Waikato farmer and conservationist Gordon Stephenson in 2013. Photo / NZ Farm Environment Trust
Waikato farmer and conservationist Gordon Stephenson in 2013. Photo / NZ Farm Environment Trust
The National Sustainability Showcase celebrates the year’s 11 Ballance Farm Environment Awards regional supreme winners. The showcase culminates with the announcement of the Gordon Stephenson Trophy recipients. Here, the New Zealand Farm Environment Trust reflects on the legacy of the man behind the trophy.
If Waikato farmer and conservationist GordonStephenson had one core belief, it was this: “There’s no better fertiliser than a farmer’s boots,” recalls his daughter, Janet Stephenson.
“He believed that it’s only by walking the fields all the time that you can see what’s happening on your land.”
It’s what Gordon’s father did, and his grandfather before him – a love of the land ingrained so deep and abiding that being a good steward of the land became his life’s work.
“He believed deeply that you should leave the land in a better state than you found it,” Janet said.
“Even when things like soil health weren’t fashionable and the dominant theory was to just pour on chemicals and ‘she’ll be right’, he was concerned about humus levels.
“He always asked, ‘What will be the implications of this in 100 years?’”
He graduated with a BSc (Agriculture) from Reading University in the 1940s, and his wife Celia graduated from London University as a civil engineer.
The couple first farmed on a friend’s dairy farm.
They then moved as herd managers, first to the Midlands and then to Lincolnshire.
They also worked on a grass-drying operation in South Yorkshire and then cropped alongside pigs and dairy in Cambridgeshire.
Their ambition was to own a farm by the age of 40 – a dream they knew was unlikely to be realised if they stayed in England.
So Gordon, Celia and their young family became “Ten-Pound Poms” and headed to New Zealand to start a new life.
Gordon’s first job was as a shepherd on the farm Mataitira near Kakariki, where he learned how to fence New Zealand-style and manage a flock of 300 ewes.
In his memoir Journey, Gordon said that once the couple’s bonded two years were up, they packed up the kids in the Standard 10 van that had come with them on the SS Captain Cook from England and went share milking in Lichfield, in South Waikato.
A few years later, a property came up for sale in nearby Waotu, and it was here, on the green rolling hills of Waikato, that Gordon and Celia made 150 acres (60.7ha) of dairy land running down to the Oraka River their forever home.
It was just in time to satisfy that ambition to own a farm before they turned 40.
“While he was away in Christchurch on the Lincoln Council, or Wellington for Federated Farmers, Celia kept the cows milked and the farm running.”
One of those committees was the Waikato Conservation Board.
In an interview with fellow Waikato farmer Bill Garland, a past regional and national chairman of the Ballance Farm Environment Awards, Gordon described how he would start every meeting with a homily, “just something to set the tone of the meeting”.
Gordon Stephenson (centre) with the 2013 Ballance Farm Environment Award winners Craige and Roz Mackenzie.
At one particular meeting in 1991, he decided farmers needed to be told they were doing a great job.
Such a great job, in fact, that he felt there should be an award to recognise what they were doing.
A year later, the Waikato Farm Environment Awards came into being.
As he told Bill, “The environment is not just the pretty things we live in, it is everything. It embraces social, economic, ecological – the lot.”
It’s a sentiment that Janet recalled hearing often.
When they were growing up, Gordon kept the family apprised of international environmental issues using updates from the World Watch Institute that arrived regularly by mail.
“He believed you had to be well-connected globally, but act locally,” Janet said.
His elder daughter, Lynn, said his love of the land and natural curiosity in how other people farmed earned Gordon a family reputation of “farming from the road”.
“He would drive by slowly and look to see what they were doing,” she said.
“His approach was always without criticism.
“He always saw farmers as people who, given the right encouragement, would be great stewards of the land.
“He knew that farmers didn’t work well with regulation, but if you gave them the carrot rather than the stick, they would be motivated to do the right thing.”
Thirty years ago, the idea of sustainability was still somewhat fringe, so the awards became a way to get people to think about the long-term effects of what they were doing on their farm.
Developing the concept of the 100-year rule, he encouraged farmers to think about what would happen if they kept doing what they were doing for the next 100 years.
“That’s really only four generations,” Gordon told Bill.
The first awards attracted 40 entrants, and the rules were “made up by the seat of our pants,” he wrote in his memoirs.
However, because the principles of sustainable management are universal, when the awards grew to a national programme 10 years later, they used the same criteria – criteria that are used today, regardless of sector.
Phillipa Crequer helped co-ordinate the early Waikato farm awards with Gordon and Bill Garland.
“If he could change one person, that’s what he would do.
“Especially when it came to spending time with the next generation, getting them involved and engaged.
“He presented as just this farmer from Waotu who liked his birds and bush, but he had so much intellectual brain power.”
Janet said it couldn’t have been easy to bring farmers with him on the sustainability journey, but he had natural leadership skills that meant people listened to him.
They were skills honed during the dying days of World War II when Gordon joined the Royal Marines.
He served in the Netherlands and was due to be shipped out to battlefields in the Far East when a peace deal was signed.
Gordon was instead posted to Hong Kong and given command of a large rural area in the New Territories, responsible for restoring order, initiating education, and monitoring public health.
At just 21, he managed a team of marines, delegated responsibility across regions, and built trust with local communities despite language barriers.
He was offered a permanent commission in the Marines, but the pull to follow in his father’s farming footsteps was too strong, and he applied for a discharge.
Gordon died in 2015, but his legacy lives on through initiatives such as the QEII National Trust, which now protects almost 200,000 hectares, and the Gordon Stephenson Trophy, awarded annually to a farm business that exemplifies sustainable land management.
Gordon wrote in his memoirs, “I want my obituary to say, ‘He was a good farmer.’”
Every year, the Gordon Stephenson Trophy is awarded to a farmer “doing the right thing because it’s the right thing”.
