Kōrero: Pastures

For tussock-covered South Island hill country to be suitable for stock grazing, it needed to be sown with improved pasture species. Plant breeding and selection from the introduced English varieties produced clovers that could establish rapidly and provide a nitrogen source for associated grasses, ensuring a permanent, new, and more productive pasture could be established in a wide range of New Zealand environments. Here Bruce Levy espouses the advantages of improved pasture species over the native varieties.

Transcript

Changes over the past 40 years have taken place relative to the herbage seeds we use in our grasslands. Originally, there was little to guide us in our choice of seed. The native species were of little use and fortunately indeed for New Zealand, European grasses and clovers found here a congenial home. Over the 80 years of their widespread use there have been marked changes in that both climate and farm use to which the species were put have moulded or modified the original material from Britain or Europe generally. Within the past 20 years much work has been applied to ensure quality in seeds, both from a purity and germination and from a strain quality point of view. Methods have been divised whereby good strains are produced, sewn, harvested and marketed under the safe guards of seed certification. Over the years some good strains among the grasses and clovers had developed and persist in Hawke's Bay in Poverty Bay and some in Canterbury and at Woodend, Rangiora and on the Akaroa Peninsula. The district of Sandon and also carried a good rye grass type.