Changed Outlook On Mackenzie Urged

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30962, 19 January 1966, Page 1

Changed Outlook On Mackenzie Urged

The Mackenzie Country should not be looked on by the public as merely a series of kilowatt storage tanks, said Dr. K. F. O’Connor, officer-in-charge of the Lincoln station of the Crasslands Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, yesterday.

Pastoral development of this region might yet put to shame much of the land development done in New Zealand in recent years, he said. A relatively few cusecs of water put into well-designed stock water channels might benefit the nation more than if it were put through the turbines at Benmore and other power stations.

A major objective must be integrated use of water for electricity generation, pastoral production, soil fertility improvement and. where necessary, supplementary irrigation.

Dr. O'Connor said I hat five years ago he caused some i eyebrows to be raised when , he estimated the production I potential of the better soils [ in the high country as roughly equal to five tons of hay a year. Now, only four years after the beginning of an intensive experiment in the Mackenzie and Ahuriri, it had been found that this estimate had been surpassed by more than 50 per cent. In the 1964-65 season the production of herbage under intermittent hard grazing, with the use of 3cwt of sulphur superphosphate an acre a year, had ranged from about 60001 b of dry matter an acre at Tara Hills to 11,0001 b on a moraine soil at Pukaki and 17.0001 b on nearby alluvial soil. STANDARDS ELSEWHERE Dr. O’Connor said that 90001 b to 12,0001 b of dry matter an acre was a common range for improved pastures in lowland areas from Waikato to Southland. Mackenzie production, therefore, was respectable by standards applicable in any other part of the country. On all the experimental sites, regardless of initial fertility or fertiliser treat-

ment. Dr. O’Connor said.! there had been a gain from; hard grazing over a lax sys* tern of grazing. This demonstrated the importance of the principle so well described by the late Dr. P. D. Sears, a former director of the Grasslands Division—“ You have got to eat grass to grow more' grass."

STOCK CARRYING With fertility developed in the basin areas for production of hay and other feed crops for winter use, and with thorough development of pastures on unploughable hill country, it now seemed that a carrying capacity on improved lands of six to eight sheep to the acre might not be out of reach. The sooner such stocking rates were reached the sooner he would be able to revise these estimates upwards, he added, referring to the fertility building contribution of more and more stock once the process had been initiated. It appeared, he said, that on some areas near Pukaki which were threatened by inundation through the raising of lake levels, a stocking rate of more than five sheep to the acre had already been reached in farm practice. PUBLIC OPINION Pastoral development of the Upper Waitaki was being held back, Dr. O’Connor said, because there was an adverse climate of opinion for land development under the present system of private leasehold tenure. There was a favourable climate for hydroelectric construction pro-

grammes and for land development by Government departments for closer settlement, but there was not such a climate for development of the large holdings, the size of which might well be economically necessary in the tough and variable climate of the high country. THE “BLIND"

At the heart of the trouble was an immense and apparently resistant layer of public ignorance. He did not think that the men and women in the Mackenzie Country were guilty in this respect. Most of them knew the prospects, and though not all of them shared the same ambitions, some of them had been so far out in front in pastoral improvement that the ■ scientists had had their work cut out to catch up. The trouble lay with people from all walks of life who travelled "blind” at 60 miles an hour from Burke’s Pass to Mount Cook, who could not see the sheep on the country because they were not washed white a s in Southland and in the Manawatu, and who could not see the green clover sward under the brown blurr of the tussocks because they never looked. These people went with their families and friends to Benmore or Aviemore, where they received a short instruction on how to block a river and generate electricity, and went back to their homes rightly impressed with the wonders of engineering but with the erroneous impression that the rest of their tour was through a relatively valueless near-desert. There were also many in New Zealand who stopped I learning about their country when they left their geography classroom for the last time, if they had heard anything about the tussock grasslands they might have remembered “12m acres, 2m sheep, some Blusterers, yarns about snowraking and dogs and a freebooter called Mackenzie, and perhaps something about rai>i bits and soil erosion.” : So long as the Mackenzie was considered solely a romantic element in the country's national lore it could be exj pected that its pastoral development would be slow or even would not exist. By all means the colourful past of the region should be remembered, but its future should not be denied by picturing it just as a series of kilowatt storage tanks. WATER FOR STOCK As on the Canterbury plains a few decades ago, the introduction of intensive grazing management in the Upper Waitaki basin depended on the distribution of stock water For this reason close attention would oe given to the report on the water needs of the Mackenzie and other areas at present being prepared by an inter-departmental committee, for if the future stock water needs of the region were not adequately provided for at the planning stage the nation would risk grave economic loss.

A fresh look at the arithmetic of water in the Upper Waitaki catchment would make it possible to take the first step in a genuine effort to create a climate of public opinion that would foster whole-hearted and widespread land development for optimum use of this area in the interests of the nation.