Bringing rimu back to Mt Rimu

Justin and Hamish Morrison farm alongside dad Brent on land bought by their great-grandfather, ‘‘Billy Irish’’, who sailed from Cork for New Zealand as an infant.

Billy, the son of a ferryman who rowed people across the Wairau River at Kaituna west of Blenheim, became a teamster. By hauling rimu, kahikatea, matai and totara logs for Brownlee’s Sawmilling Company, he saved enough money to buy 40 hectares of rough development land at Rimu Gully in 1924.

‘‘It was fresh out of the bush with stumps everywhere and no grass, a boundary fence, and a single good paddock for hay,’’ says Brent.

‘‘It took years for the stumps to rot. ‘‘Eventually they were pulled out with a six-horse team.’’

Milk was delivered to the Rai Valley dairy factory by horse and cart which forded the Rai River every day, whatever the weather. Billy and his wife Violet’s 11 children milked 20 cows before school while their father kept working for Brownlee’s, which had mills throughout the Pelorus district.

When Billy Irish broke his leg, his 12-year-old son, Denny Morrison, stayed home to help his mother at Mt Rimu Farm and learned to plough with a team of horses. ‘‘For someone who left school so young, he had big ideas and was very clever with a great ability to recognise things that would improve your lot,’’ recalls Brent of his father, Denny, who died last year, aged 91. ‘‘He fought tradition, fought for the little guy and was very persuasive.’’

To increase his capital and buy more land, Denny went into partnership with miller Sinclair Couper. They cross-sawed native timber into six-foot lengths, split with wedges and an axe into triangular posts mostly sold to Awatere farmers in the 1950s.

‘‘In his final years Dad [Denny] had regrets about felling the last rimu trees off Mt Rimu for framing timber, sold and used to build our home just as treated pine became available,’’ recalls Brent. ‘‘Later, he saw that as pillaging and – inspired by the NZ Forest Service – became an early adopter of farm forestry.’’ Those plantings are now in a second rotation. Brent has expanded to 127ha of forest, including redwoods, blackwoods and cypress as well as pines. All trees are thinned and pruned to maximise value. Forty hectares of native bush remains on Mt Rimu.

Denny chaired the Rai Valley Dairy Company, the first in New Zealand to install refrigerated vats on farms.

‘‘He fought the Dairy Board for that improvement and instigated night collection by tankers, enabling a bigger window between milkings and carting at a cooler time,’’ says Brent.

After leading amalgamation of the Rai Valley, Koromiko and Tuamarina dairy companies into Marlborough Cheese at Tuamarina, Denny spearheaded the cooperative’s search for new markets.

This culminated with exporting kosher cheese to Jewish customers in New York.

Those same powers of persuasion saw Denny organising for the Pelorus Hall to be lifted by hand off its piles, on to a truck and on to new piles at Carluke.

He correctly calculated that if every man in the valley turned up, they would be capable of shouldering the weight.

Denny and wife Erica were also innovators, joining the Livestock Improvement Council (LIC) the year it came to the South Island, in 1954.

The NZ Dairy Board subsidiary enabled artificial insemination with semen from proven sires, boosting the performance of participating herds.

In 1968 the couple built the milking shed the family still uses by Rimu Creek which flushed away effluent, at the time permitted and seen as logical. Almost immediately, attitudes changed, and a ramp was built in the early 1970s so waste could be collected and spread on to paddocks. By the time 16-year-old Brent came on board in 1961, the farm had expanded from 40ha to 150ha at Rimu Gully, 120ha at Opouri plus a leased block in the Ronga Valley. ‘‘At first, I enjoyed development work more than milking cows. But a stint doing seeding in Western Australia convinced me that sitting in a tractor all day isn’t great.’’

Back home, he married the girl next door, Caralyn Price, raised on a dairy farm at the top of the Opouri.

‘‘We communicated well, sharing ideas and work. It was a perfect relationship, supporting each other.’’ Brent’s and Caralyn’s years on the land saw the dirty dairying campaign highlight deterioration of rivers, lakes, streams and wetlands as farming intensified, especially in Canterbury and Southland. Water quality suffered due to dramatically increased irrigation takes and runoff of effluent, sediment and nitrogen-rich urea fertiliser.

In 2012, the couple were among the first in Marlborough to install a weeping wall to separate solid and liquid dairy shed waste. Liquid is gravity-fed into a rubber-lined storage pond, then sprayed on to pasture as fertiliser when soils are dry and can soak up nutrients.

Dried-out solids are worked into the ground before sowing. Stock crossings were bridged, culverts installed, streams fenced, and native trees planted.

Brent agrees that using urea fertiliser is not best practice.

‘‘There was a time when we applied ‘big hits’ twice a year.

‘‘It is rocket fuel which does make grass grow but too much suppresses clover which naturally fixes nitrogen.’’ Nowadays, small amounts go on more regularly ‘‘so it won’t wash off’’ into waterways.

Potash – essential for growing hay or silage – is added in autumn, sulphur in spring and lime to keep everything in balance.

From day one, the Morrisons got on board with Te Hoiere Project which pulls people together to restore Pelorus land, rivers, streams and the estuary at Havelock. In June, a team of professionals cleared a 2ha streamside site on their farm for planting in natives and weed control over the next two years. The family paid for fencing and a portion of plant costs.

‘‘We want to get the rimu back into Rimu Gully,’’ says Justin who planted 20 around the farm this autumn.

Brother Hamish runs the dairy herd of 415 cows and his wife, Lee, is chief calfrearer. Justin, a fitter and turner, manages the beef side of the business, forestry, tractor work and day-to-day maintenance while wife Kimberly works off-farm.

‘‘I see the farm going more tech-based to meet environmental challenges while advancing milking and admin,’’ says Hamish who returned from working overseas in 2016 when his mother became unwell, then died.

He took over the office work, shifting invoicing, GST and wages on to the cloud, initially while holding down a surveying job in Nelson.

There are plans to build a new milking shed on a small rise in the centre of the farm to minimise walking for cows and to efficiently feed waste into treatment ponds. That should line up well with technology like electronic eartags and collars that will track cows’ movements, diet, fertility and calving on phones, says Hamish.

A fifth generation of Morrisons is now growing up on the farm.