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the scale of their harvesting operations, such as twenty reapers following each other in echelon, were the memorable features of the period, these properties accounted for not more than one-quarter of the 97,000 acres harvested in a peak year such as 1892. A far more significant difference between estates and farms was the attention directed on the former to preserving the fertility of the soil by rotational cropping. Grigg was a leader in the formation of the Ashburton Agricultural and Pastoral Association in 1877. However, he did not favour the lengthy title of the organisation. What he wanted was a farmers’ club, meeting frequently with the object of encouraging improved farming practice. In 1880 he addressed the association on ‘Can farming be made to pay in Canterbury at present prices?’ and, analysing costs and returns, proved that it was possible. More important, he strongly criticized what he declared to be the current practice of planting the whole farm in wheat or oats year after year. He cited John Cochrane of Wakanui as an exception whose high yields proved the value of careful farming.’^[1] On a later occasion he named Edward Herring, Duncan Cameron and himself as the most skilful of the ‘high farmers’.

Herring came to New Zealand in 1881 as the representative of a small company of Yorkshire farmers who proposed to settle in the colony when the land had been selected and prepared but never did so. He bought the Alford Station, freehold and run, from Robert Tooth. In the following year, when he had just taken possession in the name of the New Zealand Alford Estate Company Ltd of Leeds, he held 10,216 acres freehold and some 4500 acres of leased land. The rapidity with which he transformed Alford was a matter of comment. A report of 1886 described him as ‘a man of great energy, a capital colonist, and one whose nature is bound to urge him on to make continual improvements where ever he plants his feet’. He had built a new homestead, simple and attractive and surrounded it with gardens. More unusually, he had added ‘a model home for his workmen . . . the acme of comfort’ with quarters for the married couple, ‘Mr and Mrs Cookson’. There were comfortable bunks in the men’s rooms with good mattresses and pillows, piped water, and living rooms well supplied with books and papers. In four years he had planted 20,000 trees on eighty-five acres of chain-wide shelter belts. He had redesigned and enlarged the sheepyards, set up machinery worked by a water-wheel for chaff-cutting and sawing timber, and built a bacon-curing