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the outcry which arose from time to time because some unneighbourly farmer had drawn off supplies for this purpose.

At the beginning of 1886 drought conditions, together with urging for years from various newspapers, at length persuaded the council to consider a trial irrigation scheme. In March 1887, the council responding to requests from farmers’ meetings chose a reserve at Elgin to serve as an experimental irrigation farm. Eighteen months later, a writer reported that the ratepayers ‘have seen one of the worst bits of land in the district, the County Council farm at Elgin, transformed from being barren save for weeds, into land yielding [luxuriant] crops of every description’.^[1] For the sake of those unwilling to go and see, samples of produce were exhibited before the council and later displayed in Friedlander Brothers’ store.

The abrupt termination of the test after three years was the most curious and most significant aspect of it. In June 1890 James Brown, in whose Wakanui riding the farm lay, successfully moved: ‘That the benefits to be derived from Irrigation having been clearly demonstrated, the Council is of opinion that further experiment is unnecessary, and that all business with the farm be wound up by July 31 next’.^[2] The action was curious because, two years before, Brown had argued strongly in the council on behalf of an irrigation scheme for the whole Wakanui area and, two years later, he returned from a visit to the irrigated areas of Mildura, Victoria, to preach the need for similar irrigation in Ashburton. Certainly the experimental farm had not achieved its alleged purpose in three years. Most farmers were still unpersuaded. That was why the motion was significant. The farm cost money and, as a recent water supply poll had shown, there was little support for irrigation.

In June 1891, when ‘some months of drought [had] succeeded two years of scant rainfall’^[3] the advocates of irrigation carried out what should have been a particularly persuasive newspaper campaign. In the correspondence columns they showed that a great deal of irrigation had been done locally from private supplies. For example Donald Oliver, of Chelmsford, one-time manager of Westerfield, described how in every year from 1877 to 1883 inclusive he had irrigated 500 acres of the estate. The opposition to these proponents of the use of water was led by W. L. Allen, manager of Acton estate, whose high reputation as a practical farmer gave weight to his opinions. His prejudices were based apparently on the failure of Nixon’s scheme at Alford, while he was working there.