New adviser at Rangiora

Press, 15 October 1976, Page 15

New adviser at Rangiora

Mr G. D. Miller, who has taken up the post of senior advisory officer with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries at Rangiora, has been associated with a wide range of farming activities in recent years. His career has also taken him to some of the more remote corners of the country, where farming has been on a large scale. Before coming to Rangi-

ora he was stationed at Hawera, where he worked in the South Taranaki area for seven years. Once devoted largely to dairying, this area has seen a big swing to cattle fattening, and over the last two years to intensive cropping.

While stationed at Hawera, Mr Miller did quite a lot of the “spade work” on the Taranaki agricultural research station. This was established principally to appraise dairy farming systems, and also to experiment with insecticides for local conditions. He was also associated with the Waimate West demonstration farm, a 90acre dairying unit which, with two cows to the acre, is rated as one of the most productive dairy farms in the world. From about 1965 to 1969. Mr Miller was stationed at Ruatoria. This posting often took him out to East

Cape, the most eastern point of New Zealand. The properties there were large pastoral concerns, often on steep country with stock grazing “both sides of the! acre.” For two years before! this he had been at Kaitaia in the far north. Mr Miller comes from a farming family. He has! made brief visits to the South Island, and spent\ some time on a farm at Methven while completing a degree at Massey University. When it was suggested that North Canterbury would be a marked change after the dairy country of Taranaki, Mr Miller said it was not the most varied he could imagine, but he was looking forward to working in the area.

One of the first things he did was to take out some production figures for the area, and he says the growth in output over the last 20 years would be better than anywhere else in New Zealand.