"Tapui Farm," Plains Folk #474 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

They fed us mutton roast and mashed potatoes, and for desert, pavlova (more about pavlova in a later column). In my slide-portrait of the family, Pauline, Richard, the boys, and the baby look like the archetypal family farmers. If I were the type to resort to cliches, I would say that the Gares, proprietors of Tapui Farm, in semiarid Central Otago, New Zealand, are the salt of the earth.

They struggle to scrape by raising crossbred sheep and red deer on a small irrigated farm. The irrigation water, which comes to their paddocks via a contour-race system (sorry, I'm not going to try and explain that to flatlanders), requires about the same amount of tending as do the active Gare boys. Irrigation family farming is a twenty-four-hour proposition.

And sometimes it gets even more complicated than that. Sometimes regular folks find themselves in an extraordinary situation, and they have to look inside themselves for old-fashioned things like democracy and self-reliance.

A few years ago New Zealand, like most social democracies around the world, was trying to privatize its economy, getting the government out of all manner of businesses. The government decided it was going to sell off all the irrigation schemes it had built seventy or eighty years earlier, including the Manuherikia Scheme, which served Tapui and all its neighbors.

So down to Alexandra, the closest sizeable town, came a government negotiator, who called the irrigators in and explained that the government was prepared to sell out to them. He said that the irrigation schemes had always lost money, for the water payments from farmers never covered costs, and the government wasn't going to carry them any more. He asked, what would they pay for the works--dams, siphons, flumes, ditches, water rights?

Now, the blokes to whom he delivered this pitch were neither politicians nor businessmen. They were experienced sheep farmers, but they knew little of the operation of the scheme as a whole. Government engineers and racemen had taken care of that, and they had not wanted farmers interfering or asking questions.

So the irrigators got themselves an agribusiness consultant, a young fellow with a laptop computer, who was bilingual--he spoke both accounting and farming. He helped them realize that in fact, they were in a position of strength. The government wanted to get rid of the irrigation schemes, and had admitted that they lost money. Pretty soon the farmers were thinking that instead of paying for the scheme, they should insist that the government pay them to take it.

And that's just the way it went. The government turned the irrigation works over to the farmers and gave them a grant to rehabilitate them and get operations underway. The farmers formed an irrigation cooperative, of which Richard Gare is Secretary. And you know, it works.

It's not without risks. Richard took me around the scheme in his ute. I saw where water was diverted from the Manuherikia Gorge, through a tunnel, and into ditches that cling to rocky hillsides like garlands on a Christmas tree. It looks like disaster--a rockslide, for instance--could happen any time.

On the other hand, water rates are stable, water is being delivered when people want it, and there is a powerful sense of pride abroad in the scheme. When you hear their story, you have to wish people like this well. Sort of makes you want to buy wool.

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