"Avenel Station," Plains Folk #468 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

I've seen some showcase farms and some fancy ranches, but I've never seen anything quite like Avenel Station, at Miller's Flat, in Central Otago, New Zealand.

The proprietors of Avenel are Marcelle and Pat Garden. Marcelle grew up on a small farm in Switzerland; Pat is a native New Zealand boy. They met through a young farmer exchange program. Marcelle's a wheel on the school board; Pat's Chairman of the High Country Subsection of New Zealand Federated Farmers.

Everywhere we went in the farm country of New Zealand, we learned something, and here's what we learned at Avenel: There is more than one way to live well with the land.

Here in western America, our ideas about how we should treat the land have been shaped, whether we know it or not, by the academic science of grasslands ecology. Grasslands ecology was invented at the University of Nebraska about a century ago. As a pure science, it eventually led to the applied science of range management. Most folks think pretty highly of range management specialists, although some cattle people refer to them as "prairie fairies."

Our general way of thinking about the prairie is that you have to be gentle with it. We're concerned about "pressure" on the prairie, especially grazing pressure. We figure that if grassland begins to get run down, then the answer is to reduce the grazing and let it recover.

That's why it was such a shock a few years ago when that Rhodesian fellow, Allan Savory, came over here in his tweeds and said that to keep grassland in good shape, you have to put lots of hooved animals on it and tear the heck out of it now and then.

These New Zealanders are a tweedy lot, too, and they have their own ideas about handling grassland. "Development" is the key word. Operators such as the Gardens don't just graze off what happens to grow. They develop their pastures, breaking out the easy slopes, seeding them with mixes of English grasses and clovers. On the high tussock grasslands they use aerial seeding and aerial topdressing. Judicious, carefully planned burns also play a role in maintenance of the tussock.

A drive over Avenel in the ute provides proof that development, under careful stewardship, can fashion a garden in the grasslands. The intensively developed pastures are emerald, swards like fur on some reclining animal. Here and there, where bits of slope are too steep for pasture development, stands of pines and eucalypts thrive. In the higher country the tussock tallgrass is rank, and other grasses and herbs prosper under the protection of the tussocks. This is stable, productive land. It is not prairie, not wilderness. It is a garden, Gardens' garden.

The sheep are Romney crosses. The cattle are Angus, with Frisian bulls. The deer herd is red deer captured from feral stocks. Impressive livestock all around--but it's the condition of the land and vegetation that impresses me.

Judging from the statements of political lobbyists, there are just two approaches to the land. You either preserve it, make it a park, or you exploit it, make it a desert. At Avenel we saw that there is another choice. You can make it a garden.

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