Government Is Country’s Most Extensive Farmer

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27427, 13 August 1954, Page 10

Government Is Country’s Most Extensive Farmer

‘The Press" Special Service

WELLINGTON, August 12.. New Zealand’s biggest farmer is the Government itself. One department alone—the Lands and Survey Department—is at and developing for the Land Settlement Board some 400,000 acres on which are running nearly 400,000 sheep, 70,000 cattle, and 6000 dairy cows. The department thus owns one in every 93 of the country’s flock of sheep and one in every 37 of its cattle. In addition to that acreage,- the Lands ans Survey Department owns and manages the largest high-country run in the Dominion, the combined Molesworth, Tarndale, and St. Helens stations in Marlborough, totalling 460.000 acres. The biggest and most publicised of the board’s projects is the area of pumice lands—hitherto known as the “Wastelands”—ranging from the Bay of Plenty in the north to Taupo in the south and to Te Kuiti in the west. In this area, development blocks total 150.000 acres. The next biggest projects after the kotorua-Te Kuiti project are in North Auckland where 60,000 acres are being broken in, Hawke’s Bay (45.000 acres), and Southland (40,000 acres). In Wellington province the total area is relatively small—2o,ooo acres. Not far behind the Land Settlement Board as the Government’s principal farming agency is the Maori Affairs Department, which owns and farms 172,000 acres with 290,000 sheep, 51,000 cattle, and 3000 dairy cows. These fig-

ures are quite apart from the 202.000 acres (107,000 shfeep), 6000 cattle, and 67,000 dairy cows) which are farmed by individual Maori farmers, but which are closely supervised and largely owned by the department. The Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Council runs 14 varying types of demonstration farms totalling 13,000

acres and stocked with many thousands of sheep and cattle. The Justice Department has 11,000 acres and runs 18,000 sheep and 3700 cattle. Strangely enough, the Department of Agriculture is not a very big farmer, its demonstration and experimental farms amounting to only 7100 acres, but with nearly 17.000 sheep and 2000 cattle and dairy cows. Some of the most diverse farming is carried out by the Mental Hospitals Division of the Health Department. It has 11.000 acres stocked with 6000 sheep. 1500 dairy cattle, 2000 pigs, and 7000 head of poultry. In the aggregate the Government is today farming and developing more than 1,100,000 acres, and owns about 750,000 sheep and 140.000 cattle.