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leasehold to Edward M. Goodwin. In the same way nearly 12,000 acres of Lagmhor were not bought until after this time and the land was devoted to sheep. Nevertheless, it is convenient to make a distinction and to call properties which were largely freehold, ‘estates’. Wheat raising on these estates was the dominant feature of New Zealand farming during the 1880s and of Canterbury farming until the end of the century.

The two most widely known wheat farms were Grigg’s Longbeach and Gould and Cameron’s Springfield. Duncan Cameron, the Scottish shepherd, whom George Gould appointed manager of Springfield and then took into partnership because of his skill with sheep, showed as well what could be done in large scale agriculture on the dry plains. He probably planted greater areas than Grigg—for instance 5000 acres in 1892 and 5500 acres in 1894—but yields on Longbeach were generally higher especially in dry seasons. For many years, both estates had 4000 acres under wheat besides some thousands under oats and barley. Longbeach was described by the Ashburton Guardian during the favourable harvest of 1889:

Longbeach is always worthy of a visit, though harvest is the time to see it to greatest advantage, whether it be early in the season when the ripening corn spreads as far as the eye can reach, with here and there the reaper and binder busy at work on some of the earlier crops, or later when miles of stooks stand in the bright sunshine, and the landscape begins to be diversified by fast rising stacks, while two or three clouds of smoke show where the sheaves are being put direct from the stook into the threshing machines, or a traction engine goes puffing up to the railway with a heavy load of new season’s grain for shipment to catch the early market. [There are] ten miles [of] an almost unbroken series of wheat fields.^[1]

The account goes on to list sixty drays and waggons busy at stacking, close on 7000 acres in crop (4000 acres being wheat, averaging thirty-five bushels to the acre) thirty-five reapers and binders, 300 men at work and as many horses. A similar newspaper report of 1896 states that there were 7000 acres of crop, with seventy reapers and binders, and the same number of drays, and altogether one thousand horses at work. In that year the Christchurch implement firm of Morrow and Bassett lined up fifteen McCormick ‘self-binders’ for a photograph before sending them to Longbeach.

In an article which makes clear the varying conditions under