined subsidy had the effect of reducing rail freights up to 40%. Though hill country farmers a long way from a works must have been helped, the principal beneficiaries would have been dairy farmers in the Waikato or Taranaki not too far from a railway station. This system of subsidies which, in some form or another, had a long life, did not cause much discussion. Concessional freight rates to help farmers had a long history and it may have been considered more satisfactory to introduce an identifiable subsidy rather than arbitrarily fix freight rates an a level below actual costs.
Fertiliser goes on the hill country: In his 1929 report, Cockayne expressed satisfaction that for 1928/29 some 2,250,000 acres had been topdressed, but went on to say that the goal should be 6m acres. Rather rashly, he predicted that at the then rate of increase this figure should be reached within the next decade. Collection of statistics of the area topdressed began in 1926/27, when the area was 1.9m acres. The figures also suggest that farmers were applying heavier dressings as well as extending the area, and at this time about five times as much was spread in the North Island than in the South Island.
Coinciding with the expansion of topdressing, the Fields Division began to devote more attention to experimental work and to the interpretation of trials. The 1926 report included the following comment "co-operative experimental work has, as in previous years, been mainly confined to manurial trials. In general, these are of a demonstrational character, but in some localities they are conducted on the most modern lines of field experimentation where the results can be accurately interpreted on statistical lines. This latter method means greatly increased work, but the results are much more satisfactory from an instructional standpoint. It is hoped to have this form of experimentation more generally used as fresh experiments are put in hand".
Experimental design introduced: Was this statement implied, was that not many conclusions could be deduced from the trials that had taken place up to then! With the appointment of A.[Abe] Hudson as Crop Experimentalist in 1925, the design of experiments and the interpretation of the results was put on a more rigorous basis. Other details in the 1926 report included a description of experimental work at Puwera near Whangarei, which indicated that reasonable pastures could be established on gum land at a cost of £15 per acre, provided that £1 per acre was spent annually on top dressing. At Marton the emphasis was on clover establishment and top dressing; at Ashburton on wheat varieties; at Winton on management systems in relation to short rotation and permanent pastures and at Galloway on the practicability of dairying on irrigated land. Apart from the cumulative results of the work at Marton, the others could well have been of limited importance; whatever conclusions were reached would have been rendered obsolete by subsequent developments.
Economics introduced: Cockayne also stated in his 1926 report that "in the past, the almost complete lack of knowledge of farm economics in New Zealand has made the work of rational agricultural instruction of great difficulty, but the appointment of an officer during the year to deal with this most important subject has been a matter of great pleasure to me". Fawcett had been engaged as an assistant instructor in Ashburton, after completing a degree in agricultural economics at Cambridge following his war service. In 1925 his analysis of the costs of maintaining a 6 horse team on Canterbury mixed farms was published in the Journal of Agriculture.
Soon after he came to Wellington in 1926 Fawcett must have started work on his dairy farm survey which covered 200 units in the Waikato and Taranaki. The results were published in 1929, and for the first time provided a picture of up-to-date management systems as well as an indication of the extent to which they were being put into practice.
Farm instructors: Most instructors in the 1920’s would have confined themselves to advice on fertiliser applications on pastures as well as on cash and fodder crops, seed mixtures, and pests and plant diseases. Managerial advice, such as it was, would have been based on the experience of progressive farmers in a particular district, adapted to other farmers’ situations. Data from field trials would not have been sufficiently clear-cut to draw too many conclusions, and until the results of soil surveys were available such data would have to be used cautiously. This point was mentioned by Smallfield (1970). He also stressed that there was little information on techniques to get ideas across. The instructor had to develop his own methods and the ones that stayed on the job were those that possessed an affinity for it; others found that it offered little satisfaction.
Contact for Enquiries
Rural Affairs Coordinator
Sector Performance Policy
MAF Policy
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
Wellington
NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 4 894 0675
Fax: +64 4 4 894 0745
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