FROM SEA TO SEA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 397, 31 January 1947, Page 14

FROM SEA TO SEA

By

SUNDOWNER

ROM Thames to Raglan as a gull flies may be a little more than 50 miles. As a car goes it is approximately 100 miles and, with the exception of some rough hills near the West coast, is one big dairy farm. There is no doubt in the minds of its occupiers that it is the most important farm in New Zealand, and it fs easy to believe that it is the richest. It may even be true, as I was told in a hotel at Te Aroba, that the triangle joining Paeroa, Matamata, and Hamilton produces one-third of the Dominion’s total income, It would be a tedious business to check a claim like that, and profitless to prove it wrong -like plumbing our legion of bottomless lakes, If believing that they are bottomless makes us more reverential New Zealanders, the balance is on the profit side if we go on believing it; and if by taking the necessary trouble I made it clear that the income of that big farm is not a third of our total but only a fourth or a fifth or a sixth, my labours would not be appreciated in the rest of the Dominion, and would smell like forgotten fish all the way from Paeroa to Cambridge. Fortunately there is nothing in me that ever wishes to question local enthusiasm. I accept it at its face value, and if it wears a little thin later I know that~it has served its original purpose of delivering somebody from pessimism. I know, too, that records are achieved at a price. They might think in a hotel that Thames-Waikato grass turns to gold; as it does. But I heard something of the cost of the transmutation from a woman in a motor camp. With her husband and her son she was milking 96 cows a few years ago, But she was on the plains where the ground was always wet in winter, The cows came into the shed caked with mud, and mud was their bed when they lay

down at night. So they "blew out," as she put it, in three years, and cost on an average £10 to replace. "You didn’t breed your replacements?" "Yes, we did that, too, but you often get caught short. Besides it is no joke rearing calves. I usually kept about 40, and took a lot of trouble with them. But men won’t help a woman with calves." "Why not?" "They think it’s women’s work. Anyhow they hate calves. Most of them hate cows too, I had to go to the sheds every day to keep the peace, The cows

were on their nerves and my husband told me that if I didn’t come down and help there would be murder some day. So of course I went." "And did your house-work too?" "Yes) the house and the calves; You know what it is on a dairy farm-meals at all hours, with house-cleaning, sewing, and mending when you can find time. I was in the sheds twice a day washing udders and teats. I bailed all the calves at feeding time, so that the greedy ones would not rob the others. I cooked and scrubbed and darned and patched, and then crawled into bed tired out." "You would at least sleep well." "Sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t. You can be too tired to sleep. But the boys often fell asleep half-way through their tea." "In the end you broke down?" "Only when my boy went to the war and got killed, We struggled on a bit longer, but it was hopeless." "You could not get labour?" "No one could during the war, but dairy-farmers never can, I’ve been away from it now for three years and don’t feel so bitter about it, but those cows nearly drove us mad." Bs Bo a HAT was one encounter on my sea-to-sea journey (which, though a good car would do it in three hours, took me 10 days). Here is another, set down just as it happened. I passed a man not far out of Thames cutting buttercups with a scythe, and went back to talk to him, Was this an anIF THEY nual business, I° LEAVE US asked, or something ALONE new? I was a South Islander, and had never seen anything like it before. "What part of the South Island?" "Canterbury and Otago." "That’s dry, isn’t it? You won't get buttercups where it’s dry." "Yes, fairly dry, Twenty to forty inches of rain. How much do you get here?" "I don’t know, but I think twice as much," ; "Do you need a lot of rain here?" "Well, we do and we don’t. Too much rain makes a bog of it again. But if we get no rain at all for a month or two we get into a very bad way." "Ts it permissible to ask what land here is worth-not your farm, but land generally in this district?" "Well, I gave £60 for this some years ago. It’s worth about the same to-day." "It’s good land that is worth £60." "This is good land." "Yes, I can see that. Do you have to help it out a bit?" "Top-dress?" "Yes." "Of course. Everybody top-dresses. But we can’t always get enough to put on," "Do you need extra feed in winter?" "Yes, it’s cold in winter, and the paddocks are pretty bare. But we have to make hay or ensilage at this time of year to get rid of surplus growth." "So your winter feed is not altogether an extra?"

"It’s extra labour, but if we ran enough stock to eat all the grass in summer, they’d starve in winter." "All in all you get through pretty well, There’s not much wrong with dairyfarming on country like this." _ "Only mortgages, and I don’t keep one." Been all your life here?" "Here and round about. I was born in Thames, My grandfather came there from Cornwall," "A miner?" "Not here. He went into the carrying business." "Then bought land?" "A little." "Which your father made a little more?" "Yes," "And now you have this beautiful farm without a mortgage. You're on top of the world," "I’m all right if they leave me alone." "But nobody can touch a man without a mortgage." ' "The Government can," "You mean tax you more?" "I mean take my farm." "Oh, I see. You're worried about that, are you?" "Not worried perhaps, but watching them." "Are your neighbours watching them too?" ‘ "Some are and some are not. A lot of them have mortgages," "Well if I owned your farm I don’t think I would lie awake worrying about jt." "Have you ever owned a farm?" *No." "A business then?" "No," "Do you own your own house?" "A very small one." "Nothing else?" "Not much more. Nothing that you would mortgage your farm to buy." "I wouldn't mortgage it for anything." "Neither would I if I owned it. But I wouldn’t mortgage my sleep either worrying about it." (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) "Are you just having a holiday?" "Just having a look at your district. I was through here in 1918 but hadn’t seen it since. Did you plant those weeping willows?" "Yes, you can’t beat them for shade in summer, but it was a mistake to plant them near the drains. You're fighting them all the time." "But they’re worth a day’s work now and again aren’t they?" "T suppose so." "And a little watching." "Yes, perhaps they are." "Like a good farm without a mortgage, eh?" He looked at me a little suspiciously, then burst out laughing, and I thought it a good moment to say good-bye. But I have thought a lot about him since and wish I could feel that anyone knows a better answer to such men than telling them that Governments legislate for majorities and not for minorities, and that second-rate farmers like second-rate workmen usually make life difficult for the first-rate. %* %* * ‘THE buttercups I saw him attacking ' with a scythe-it turned out that he was merely clearing the side of a ditch ~-were a part of the biggest crop I have ever seen in my own life, and I hope the biggest anyone else has seen in New Zealand. I don’t think I exaggerate if I say that between Thames and Cambridge it was not hundreds of acres that I saw yellow with BUTTERCUPS buttercups, or thousands, but tens of thousands; and by yellow I mean so yellow that paddock after paddock showed no green grass at all. It would have delighted eyes less full of butterfat than mine usually are, but I could not help wondering how much less grass it meant per acre and what the effect must have been on the flavour of the milk and butter. But only one farmer admitted that there was any effect at all. The man with the scythe agreed that he would sooner be without them-that they were smothering the clover and that stock didn’t like them. They were especially bad this year, he told me, because of the long drought last summer, the mild winter that followed with almost no frosts, and then all the recent rain, Why frost should be worse for buttercups than for grass he did not say, or why a drought should be better (though I could almost answer that one myself), but it comforted him to have a reason for a situation he could not

control and for which he was not himself responsible. Another farmer said that sheep would cure them but that "cows wouldn’t follow sheep." He had tried and it was no use. I asked if he meant that there was not enough grass for cows after’ sheep had eaten a paddock bare. But he didn’t mean that. He meant that cows do.’t like sheep and don’t thrive on gtass to which sheep have had access at all. That was why he laughed at me when I asked if sheep and cows could not run together in buttercup country. A bank manager with many farming contacts assured me that buttercups are "no detriment at all." In a week or two they would all have disappeared and that generally was the farmers’ attitude too. When I suggested to one of them that only the flowers would have disappeared he made it clear that he thought I was being smart. In the end I tried an inspector of noxious weeds, who agreed that "the situation was very bad this year," but assured me that his district was not "bad in general." He had no remedy for buttercups except sheep, which were "no good in this country’-he meant less profitable than cows-but added that "they had word" of a remedy from America, treatment with hormones, which they were told would clean up their country at about £2 an acre. I did\ not ask if he had heard of Dr. Smith’s "comedy hormonists." (to be continued)