Canterbury Farming, October 2012

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October 2012

28,850 copies distributed monthly – to every rural mailbox in Canterbury and the West Coast.

INSIDE Rangiora High ‘not dragging Page 4

Equal education essential Page 18 Correct shelterbelt maintenance

chain’ over farm purchase

by Hugh de Lacy

It may have been five years since it sold its dairy farm for $7.7 million, but the Rangiora High School Board of Trustees says it’s not dragging the chain on buying a replacement for its agricultural curriculum And in the meantime the buying power of the capital is not being eroded by the $1000-a-day in interest being spent on school operations and maintenance, board chairman Warren Newbury told Canterbury Farming.

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A journey back through history

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He was responding to the fears expressed by a former boarder at the school’s agricultural training hostel that the board was deliberately under-bidding on replacement properties just to keep the interest revenue flowing into its operational coffers. Noel Miles of Nga Pari farm on Mt Thomas Road on the southern bank of the Ashley River, where his family has farmed for 114 years, fears the board is ignoring the caveat placed on the dairy farm when the school acquired it in 1930. The caveat, imposed by the farm trustees at the time, required that in the event of the land ever being sold, the capital would be reinvested in another farm to maintain the school’s long tradition of being

the centre of secondary-level agricultural learning for the South Island and the Chatham Islands. Rangiora’s 15-hectare dairy farm on Kippenberger Avenue was sold in 2007 following a change in its zoning from rural to urban, and has become a part of the town which is expanding rapidly in the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes. Since then the board of trustees has bid on several replacement properties, but Miles told Canterbury Farming the bids never came near the properties’ market values. He cited the case of a 200ha property 15km west of Rangiora on the main road to Oxford that sold for $4.5m last year, against a bid from the school that was a million dollars lower. The farm, called Randlea, contained a piggery, granary and woolshed which have since been demolished, and the land has been cut up into 4ha lifestyle blocks. “That would have been an absolutely ideal training farm

for the school but I suspect the board deliberately bid low so it wouldn’t jeopardise the income the school’s getting from the interest, and in the meantime the value of the capital is steadily eroding,” Miles said. Another farm the board had looked at was Waikene Station on the Inland Road south of Kaikoura, but Miles said that was too far from the school, was mostly bush-covered, had no capacity for arable or intensive livestock farming, and is “good only for pest control and hunting.” Even to consider such a block of land as a replacement for the dairy farm “seems to reflect the urban belief that former Prime Minister David Lange once expressed, that agriculture in New Zealand is a sunset industry,” Miles said.

and most of the $2 million collected in interest so far had been added to the capital. The replacement farm fund was now up around the $10 million mark. “We’ve put in place protocols to protect the CPI (Consumer Price Index) value of the capital, because we’re not fools by any stretch of the imagination,” Newbury said. “We are well aware of the potential to erode capital if it isn’t managed well, so the priority is that the capital value is maintained.

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Newbury said the board fully appreciated Rangiora High’s “special character” as a centre of agricultural learning and “the hugely advantageous position” it conferred, compared to other high schools.

“Interest over and above that is being used to provide facilities and things for the school over and above what the normal operating budget would provide.” The board had bid unsuccessfully on four farms so far, and negotiations over a fifth are presently at a delicate stage.

Other parcels of land were added over the next couple of decades, and in 1930 the total farm area reached 45ha.

“That idea’s been blown out of the water by agriculture’s performance since the international financial crisis, but it’s taking so long for the school to buy a replacement farm that it looks as though the board of trustees still thinks like Lange. “Without a training farm such as the one Rangiora High School is supposed to have, where are young people going to learn their farming skills?” But board chairman Newbury said the failure so far to replace the dairy farm was not because the school was spending the interest on operations and maintenance,

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“We have to satisfy educational needs, and satisfy the Ministry of Education of those needs.”

Rangiora High School introduced agricultural training in 1910 after it leased a halfacre next to the school for 25 shillings ($2.50) a year, and the local community subscribed £80 ($160) to purchase equipment.

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