Transcript
WILLIAM: You might have heard about the New Zealand number 8 wire mentality. It refers to this stuff: mass produced steel fencing wire.
MĀNI: This kind of wire was invented in 1855 by an Englishman called Henry Bessemer. It was way cheaper and stronger than any wire invented before.
WILLIAM: …which made it ideal for making fences! And it got popular just as more and more Europeans were migrating to Aotearoa in the 1860s and 70s.
MĀNI: That's why farms in Aotearoa are covered in steel wire fences, while farms in Europe and other parts of the world often have old stone walls or hedges.
WILLIAM: But… where does the whole idea of a number 8 wire mentality come from?
MĀNI: Well, a lot of farms in Aotearoa were pretty remote. If anything broke, farmers often had to fix it themselves. And if you needed something, you sometimes had to make it from scratch!
WILLIAM: …And there was a lot of fencing wire lying around, so they often used that!
MĀNI: Yeah, fencing wire became a metaphor for a rough and ready kind of innovation. It’s tied up in the mythology of New Zealand farming.
WILLIAM: So in this episode we’re going to look at the history of farming in Aotearoa through the lens of innovation.
STING
MĀNI: Innovation in New Zealand agriculture is a lot older than number 8 wire. It goes back to the first people to arrive here.
WILLIAM: Māori found these islands jam packed with birds and seafood, but not many fruit and vegetables.
MĀNI: The thing is, plants in Aotearoa had evolved side by side with birds for millions of years. So they didn’t develop the kinds of fruits and grains which mammals like us enjoy eating.
WILLIAM: But humans are a clever bunch and all through history we’ve found ways of turning plants that are inedible in their natural state, into dinner.
MĀNI: So how did Māori do this when they arrived here?
WILLIAM: In some cases they could rely on Mātauranga Māori, traditional knowledge.
MĀNI: Yeah! For example, tī kouka, the native cabbage tree, was similar to plants in other parts of the Pacific. Māori knew they could bake the stem and roots of the tree as a sugary treat.
WILLIAM: Other plants were less familiar, like karaka.
Māori would have seen birds such as kererū feasting on karaka berries, and were probably quick to try them themselves.
MĀNI: Unfortunately, while those berries are delicious for native birds, they’re poisonous to humans.
WILLIAM: But Māori kept experimenting with karaka and eventually they figured out the berries could be roasted, leaving an edible kernel.
MĀNI: Before long, groves of edible plants like karaka and tī kouka were being planted around settlements where they could be easily harvested.
WILLIAM: But native plants often didn’t produce enough kai to keep everyone full. So Māori in most parts of Aotearoa relied on plants they brought to these islands: taro, uwhi, and most important of all - kūmara.
MĀNI: These tropical plants that would only grow in the warmer parts of the country.
WILLIAM: But Maori worked out that by planting kūmara in raised mounds, adding small stones to the soil, and building stone walls around their gardens they could boost harvests.
MĀNI: You can still see some of these walls today at the Ōtuataua Stonefields near Auckland Airport.
WILLIAM: The stones soaked up the sun’s heat in the day, and radiated it out at night, keeping the tropical kūmara nice and cosy.
MĀNI: …That extended the growing season by up to a month in a much cooler climate.
WILLIAM: Maori also knew kūmara did best in sandy, free-draining soils... like in the tropical Pacific.
MĀNI: To get that sort of soil here they'd first burn the bush to make space for a garden. The ash worked as fertiliser.
WILLIAM: Next, they had to carry a whole lot of sand and gravel to the garden and mix it in with the soil.
MĀNI: Every hectare of kūmara garden needed about 13 hundred cubic metres of sand and gravel.
WILLIAM: The largest kūmara gardens were in the Waikato basin. They covered at least three thousand hectares.
MĀNI: Waikato Māori built these gardens by shifting about four million cubic metres of sand and gravel.
That’s enough to make a sand castle bigger than the sky tower.
WILLIAM: But south of Te Waihora, Lake Ellesmere, it was usually too cold to grow Kūmara even with these innovations.
MĀNI: Instead, Ngāi Tahu hapū preserved seal and bird meat in fat and oil using Pōhā, special airtight bags made from bull kelp.
WILLIAM: It worked the same way tinned meat works, keeping food safe to eat for two or three years. Ngāi Tahu whānau still use pōhā as part of the seasonal tītī or muttonbird harvest.
MĀNI: This sort of know-how was handed down through the generations and encoded in waiata, stories and religion. That made sure proper techniques were followed to get the best harvest.
WILLIAM: But still, adapting from tropical polynesia to temperate Aotearoa was hard work!
MĀNI: That’s why Māori were so enthusiastic about experimenting with new agricultural tech which arrived in Aotearoa after European contact.
WILLIAM: Māori were quick to adopt European technology. From simple stuff like metal shovels and ploughs, to more complex things, like water mills.
Dozens of water mills were built in the 1850s to grind corn and wheat into flour.
MĀNI: Although Māori were less willing to embrace some European techniques. For example, many were reluctant to use manure as fertiliser because of concerns it might contaminate kai and violate tapu.
WILLIAM: But on the whole, Māori in the 1840s and 50s innovated successfully with European crops, animals and technologies.
They dominated Aotearoa’s food export business up till the 1860s, feeding hungry colonists in New Zealand, and Australia as well as themselves.
MĀNI: Meanwhile, early Pākehā farmers had a rocky start…
WILLIAM: In 1840, the New Zealand Company tried to set up a farming settlement in the lower Hutt Valley.
MĀNI: But they didn’t realise they were building on a floodplain. Within a year their crops were destroyed when the river burst its banks.
WILLIAM: Colonists could have saved some time by getting Māori advice on farming in Aotearoa. But instead Pākehā ended up learning those lessons through trial and error.
MĀNI: One thing they learned was that many parts of New Zealand were too steep and wet for growing crops like corn and wheat.
WILLIAM: So, they switched to the type of farming Aotearoa is most famous for… Sheep farming.
MANI: Historically, Kiwi sheep farmers have been an innovative bunch.
The first shearers in Aotearoa used the same method people used back in England, tying the sheep's legs together and cutting the wool by hand.
WILLIAM: But in the 1850s and 60s a new style developed in Australia and New Zealand - leaving the sheep's legs free and clamping the animal between your legs to hold it still.
MĀNI: Suddenly, instead of shearing 35 sheep a day, shearers could get through 70 to 80.
WILLIAM: Then, in the 1880s, the first shearing machines arrived.
MĀNI: And as the South Canterbury Times reported in 1894 - things suddenly got a lot faster.
“Māori shearers appear to know how to get splendid work out of the Wolseley shearing machine. At Whakamarumaru station the other day, a shearer named Harawera put through 204 crossbred sheep from 5 o’clock in the morning till 5 o’clock at night, with two hours out for meals. Another Māori sheared 208 the same day” - South Canterbury Times, January 1894
WILLIAM: Throughout the 20th century, Kiwis were breaking shearing records left and right - most famously by Godfrey Bowen.
MĀNI: Bowen shot to stardom in 1953. He beat a world record by shearing 456 ewes in 9 hours at Opiki in Manawatu.
WILLIAM: The secret was a special shearing method Godfrey invented with his brother. They called it “The Bowen Technique”.
It used long rhythmic movements to put less strain on the shearer while getting more wool off the sheep. The Guardian Newspaper in the UK compared the grace of Bowen’s movements to a world famous ballet dancer.
MĀNI: The technique saw him named the New Zealand Wool Board's official shearing instructor, and he was in hot demand for demonstrations all over the world.
WILLIAM: Bowen went on to found the agrodome near Rotorua after realising farming could be a massive drawcard for international tourism.
MĀNI: He also helped organise the first Golden Shears shearing tournament in 1961.
WILLIAM: But the Bowen Technique was only part of what made kiwi shearers so fast.
They also had a special and incredibly controversial comb. That’s this bit at the top which guides the wool into the blades.
MĀNI: And this is a… controversial… comb?
WILLIAM: Yup, so controversial it triggered a drive by shooting over in Australia in the 1980s.
MĀNI: OK, I've got to know more about this comb!
WILLIAM: So kiwi shearers experimented by using combs which were a bit wider so they could grab more wool.
MĀNI: Not sounding very controversial so far…
WILLIAM: Yeah, it might seem like a minor tweak but it allowed shearers to get through an extra 20 to 30 sheep a day.
The wide comb was quickly adopted all across Aotearoa. But over the Tasman, the Australian sheep shearers union banned the kiwi comb.
Some union leaders feared it might cause injuries to sheep and shearers - or be used to justify cuts in pay and conditions.
MĀNI: Was that true?
WILLIAM: There was no evidence, but the shearers union wouldn't budge.
In the early 1980s gangs of shearers rebelled against the union’s ban on the comb, including many kiwi migrants.
And as Australian author Mark Filmer points out - things got nasty.
“There were fights in pubs and clubs and there were union shearers raiding sheds where the rebel shearers were working. There was an open gun battle in Coleraine. It is a sleepy little town of 1200 people and there's two groups of rival shearing teams firing guns at each other in a suburban street! Two Kiwi shearers got shot and ended up in hospital.” - Mark Filmer, author of Three Steel Teeth, interviewed by Orange City Life.
MĀNI: Wow…
WILLIAM: Yeah, eventually Australian courts stepped in to overrule the ban on Kiwi combs. That decision triggered a ten week strike by the Aussie sheep shearing union.
MĀNI: Huh… controversial combs.
WILLIAM: OK, so what’s our next agricultural innovation?
MĀNI: Gotta do refrigerated shipping right!
WILLIAM: Let’s do it.
MĀNI: So back in the 1860s and 70s sheep farmers were riding high thanks to booming wool prices.
WILLIAM: But the boom didn’t last.
MĀNI: What goes up must come down… Between 1860 and 1900, global wool prices crashed from 16 pence a pound to about five pence.
WILLAM: The entire economic future of New Zealand was in crisis.
MANI: Meanwhile, back in Europe, the population was exploding… In the UK the population nearly tripled from about 15 million in 1800 to over 40 million in 1900.
WILLIAM: Suddenly there were a lot more hungry mouths to feed and European farms struggled to keep up with demand.
MĀNI: Farmers in Aotearoa had tons of sheep, but no way of getting their meat to the people who wanted to eat it.
WILLIAM: They tried tinned mutton - but people didn’t really want to eat it… cos apparently tinned was pretty disgusting.
MĀNI: The best way of keeping meat safe and delicious for a long time is to freeze it.
The first refrigerated ship set sail from Sydney in 1876, but the refrigerator failed and all the meat rotted.
WILLIAM: A few more refrigerated ships were trialled over the next couple of years in Australia and South America.
MĀNI: But the voyage which really changed the game set sail from Dunedin in 1882. It was a 12 hundred ton sailing ship, funnily enough, called the Dunedin.
WILLIAM: The Australian and New Zealand Land Company paid a thousand pounds to outfit the Dunedin with a steam-powered refrigerator.
MĀNI: Then they loaded it up with nearly 5 thousand prime sheep and lamb carcasses at Port Chalmers
On February 15th 1882 it set sail for London.
WILLIAM: The trip was nearly a disaster.
MĀNI: First, sparks from the refrigerator machinery set the sails on fire.
WILLIAM: Then, when the Dunedin arrived in the tropics, the cargo started defrosting because cold air wasn’t circulating properly in the hold.
MĀNI: Captain John Whitson went below deck to cut more air ducts, but he got stuck and almost froze to death.
WILLIAM: Luckily, his crew managed to loop a rope around his leg and drag him to safety.
MĀNI: In the end, it paid off. The Dunedin sold its cargo in London for double the price it could have fetched back here.
WILLIAM: Within ten years there were 17 freezing works in Aotearoa, capable of processing three and half million carcasses a year.
MĀNI: Refrigeration single-handedly saved New Zealand’s economy.
By the 1920s 93 percent of all New Zealand’s exports were some kind of animal product - and a big chunk of that was the meat and dairy exported on refrigerated ships.
WILLIAM: As a government report written in 1916 said:
“the general prosperity and advancement of New Zealand hangs on the slender piston rod of a refrigerating machine.” - Meat-Freezing Works in New Zealand, May 1916.
MĀNI: Refrigeration also had a big effect on the wider structure of the farming industry.
WILLIAM: Many farms stopped mixing sheep farming with growing crops like oats and wheat, and focused solely on farming sheep and cattle.
MĀNI: Higher profit margins and government intervention also shifted Aotearoa from a country dominated by super-wealthy individual landowners, to smaller, family-owned farms.
WILLIAM: And as often happens, one innovation fed another.
Up until the invention of refrigerated shipping, the dominant sheep breed in Aotearoa was the merino.
MĀNI: Everybody knew merino sheep made the best wool.
In fact, when these sheep were first bred in Spain, their wool was so valuable that anyone caught trying to take a merino sheep out of the country could face the death penalty.
WILLIAM: But thanks to refrigerated shipping, Kiwi farmers were now making money from sheep meat as well as wool.
MĀNI: And merino sheep aren’t all that great to eat. Too tough and stringy.
WILLIAM: So, many farmers switched to breeds like Lincolns, Romneys and Leicesters. These were much tastier… but their wool was much less valuable.
MĀNI: So from the 1860s a Scottish migrant called James Little tried to get the best of both worlds.
He experimented crossing Lincolns and Merinos to create a new breed.
WILLIAM: Eventually he succeeded. He bred a sheep that produced wool nearly as good as merino but with much better meat!
MĀNI: Little named his new sheep the Corriedale after the station he worked on near Oamaru in North Otago.
WILLIAM: Today there are about a hundred million Corriedales in the world - making them first equal with Merino as the world’s most popular sheep breed.
MĀNI: In the 1930s agricultural scientist Dr Francis Dry worked at Massey College to create another new sheep breed called the Drysale. It had especially coarse wool - ideal for making carpets.
WILLIAM: And in 1956, Professor Geoffrey Peren, another Massey scientist, created another famous sheep breed - the Perendale. It was ideal for the meat export trade and hardy enough for steep high country stations.
MĀNI: OK, enough sheep talk?
WILLIAM: Yea…
MĀNI: Let's switch to another bunch of innovators: Market Gardeners.
When the gold rush took off in the 1860s, it was pretty tricky to get fresh fruit and veges over to the diggings, so most of the gold miners had to survive on mutton and potatoes.
WILLIAM: When Chinese diggers joined in the gold rush they found this diet absolutely disgusting.
MĀNI: …And many of them decided to do something about it by growing their own fruit and veggies.
WILLIAM: These gardeners imported Chinese techniques of fertilising, irrigating and closely monitoring crops for pests and disease.
MĀNI: The level of care and attention astonished the Tuapeka Times which wrote…
“There is no class of people on the face of the earth that can take more out of a half-acre of good soil than the Chinese—every inch of surface is brought into requisition and nothing is wasted.” - Tuapeka Times, 7 August 1886
WILLIAM: For most of the 20th century, Chinese market gardens dominated the trade.
By 1957 it was estimated three quarters of the leafy greens eaten in Aotearoa came from market gardens run by Chinese New Zealanders.
MĀNI: One particularly famous Chinese agricultural innovator was Chau Tseung - or as he was better known in Aotearoa, Chew Chong.
WILLIAM: Chew Chong came to Otago in 1867 and started off selling scrap metal from the goldfields, a few years later he set himself up as a peddler.
He was wandering through the bush in Taranaki when he noticed a particular kind of fungus growing on the trees: the hakeke or woodear fungus.
MĀNI: Hakeke wasn’t often eaten by Māori or Pākehā, but it is considered a delicacy in many parts of the world, including China.
WILLIAM: So, Chew Chong set himself up as a fungus exporter, paying locals to harvest hakeke and shipping it overseas.
MĀNI: This was great news for locals in Taranaki who were doing it tough in the grips of the Long Depression. Many dairy farmers made more money selling fungus than butter.
WILLIAM: From 1872 to 1883, almost two thousand tons of dried hakeke were exported from Aotearoa. Locals called it “Taranaki Wool” and Taranaki was dubbed “The Fungus Province”.
MĀNI: You might have thought that after refrigerated ships turned up, it was all smooth sailing for kiwi farmers…. But no.
WILLIAM: Right at the time those first ships were sailing in the 1880s and 90s, New Zealand was facing a whole different crisis.
Speaking at a conference in 1905 one farming leader complained
“The land does not now smile with harvest when tickled with a hoe as it did twenty years ago … our pastures do not hold grass so well as they used to.” - Mr P. Pattullo, Otago Daily Times, 19 July, 1905
MĀNI: Many of the people who promoted the colonisation of Aotearoa claimed the soil here was naturally fertile… but that turned out to be wishful thinking.
WILLIAM: As soil science became more sophisticated it was discovered that many areas lacked trace elements like cobalt, molybdenum and copper - and many soils were rapidly losing phosphate and nitrogen through intensive grazing.
As the soil ran out of nutrients, grass died and harvests failed.
MĀNI: These kinds of problems couldn’t be fixed with a bit of number 8 wire - they needed in depth research and experimentation.
WILLIAM: So in the early 20th century the government increased support for existing agricultural training schools like Lincoln College - and established new ones like Massey College, which first opened its doors in 1928.
MĀNI: Scientists worked out the nitrogen problem could be partly fixed by changing our pasture to include more plants like clover - which suck nitrogen out of the air and add it to the soil.
WILLIAM: Phosphate was a tricker problem.
MĀNI: The solution was an artificial fertiliser known as superphosphate. It was invented by European scientists and chemists in the mid-1800s.
WILLIAM: But how were farmers supposed to spread all that fertiliser? Especially on the steep hills which dominated many sheep farms?
MĀNI: Well, in the 1930s a few daredevil pilots experimented dropping superphosphate out of aircraft - inventing what’s now called aerial topdressing.
WILLIAM: After World War Two, in 1949, those early experiments turned into a full-on industry.
Old military aircraft like Tiger Moth biplanes were perfect for dropping fertiliser - and we had a whole bunch of former Air Force pilots with the skills and nerves to do the job.
MĀNI: And they definitely needed those nerves. Flying a few metres off the ground in remote hill country is a dangerous business. A lot of pilots were killed.
WILLIAM: But the risks seemed to be worth it.
In 1985 topdressing had its biggest year ever - three million tonnes of fertiliser were dropped on farms across the country.
MĀNI: The combination of all these innovations saw a massive rise in New Zealand’s agricultural production through the 20th century.
WILLIAM: In the early 1900s there were 20 million sheep in Aotearoa… by 1982 there were 70 million.
MĀNI: Historians call this period of the 20th century New Zealand the Grasslands Revolution.
It’s what made Aotearoa one of the most prosperous countries in the world - especially in the boom years of the 1950s and 60s.
WILLIAM: Agricultural scientists were treated like heroes. As historians Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking wrote.
“...from the 1920s to the 1960s faith ran high in the limitless possibilities of science and technology to resolve humanities problems … Gains in areas such as aviation were so spectacular that this optimism became ‘scientism’, or a kind of substitute religion.” Making a New Land by Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, 2013
WILLIAM: But that optimism blinded many New Zealanders to some of the costs of innovation.
MĀNI: The expansion of pasture came at the expense of native bush.
WILLIAM: Removing trees from steep hills led to erosion which destroyed pasture.
MĀNI: Runoff, fertilisers and pesticides have polluted waterways.
WILLIAM: Government officials sometimes justified turning over Māori land to Pākehā by claiming Māori refused to adopt new technologies and techniques. In fact, many just lacked the resources to do so.
MĀNI: And the consequences of farming innovations weren’t just felt in Aotearoa.
For decades the raw materials we used to make superphosphate fertiliser mostly came from Pacific islands, including Nauru, Banaba and Makatea.
WILLIAM: These islands were strip-mined through much of the 20th century, leaving a wasteland of jagged limestone.
The local people got almost none of the profit, and many were forced to leave the islands altogether.
MĀNI: Today it’s estimated 80 to 90 percent of the land on Nauru and Banaba is uninhabitable thanks to phosphate mining.
WILLIAM: It just goes to show … innovation can come with consequences.
MĀNI: But that doesn’t mean innovation itself is good or bad - it’s about how we use it.
WILLIAM: And there have been so many number eight wire innovations we haven’t had time to talk about!
MĀNI: Yeah! Kiwis invented the first farm bikes…Johnny Callender’s “mountain goat” was able to get farmers up hills even horses couldn’t climb.
WILLIAM: And Timaru vet Colin Murdoch invented the first tranquiliser gun in the 1950s.
MĀNI: We popularised the electric fence and found a way of pasteurising butter so it didn’t give off nasty smells.
WILLIAM: There has also been an increasing diversity of agriculture.
Aotearoa used to be dominated by sheep, but when Britain entered the European Union in the 1970s and farming subsidies were removed in the 1980s, farmers had to make enormous changes to stay afloat.
MĀNI: Minimum prices, cheap loans, tax breaks and more disappeared almost overnight.
WILLIAM: The 80s were traumatic for many farmers, but the change sparked more innovations.
MĀNI: And a lot of these innovations were pushed along by women.
By the late 20th century farmers' daughters often went to university, or to jobs in urban areas, and promoted new technologies and techniques on the family farm.
WILLIAM: Organisations like the women's branch of Federated Farmers ran training programmes for female farmers, who increasingly started running farms in their own right.
MĀNI: As Jocelyn Fish, President of the National Council of Women, said in 1990
'Young farming women don't want to stop computing the latest herd breeding index to go and make a cake to have a contest with someone.' - Jocelyn Fish. National Farming News, 19 January 1990.
WILLIAM: After the 1980s a lot of sheep farms were converted to other uses - one big one has been kiwifruit orchards.
MANI: Kiwifruit were originally called Chinese Gooseberries, and they were brought to New Zealand from China by school headmistress Isabel Fraser in 1904.
WILLIAM: Turners & Growers started marketing them as Kiwifruit in 1959… and the rest is green, furry history.
MĀNI: When that multi-billion dollar industry was threatened by the kiwifruit disease PSA in the 2010s, Kiwifruit growers joined forces with government scientists to breed a new kind of kiwifruit, the Sun Gold which resisted the disease.
WILLIAM: But the biggest change in farming has been the massive growth in dairy farming, pushed along by innovations in milk processing - and irrigation.
…Although those innovations have come with some environmental problems as well.
MĀNI: Aotearoa isn’t just known for our sheep anymore.
WILLIAM: We’re a land of dairy farmers, wine growers, orchardists and deer farmers.
MĀNI: Aquaculture has taken off too! We’re world famous for our green lipped mussels.
WILLIAM: And given the challenges the agricultural industry faces today with climate change and competition from synthetic meats and milk, we’re going to need a lot more innovation to write the next chapter of New Zealand history.
