Honour ‘a family achievement’
Nelson farmer Barbara Stuart says her New Year’s Honour was a recognition for her whole family’s work for the environment.
The Cable Bay resident has been awarded the Queen’s Service Medal in the 2020 New Year’s Honours list, for services to conservation.
Stuart said she was very privileged to receive the award, but it had been an effort made by her whole family.
‘‘You don’t feel you deserve it, but I sort of see it as award for the family for the work that earlier generations have done – I feel it’s a recognition of all of those things.’’
Stuart said she and her husband Ian had been involved in environmental work for 45 years, when they first decided to protect native bush on their Cable Bay farm.
Since then, she has been involved in a variety of conservation projects in Nelson and Marlborough, including spending the last 10 years in conservation administration.
In the 1990s she was among the first private landowners in New Zealand to create a formal public walkway across her family farm at Cable Bay.
While working for Landcare Trust for 16 years, she led the
Aorere Catchment Project, which won the inaugural Morgan Foundation New Zealand River Prize in 2015.
The project received recognition for a significant improvement in water quality in the rivers and near-shore area of Golden Bay.
Stuart has been a member of the Nelson Marlborough Conservation Board for the past two years, and was a member of the New Zealand Walking Access Commission Board for two terms, from 2008 to 2011 and from 2015 to 2018.
Stuart said along with her work on the Aorere Catchment, her most rewarding project was working with the StarboroughFlaxbourne Soil Conservation Group – helping make Marlborough farms more resilient following the devastating droughts of the early 2000s.
"It came out of a series of terrible droughts in South Marlborough in the early 2000s,’’ Stuart said.
While the project initially was limited to soil conservation, a new approach was set up to enable lambs to get off the farm before the worst of the dry weather kicked in.
‘‘Instead of growing lucerne and making hay all summer out of it and feeding it out, they put together a programme of lambing early – direct feeding lucerne to their lambs so they’re off the property by the time it traditionally turns dry.’’
Stuart said the new approach proved so successful, it had been adopted not only by farmers in Marlborough but also in the East Coast of the North Island.
‘‘For me, that was pretty special.’’