"The Grasslands of New Zealand," Plains Folk #458 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

Last June I told you that Lotte and I were heading for New Zealand to study the plains country, the tussock grasslands, of that nation. We're back. We've spent most of the past six months holed up in the Turnbull Library, in Wellington, and most of the rest of the time traveling the country, visiting pastoral stations, sheep farms, irrigation projects, and other agricultural enterprises.

So what can you learn from this sort of experience? My agreement with the governments of New Zealand and the United States was that I was to look into a number of topics pertaining to the agricultural history of the South Island of New Zealand, the island that has extensive native grasslands in some ways comparable to ours on the North American plains. I was to investigate things like the use of fire in grassland management; the rabbit as an agricultural pest; fencing, irrigation, and other things that have to do with farm people and their relationship with the land.

We brought back big files of material about all these topics, but from the experience as a whole, we learned one thing in particular: not to take things for granted. If you live and work for a long time in some place, you get in the habit of thinking that life in that place just naturally falls into certain patterns. You don't think to ask whether things had to work out the way they did. You don't consider all the possibilities.

But then, if you go to some other place where the natural circumstances are similar, and you find that people do things differently and think about things differently, it teaches you that the patterns of life are not predestined in either place. We can learn from one another about possibilities. The test of life on the plains is an essay question, and there are many correct answers.

When you take a train the length of the South Island and see more sheep than you ever counted in all your sleepless nights, you realize that the North American range did not necessarily have to be cattle country. When you go to old-fashioned butcher shops and buy abundant, lean, cheap beef, lamb, and pork, you realize that it doesn't necessarily require feed grains, feedlots, and supermarkets to put meat on the table. When you watch a couple of heading dogs bringing a mob of sheep off a mountain, you realize that rodeo is not necessarily the ultimate in pastoral artistry.

And when you talk to a sheepman who laughs, like he was knocked punchy, while recounting how he and the government have spent four million dollars killing rabbits on his station--including shooting them from helicopters--you realize that our problems on the North American plains are not necessarily the worst that can be imagined.

Come along with us over the next few weeks and consider the possibilities, and meet some of the farm people, of New Zealand. We'll put the billy on to boil.

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