Murray Harris is a familiar face in the primary sector in Otago and Southland — after all, he has spent four decades working in it.
Mr Harris, who lives in Dunedin, has his own consultancy business, focusing on his expertise in sustainable land management and environmental matters.
Brought up in Dunedin, his love of farming could probably be attributed to weekends and holidays spent on a friend’s farm at Clinton.
He studied agriculture at school and then headed to Lincoln where he completed an agricultural science degree in 1973.
Upon graduating, he had the choice of two jobs — either a farm adviser in Northland with the Department of Agriculture, or a soil conservator with the Otago Catchment Board.
He chose the latter, deciding he wanted to return to Otago and work from Dunedin. Under boss Wallace Ramsay, who was chief soil conservator, there was an excellent training programme.
Staff in soil conservation in the mid-1970s reached up to ‘‘18 or so’’.
It was in the days of subsidies and a lot of the work was based around soil and water conservation plans, similar to today’s Land and Environment Plans.
He became soil conservation works officer and the team worked on a lot of major projects, some with Government funding and some without.
It was probably one of the largest staff groups in New Zealand working in soil conservation land management, he said.
The Upper Clutha hydroelectric power development project in the 1970s was interesting, particularly looking at the diverse land resource that was going to be inundated by the various dam proposals, although only the Clyde project was eventually undertaken.
One of the more challenging jobs involved a large team of specialists, under the auspices of the Ministry of Works and Development’s water and soil division, having to survey the entire Shotover catchment by foot from February to April one year.
The objective was to identify in the large catchment (about 109,500ha) where the sediment was coming from as concerns were expressed at the rate the Roxburgh Dam was filling up.
The final report in 1977 showed about 97,940cu m of sediment was generated annually, 62% from slips, gully and sheet-wind erosion, while the balance, 38%, came from bank and streambed deposits.
No real conservation works were undertaken after these findings but, over a two-year period, about 100,000 goats were exterminated in the catchment and that had a positive effect in allowing good vegetative recovery, he said.
In 1983, Mr Harris did a three-month secondment working for the New South Wales Soil Conservation Service on periurban land-use flooding issues, mining restoration and general land-use planning.
Then came the Local Government Amendment Act and the change from catchment board to Otago Regional Council in 1989 which proved to be a major change, as some staff were made redundant and ‘‘hundreds of years of expertise’’ was lost.
In 1991, he became the council’s land manager, responsible for the implementation of the Rabbit and Land Management programme and property plans, mainly in Central Otago.
Projects included forestry as a land use, and identifying soils suitable for dairying and those that were not.
It was interesting, looking back, that some dairy farms should not be on some of those soils, he said, but throughout New Zealand, market forces were leading that drive.
Further restructuring in the land management section saw Mr Harris made redundant in 1994 and he set up his own consultancy business. Since then, he had worked on some ‘‘pretty amazing projects’’.
One job he particularly enjoyed was helping draw up very detailed LEPs for two Landcorp-owned properties in Otago and five in Southland and the Te Anau Basin.
If some other farmers looked more closely at what Landcorp was doing, they could learn a lot.
Many of the systems the state-owned enterprise had in place would stand it in good stead in the future, he said.
In 2003, Mr Harris completed a contract with the Southland Regional Council under which he visited 90 dairy farms.
After assessing what their issues were, environmental farm plans or guidelines were prepared, with a range of recommended best management practice presented in a report to each farm owner. Much of it was to do with effluent management.
After he completed that, the council made a permanent staff appointment and since then, staff numbers in that field had increased dramatically.
In all the years he had been in the field, some of the best results were achieved when he had one-on-one contact with farmers or small groups, he said.
He believed the ORC needed to realise that, with some farmers, the only way to get results was to sit down with them and have that personal contact.
He peer-reviewed the New Zealand Deer Farmers landcare manual in 2004 and was coauthor of the soil conservation technical manual.
For some years, he also tutored diploma of agriculture students at Telford and he is also secretary of Clutha Agricultural Development Board.
In 2002, Mr Harris was asked to co-ordinate and start the Southland Ballance Farm Environment Awards and he was judging co-ordinator there for two years, before getting involved with the Otago awards.
He was judging co-ordinator for the Otago awards from 2004 until 2011 and he remained on the committee.
He enjoyed his involvement with the awards, largely because he saw the value of it as a learning, education process.
He would like to see more farmers enter the awards, saying they were getting comprehensive reports back from the judges for free.
Mr Harris would like to see all farmers have LEPs, so they could make better decisions with their business plans.
He would also like to see the likes of meat and dairy companies push that more, saying it should be mandatory to have an environmental farm plan, but they needed to get a premium for their products.
If the requirement was driven by companies or processors, then he believed a lot of progress would be made, but only on the basis that farmers got a premium.
Farmers should all try to understand the ‘‘triple bottom line’’ — of economic, environmental and social-community performance.
It was not just about farming in the production sector, the other two had to be integrated in the property.
Mr Harris was an advocate of farm forestry, both as shelter and as a means of having a different income stream.
Looking at non-producing areas of a farm, such as poor gullies, could still make very good money if a reasonable area was planted over time with production trees, and utilising good silviculture management.
Some very good results were being achieved, with farmers making money through farm forestry. Economically, it was far better than sheep or cattle on poor country.
It was also interesting talking to farmers about the different environment that farm forestry created. Mr Harris looked after NZTA trees on the Kilmog, the only forest owned by it in New Zealand. About 40ha was there to stabilise the road.
There were some very vulnerable areas on the coast and some of those could be better off in forestry, particularly in the event of a major storm event or changing climate, he said.
Water testing was a good initiative, he said, as farmers needed to have an understanding of where their risk areas were on-farm, what was causing it and what they needed to do about it.
In South and West Otago, riparian fencing and planting was not the ‘‘be all and end all’’, especially in areas with tile drains, and there needed to be other management systems in place.
He would also like to see a lot more farms with wetlands. A small wetland at the bottom of a farm, where the water ran out, would help do that final filtering and could be established over time for very little cost. Sunlight was an important factor for wetlands to kill bugs, so low growing plants were needed.