The Board of Agriculture Act
Those such as Thomson, who crusaded for more attention to science, did not accomplish a great deal, and it is unlikely that Massey shared their concerns. The Board of Science and Art Act in 1913 allowed the Government to claim to be aware of the importance of science, but it did little else. Massey obviously attached a great deal more importance to the Board of Agriculture Act which came into effect the same year. It established the Board of Agriculture of 12 members, made up of 8 nominees of agricultural and pastoral societies and four appointed by the Government, whose functions would be to advise the Minister of Agriculture, examine and report on economic problems affecting agriculture including marketing and to investigate whatever matters it considered important. The Liberal opposition contended that the creation of the Board represented a vote of no confidence in the Department, but Massey insisted that the two organisations were complementary as the Board would be able to examine issues which the Department, with a heavy administrative load, could not possibly address. The first chairman was Sir James Wilson, and his enthusiasm along with that of another member, Edwin Hall, of Auckland, carried the Board along.
Its first meeting was held in June 1914, and in his opening speech Massey said that it should advise the Minister on everything connected with the progress and prosperity of the industry and the marketing of its products. Other matters he suggested were agricultural education, noxious weeds control, forestry, back country roads, stud stock improvement, immigration and the "reported operations of a meat trust in New Zealand", the last being Massey’s particular bete noir. He also mentioned the possible reorganisation of the Department of Agriculture and may well have noted that Hunt, the Chairman of the 1912 Commission, was a member of the Board.
The Board of Agriculture is one of the earlier examples of a high level advisory group being established to assist Government in the policy making process, and the reasons for its eventual decay could be as interesting as those underlying its creation as would its relationship with Ministers and with the Department. Its examination of the Department soon led it to decide that the head should be someone with professional qualifications rather than administrative experience, in other words, to replace Pope as Director-General.
The Political Response: Information on this latter confrontation comes mainly from Sir James Wilson’s papers which were drawn upon by L J Wild in his biography (Wild 1953). Naturally these support the Board’s position or the Board Chairman’s perception of the issues; there is no record of Pope’s viewpoint, but according to Wild he defended his role tenaciously. An obvious starting point was the Hunt Commission’s criticism — over centralisation and duplication of functions. Pope had inherited this state of affairs, and if, during his period of control, he had done nothing to improve it he did not have much freedom of action. His lack of direct experience of the Department’s field work would have been obvious, and in the end, the question must have been as to whether or not Reakes should replace Pope. Of the other possibilities, Clifton was about to retire, Kirk too specialised and also close to retiring and Cuddie of the Dairy Division, was also too specialised. Wild asserts that Pope’s relationship with his senior staff was not good and that, from the outset, he regarded the Board with hostility. In view of its attitude to him, this is hardly surprising; furthermore there was bound to be some confusion as to where an advisory function finished and executive responsibility began.
It would appear, with its power to report directly to the Minister, the Board may not have always consulted the Secretary; he, on the other hand, according to Wild, referred trivial matters to the Board solely to needle its members. He could also claim that its criticism of departmental structures dealt with purely administrative matters and did not cover issues where technical expertise was required. And on the subject of the Department’s six experimental farms, another question which absorbed much of the Board’s attention, Pope was the only man who had at least attempted to make a broad assessment of their effectiveness and had pointed to their major defect — their lack of qualified people to undertake scientific work.
Another task that Massey identified as being appropriate for the Board to undertake, was a review of agricultural education, and the absence of any Government institution providing it. Massey again excluded Lincoln as its courses were considered too long and too expensive. About the same time, in 1913, a report on Hawkesbury Agricultural College near Sydney by Edward Newman, the MP for Rangitikei, was published by the Government. He declared himself very impressed by the practical training given to youths attending the college which offered 3 year diploma courses as well as one year special courses with 4 week courses in winter for farmers and 4 weeks in summer for teachers. The diploma course would have been much the same as Lincoln’s but the institution clearly looked for extra business. The Newman report was another example of the fixation on short courses with the emphasis on practical training, which is typical of the period.
Departmental responses: Changes within the Department during Pope’s first three years with Thomas McKenzie as Minister, were few apart from the appearance of the Journal and some extra staff being taken on by the experimental farms section. In some ways, Clifton may have seen the running of the farms as being more an art than a science. Over his long career, his ability to see into the future especially the possibility of a system of pastoral production based on pasture utilisation becoming the norm, was remarkable, but he may not have been much interested in detailed experimental work nor in rigorous analysis of the results. One thing is perhaps revealing in this context. In his 1909 report he described calling in a water diviner whose predictions proved successful when bores were sunk at Ruakura and Arataki, but failed at Weraroa! (AJHR 1909). But no attempt was, in fact, made to analyse the mass of experimental data being collected even if that had been possible. In 1912, J S Hill joined the staff at Moumahaki and inaugurated some plant selection work. He was the first Lincoln student to have completed the University of New Zealand’s B Ag course and would have worked with Hilgendorf on his wheat variety selection programme. He must have also been the first Lincoln graduate hired by the Department.
Pope’s proposal for the establishment of 20 experimental farms did not produce any particular reaction. Quite apart from the staffing problem only beginning to be accepted - the cost would have been far too great. At least in 1913 two field instructors were appointed, George Baylis in the North Island and Alexander McPherson in the South Island, to lay down trials. The areas on which they would concentrate were gum land in Northland, pumice land, pakahi land in Westland, Canterbury light land, sand dunes and depleted tussock country. Rather optimistically, it was stated field inspectors would help, while carrying out their rabbit and noxious weeds work, and that arrangements would be made to teach them to lay out trials and record the results. No mention was made as to who should assess the significance of the results.
Brown enters the scene: Clifton retired in 1914 and was appointed NZ Commissioner at the San Francisco International Exhibitions, one of his assistants being the fields instructor McPherson. His brother had been the manager at Totara in 1882 when the first shipment of frozen meat was prepared. Education boards had been recruiting professionally qualified men for some years to act as instructors, but it was not until 1913 that the Department engaged A McTaggart with degrees from Cornell and Toronto to advise in all matters connected with field crops, and, with Clifton’s retirement, John Brown was selected as his successor. He had a degree in agricultural science from Glasgow, had worked in Canterbury as an Education Board instructor, where he had run into some difficulties with his employer, but then went to Australia where he later became Director of the agricultural college at Gatton in Queensland, an institution rather similar to Lincoln. Some members of the Board of Agriculture, when consulted by the Public Service Commissioner, considered that Aston should be given the job, but Brown’s "practical experience" must have been held to be more important. Brown’ period on the job was during war time when resources were necessarily scarce.
John Brown replaced Clifton as Director of the Fields Division in 1916 and moved the HO of the Division to Levin (a development farm). Brown hoped that the farm would become the training centre for the Department’s advisory staff and eventually a tertiary teaching institution.
Brown’s importance lies not in his achievements, but in his suggestions for change which were more or less put into practice during the following decade. His arrival must have corresponded fairly closely to Primrose McConnell’s departure from Ruakura for Dilworth School at Papatoetoe in April 1915, possibly as a result of his dislike of the changes that he expected Brown to introduce or because he had expected to get the job. Most significant was the expanded role foreseen for the Weraroa farm renamed the Central Development Farm. In an article in the Journal in February 1917 Pope outlined the plans which presumably had the endorsement of the then Minister, William McDonald.
Pope’s views in 1917: First of all, Pope drew attention to the absence of any system of training for the Department’s field positions, that undertaken so far at Ruakura and at Weraroa being really designed for farm workers. The Central Development Farm was being re-designed to overcome these difficulties. Experimental work could be carried out and laboratory facilities would be provided as would books and overseas periodicals. Suitable students would be trained for work in the Department, for positions in secondary schools and for actual farm management. Students would also be able to take university courses. Pope concluded his article by stating that research would aim at extending available knowledge even if the results were negative. But he warned that, "it must, however, be kept continually in view that at first we shall have very few trained men and that the present time is unfavourable for any advance requiring the expenditure of large sums of money".
Brown’s views: The limited human resources available had already been stressed by Brown in a 1916 Journal article when he wrote of a "growing demand from the farming community for scientific and management advice", but added that farmers were showing impatience at how little was being done. He went on to say, "few are aware that to this day the Department has in its service for undertaking this work the merest handful of trained men and the few officers whose duties lie in the direction indicated are apt to be so engrossed in efforts to comply with the demands of every conceivable description that the pursuit of any continuing experimentation or planned research is practically impossible. ... Not only does the Department lack qualified specialists for research and men of all round training for the prosecution of local experimental and demonstration work, but of men having the necessary training and at the same time sufficient experience of New Zealand conditions to make their services of value there are very few and these few generally have more remunerative fields for their abilities". These comments were a far cry from McConnell’s 1913 Evening Post article and even more remote from the ideas put forward by the 1912 Hunt Commission (AJHR 1912).
Brown was also critical of the existing type of experimental work. In 1915 there were 1000 field trials in the North Island and 2660 in the South Island; Brown pointed out that leaving farmers to look after them was little use, as they had more pressing demands on their time and the trial plots were neglected. Nor was any evaluation of the results possible. In further comments in the 1916-17 Annual Report, Brown stressed the complete incompatibility of research and routine inspection work. "The salary and status of an inspector are such as to attract only men with bare qualifications for the discharge of routine duties and sometimes ... not even that. The Division is thus at the present time facing the very real danger of its inspectorates becoming filled by permanent officers incapable of assisting with the development and conservation of agriculture in New Zealand except in a very narrow sense of routine administration of the Rabbit & Weed Acts", and "it would appear to be most ill considered policy to continue to impose upon a professional directorate the control and regulation of a staff whose functions thus circumscribed".
Nearly all the Fields Division’s head office staff were transferred to Levin in 1917, and in his report for 1917-18, Brown regretted that the proposed farm management studies which he saw as the basis for all field instructional work had not proceeded very far, call-ups having depleted the staff. But he again returned to his theme that instructional and enquiry work were incompatible with routine inspection duties.
Cockayne had joined the Levin staff as did the youthful Bruce Levy. By then the possibilities of it growing into the New Zealand equivalent of a land grant college on the American model must have been talked about, and Alexander McPherson, who had gone to San Francisco, prepared an enthusiastic report on what those he visited were achieving. Few would have envisaged the nature of the impending disaster. In April 1918 a Truth editorial was given the heading, "The Agricultural Department; Has there been mismanagement or mal-administration?". It went on to allege that some senior staff were corrupt and added significantly "Primrose McConnell sacrificed" a clear pointer to disgruntled staff members being the source of the charges. Some time later, the story broke that Brown had been grazing his own cattle on departmental land and his short career with the Department came to an end; the plans for the Central Development Farm were also halted and what was left of the research staff returned to Wellington.
Pope moved sideways: While this drama was being played out, the Board of Agriculture’s campaign to replace Pope had come to a halt. A Coalition government had been formed in 1915 and the member for Bay of Plenty, William McDonald had taken over as Minister of Agriculture. He was a Liberal and a Joseph Ward supporter and Pope had been appointed by Ward when Prime Minister. This may account in part for the Board’s hostility to him, its members’ sympathies being more with Massey and the Reform Party. But with McDonald’s resignation, William Nosworthy, a Canterbury high country runholder and Massey supporter, became Minister of Agriculture. In his first annual report for 1918-1919, he declared "certain important changes were effected during the year. It was considered desirable for the Government that the position of permanent head should be held by an officer possessing both practical and scientific qualifications. In accordance with this decision the position of Secretary was abolished and a chief administrative position of Director-General created. Dr C J Reakes, then Director of the Livestock Division, was appointed to the Director-Generalship while Pope became Assistant Director-General".
At the same time, a scheme of reorganisation affecting chiefly the Fields and Livestock Divisions was instituted. This meant that the rabbit and noxious weeds inspectors were absorbed by the Livestock Division and added to the team of Stock Inspectors. In addition four regional superintendents, all veterinarians, were appointed to do away with the cumbersome centralised system.
This change certainly left the experimental farms out on a limb along with the few scientists. Dr Reakes acknowledged that difficulties had arisen, but said that a new branch was being built up, "pending the appointment of a Director, the Branch is in my direct charge assisted by Mr Aston and Mr Cockayne". It would seem therefore that despite Brown’s shortcoming, his criticism of scientific work being directly linked with routine inspection had been taken on board.
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Rural Affairs Coordinator
Sector Performance Policy
MAF Policy
Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry
PO Box 2526
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NEW ZEALAND
Phone: +64 4 894 0675
Fax: +64 4 4 894 0745
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