The Ploughmen's Home

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31365, 10 May 1967, Page 33

The Ploughmen's Home

What is the relevance of Lincoln '

College to an international ploughing

contest?

It is a long time since diploma students were on weekly roster of farm work including ploughing, or since degree students volunteered for May vacation work primarily to engage in the experience of walking the furrow behind four-horse plough teams. In 1936-37 a students’ ploughing match was held under external supervision and judging, but this event for which a cup was given with a Latin inscription meaning “No honour is too great to be given to the plough” came at the end, rather than the beginning of an agricultural era. With a full-time student enrolment for 1967 of 723, plus 180 yet to be received on short term courses, numbers like these can no longer be instructed in arts where time and ground consuming practice are required. Times change but many of the most successful Lincoln students of former years will hold in highest esteem their distinction on the farm mark list, “first in teams,” meaning they were judged the most competent in handling horse teams and the ploughs and implements drawn by them. Notwithstanding the absence now of ploughmen at Lincoln, visiting competitors and officials will find the college appropriately endowed and appointed as the focal centre of their contest. Limited time will be available for them to observe the character of New Zealand agriculture, but the concentration and diversity of practical farming at the college is a microcosm of the whole. Namely, the home farm of 1624 acres, divided and managed in units—dairy, seeds, mixed cropping, stud sheep, research; the 878-acre Ashley Dene, illustrating management of stony soil subject to summer drought; the 2288 acre Hunua, west of Waikari, where the objective is to study and exemplify management of steep, low

fertility, hill country under low rainfall. Agriculture today is complex and technical, abounding in unresolved problems of plant, soil and animal. The visiting competitors, the world’s finest exponents of a noble and ancient art, will also expect to get from New Zealand an approach to current thinking on technical and scientific agriculture. For them, therefore, there ture. For them, therefore, will be the opportunity to confer with those comprising the professional edifice of Lincoln College—some 80 people engaged in teaching, research, and extension, within 12 departments. So also with those experts occupied with the programmes of affiliated institutions relating to engineering, economics, tussock grassland—and with the neighbours of the college that make the Lincoln centre a dynamic unity—sections of the D.S.I.R. and the Wool Research Organisation. The relevance of the college to the contest is primarily because all, or most of the competitors and their associates, will already know something about this institution so indelibly imprnted on the pattern of New Zealand agrculture. It is my personal thesis that this awareness of Lincoln College is most emphatically not for the reason enunciated recently by a colleague who said that “the international standing of this college depends on the research work of the staff.” On the contrary, the standing of the college internationally has developed primarily because of the image of Lincoln in particular and the country in general, associated with the calibre and personality of students nurtured by diploma and degree courses, who have settled overseas, many of them in at least 10 of the countries represented by the 16 groups of visitors So also with graduates from

the college who, before returning to serve in New Zealand, have distinguished themselves at overseas universities and left a mark of understanding and goodwill. The staff, who spend leave abroad, have also initiated and cemented lasting relationships. The Australian visitors will know that a host of Lincoln men are the foundation and core of the farm improvement clubs of West and South Australia; that Tasmania and Victoria are generously sprinkled with farmers who came from the Lincoln diploma course; that in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation research edifice, Dr. L. T. Evans directs the Canberra phytotron, J. C. Tothill and C. A. Smith are prominent in pasture ecology, while K. M. Doull at Adelaide has made revolutionary discoveries in bee management and that R. A. Sherwin and H. A. Schapper are prominent Australian agricultural economists. The Americans who will be living at the college may have an image of New Zealand given by Professors M. D. Dawson and W. S. McGuire now at Oregon State University; Professor N. P. Neal of hybrid com fame at the University of Wisconsin, and Dr. K. G. Mclndoe, breeder of rubber for the Firestone organisation. The Canadians should by now have encountered the work of C. R. Stanton, R. McCarlie and D. W. Kidd, who found opportunity and challenge in the land conservation programmes of the prairie provinces. The British ploughmen may know of the 15 Lincoln diploma men farming in parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland; of A. A. Copland who triggered wartime progress in Somerset years now has administered the extensive farming enterprises of the late Lord Beaverbrook; of Dr. H. P. Donald directing the Animal Breeding Research Organisation.

The Indian competitors will be aware of Lincoln College through the first group of diploma and degree students from this country who came to Lincoln in the mid 1940’s and who are now active in Bihar, Madras and Nepal. Some New Zealanders, like John Hayman and his wife (formerly on the college staff), have been called by the challenge of India and are now there grappling with tasks in what is probably the world’s most difficult agricultural and social situation.

The Japanese will be unlikely to arrive at the ploughing contest without having been briefed by T. I. Kawase, who still writes of his alma mater at Lincoln. Each of the other countries to be represented, notably Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands, has in my knowledge had some contact with former students, members of staff on leave, or visitors from these places to New Zealand, to be appreciatively aware of Lincoln College and what it stands for. A number of other countries, unfortunately not to be represented in the contest, have quite as strong affiliations with the college through the impact of Lincoln men now at work there This feature of the college which has been outlined, has been operating since the turn of the century when R. N. Lyne, one of the students of the first era of farming and who for 20 the 90-year history, became director of agriculture in Zanzibar.

Because of this image, so splendidly formed of their native country, the expatriates from Lincoln College have ensured the appropriateness of the college as the focal centre of the 14th World Ploughing Contest.

The visiting ploughmen, their managers and officials of the World Ploughing Organisation are staying at Lincoln College. In the accompanying article Dr. I. D. BLAIR, reader in microbiology, discusses the international image of the college.