Page:Ashburton•Scotter•1972.pdf/91

‘establishment’. The apparently stony land was ‘turning over splendidly’, 720 acres were under crop, 3500 acres in English grasses, and 18,000 merinos and halfbred sheep were pastured.^[1] Herring later said that he had put £7000 into the company and taken over the management only as a temporary arrangement for two years. However, he continued to farm the property until 1902 when it was sold for subdivision.

At the end of this period even Lagmhor could be counted among the great wheat farms. Captain George Allan McLean Buckley, John McLean’s nephew, took charge about 1898, sold some 7000 acres and, while still maintaining one of the largest flocks in the county, put as much as 5000 acres into crop, 3000 acres in cereals. During the harvest of 1900, a reporter described an 800 acre paddock on Lagmhor with 160 stacks erected on it. In 1901 Cameron, too, had two thousand acres in wheat. But at the turn of the century, this activity was exceptional. Other estates were then reducing their crops. The great wheat era in Ashburton was ended.

Extensive wheat growing would not have continued for so long if refrigeration had turned out to be more profitable. Paradoxically, in 1880, just as wheat began to usurp the place of wool as the mainstay of Ashburton farming, the Ashburton Herald expressed the hope that the frozen meat industry could be developed and so rescue the country from too great dependence on agriculture. This wish, like the opening of a dairy factory, was at least partly the result of two bad harvests.

Refrigeration in fact was just in the offing. The first frozen cargo was despatched from Dunedin in 1882. Earlier, from 1870 to 1876, there had been an export of meat, preserved and tinned at works near Christchurch, but involving five Ashburton runholders at the planning stage: J. Studholme, G. Gould, J. Palmer, H. P. Murray Aynsley and W. S. Peter. Later Wilkin and Geo. Hart were manager and chairman respectively of a meat export company.

It is commonly believed that Grigg inspired the formation of the Canterbury Frozen Meat Company in 1882. Recent investigations, however, suggest that John Cooke, Canterbury manager of the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency Company, was ‘the author and prime mover’^[2] of the enterprise. If so Cooke never-