The day water came bubbling to the surface
The land the Shipley family’s ancestor bought was some of the driest in Canterbury but when a later generation found water beneath the farm, it started a transformation of their district from brown to green. Tony Benny reports.
Burton Shipley came to New Zealand from Yorkshire in 1863, and in 1877 he paid £400 for an 80 hectare block of ‘‘waste land’’ at Greendale, 45 minutes inland from Christchurch, that was formerly part of an early Canterbury run known as ‘‘The Desert’’.
‘‘During hot, dry nor’westers we’ll often joke that Burton should have bought something other than somewhere called The Desert Station,’’ laughs great-grandson James, who recently collected a Century Farm Award plaque, marking the family’s 140 years on the property. Sadly, James’ father Ken died the day before the award celebrations in Lawrence in May. ‘‘That was the last thing on his bucket list, to go down to the awards but he didn’t make it,’’ says Helen, Ken’s wife. The couple farmed the land now called The Pines, in reference to the pine trees Burton planted around the homestead and yards, for 60 years.
‘‘It could be a very desert station when we came here. We got dry years and then we put a well down and that was the making of us really.’’
Helen recalls Ken always believed there was water beneath Greendale, on the Canterbury Plains, even though few shared his view. ‘‘Ken always said that the snow up in the mountains must go somewhere, it’s not coming in the rivers, it must come underneath the ground.’’
In the early 1970s, after receiving a sizeable wool cheque, they decided to drill for water but the local drilling company tried to talk them out of it. ‘‘They came and saw us about doing it but they said to us, ‘We haven’t got time and it would be a waste of your money’,’’ Helen remembers. A couple of years later, in 1974, the drilling company was short of work and came back to the Shipleys and agreed to put down a well.
‘‘We got water diviners, two of them actually – one didn’t know what the other one was doing. They did it in different places but there was one spot they both had and it was in a handy spot so that was where we put it down.
‘‘Every time the fella (from the drilling company) came in he’d grump, ‘Waste of my bloody time’.’’
At a depth of 50 metres there was no sign of water but 62 metres down, that changed.
‘‘Ken went out to see him and he wasn’t grumping and he said, ‘We’re going to try it for water’, and he did it again and again and then he said, ‘I think you’re sitting on a lake’. ‘‘It was unbelievable – if you could have seen the smile on Ken’s face. The years before that we’d had really bad droughts, so then we thought of all the things we could do.’’
The well yielded more than 100 litres a second and within an hour and a half rural radio reported one of the best wells ever had been found. Over the next few years many more wells were drilled in the district and for farmers, worries about drought were over.
With irrigation, Ken and Helen were able to increase production by a staggering 291 per cent. They carried on with corriedale sheep but increased numbers and now could also grow crops of seed barley, seed peas, grass seed and white clover.
‘‘That really made the farm. We went from hoping it would rain to it didn’t matter whether it did or not,’’ Helen says.
‘‘It just increased the options. It was probably the biggest turning point on this place,’’ agrees James.
In his time, Burton Shipley, the first of the family on the farm, bought adjoining land and increased the property to 520ha. Two generations later, in 1980, Ken and Helen did something similar and bought another farm. They farmed in partnership with sons James and Murray until 1991 when the partnership was ended so the sons could farm on their own accounts.
Ken and Helen kept the original 80ha and Ken, who had always been keen on sheep, was able to realise a dream by starting a sheep stud. He was interested in the new breeds being brought into New Zealand in the 1980s.
‘‘James was in England playing cricket and he wrote back to us and he said he’d been to a show and the sheep of the future was the texel. He said ,’You’ve got to get into them if they come to New Zealand’,’’ Helen says. A year or so later Ken bought three in-lamb texel ewes and a ram, and started Brandesburton Stud; he showed and sold texels until a few months before his death when he sold the stud to a fellow breeder. On September 4, 2010, the farm and surrounding district was rocked by the first Canterbury earthquake when the previously unknown Greendale Fault shuddered into life. While the Shipleys escaped major damage, they were lucky not to lose their sheep. ‘‘It’s hard to believe, but all the wires in the fences just snapped, including the road fences,’’ Helen says. ‘‘John Key was being driven round with the Federated Farmers president who could see that the sheep could just walk straight out. When he got home he put out a message for anyone to help and we had all these farmers come round to fix the outside fences. Fortunately the sheep didn’t cotton on.’’ Previously flat paddocks now had undulations. ‘‘We went out round the sheep and I said to Ken, ‘They’re all sitting down’, and he said, ‘No they’re not but they’re standing in a hollow’.’’
For their first 30 years with irrigation, Ken and Helen had ‘‘end-tow’’ and side roll irrigation, systems which they replaced with a hard-hose gun irrigator, and then last year they put a centre pivot on, only for their well to run dry for the first time, following two years of deep drought.
‘‘My brother was able to send him some water for a crop of peas so Ken did see water flow through his irrigator, but not out of his well,’’ says James.
James, who along with his wife and farming partner Andrea have now taken over the original block, hopes the aquifer beneath the farm will recharge over winter and the well will come back to life for irrigation next summer but he’s not overly concerned because by the following summer they have will have water from Stage 2 of Central Plains Water irrigation scheme available.
Compared with their well though, CPW water is expensive.
‘‘It’s probably going to cost us three times annually for water than we pay now. Where Ken increased his income threefold when he got irrigation, our costs are going to increase threefold with this new scheme,’’ says James. ‘‘The understanding is the debt on the scheme will be paid off in 40 years so hopefully the costs will decrease for the next generation.’’
CPW will replace irrigation water drawn from wells with ‘‘alpine water’’ taken from the Rakaia River, which originates in the Southern Alps. ‘‘They’re saying on Stage 1 that the aquifers are already rising through not being used.
‘‘We’re getting it piped to our gate. You’re never having to worry about pumps again, you’ll just turn your gate valve on and it’ll come out under pressure which is going to be amazing.’’
James moved out of sheep and cropping four years ago and now specialises in dairy support. He expects to be able to increase production when CPW comes on stream, and hopes grain and grazing prices will rise to where they were a few year ago.
He already grows winter feed and feed barley for dairy farmers and has no plans to grow other crops, though with water, that is an option.
‘‘One of my neighbours is probably the biggest grass seed grower in Canterbury. If there was a real demand for it we could all of a sudden be growing whatever we wanted to.
‘‘With the irrigation, climate and the soils we’ve got, we could do whatever we like, despite being The Desert Station. We think it was a pretty good choice now.’’
Helen Shipley