Studying a slide portrait of Geoff Thomson I took at Earnslaw Station,
First I had to pick up some basic geography. There stands Geoff in my slide, dressed typically for a high country sheep farmer--khaki shorts, long-sleeved shirt, gumboots. Around him sprawl emerald flats grazed by Perendale sheep and Angus cattle. Behind him loom the tan, tussock-clad mountain slopes. The color scheme is green and brown, with flecks of white and black.
Like the native grasslands of North America, the tussock grasslands of
The high country is carved into stock raising units known as pastoral runs. The runs are Crown land, but runholders such as Geoff Thomson occupy them on long-term, renewable pastoral leases.
Most runs contain some flat river valley land that is intensively developed--seeded with English forages, topdressed with superphosphate, intensively stocked.
They contain much larger areas of rugged tussock land. Tussock grasses are relatively unpalatable to livestock, but important to the high country environment.
Up to the mid-1980s much tussock land was developed productively through aerial seeding and topdressing. More recently, however, the withdrawal of agricultural subsidies and the depression of the agricultural economy have led runholders to give up development of tussock land.
Now, looking more closely, let me try to read what's written on Geoff's face. Runholders tend to have faces of the sun-tanned, wind-burned variety, but Geoff's also has some worry lines on it. A civil engineer, he and wife Diana came home to take up the family station in the late 1970s.
Those were flush times, but after only a few years a change of government, coupled with a decline in agricultural exports, hit hard. Those are traditional troubles for farmers, though. What worries Geoff more is the pressure of modern society on his family's way of life--pressure that would seem quite familiar to, say, pasture people in east-central Kansas, or ranchers in southern Saskatchewan, both areas the focus of modern movements for grassland preserves.
After the Thomsons lost half the run to the
Unfortunately, as he sees it, most New Zealanders consider the freeholding of Crown land in the high country as too radical.
Many fellow runholders fear the proposition, for it
would force them into heavy capital investment. More to the point, most urban
New Zealanders--dwellers in
Geoff understands the sentiment. "My own experience living in big cities told me that if you get a chance to get out into the country, you take it," he says. But he doesn't believe that access for the public requires an end to the pastoral way of life.
No good answers to these dilemmas emerged from our long conversations, so we headed over the hill to see Geoff's folks, Reta and Tommy, and see what they could tell us from longer experience.