Country Life: Highlands Station - a farm shaped by an eruption

It is hard to imagine the neat paddocks of green rolling pasture on Highlands Station once covered in metres of thick wet mud.

On 10 June 1886, the slopes within the horseshoe of lakes to the southwest of Mount Tarawera were splattered with metres and metres of mud from the floor of Lake Rotomahana as part of a massive six-hour eruption which killed more than 100 people.

So, what has it been like to farm in an area which had been so devastated?

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The land was recovering from the eruption when it first came into the Ford family in 1931.

A license to graze amid the scrub of "bush, bracken and browntop" led to John Ford's father owning and developing the block over half a century, burning off 20 to 100 acres a year and putting it into pasture.

A substantial stand of bush was left to continue regenerating, according to Ford's grandfather's wishes.

Nowadays Ford and his wife Catherine run 3000 ewes and 900 cattle on the 1240 hectare property with 142 hectares of bush covenanted under the QE11 National Trust.

The farm has seen a lot of change over the 94 years, from the days of milking cows by hand for cream to a focus on wool and sheep meat when prices were good.

There were also "exciting times" while deer farming. Ford's father was a pioneer in the area.

"In 1984 the deer prices were astronomical. We were selling old hinds with no teeth for $3000 a head," Ford told Country Life.

Now the Fords raise bulls for beef and are moving towards a self-shedding flock, much smaller than the 10,000 ewes the farm carried in the 1980s.

The Fords' stock policies are heavily influenced by the soils and the sensitive catchment area in which the farm is situated - above Lakes Tarawera and Rotokākahi.

Sediment from the eruption is five to six metres deep in some places, Ford said.

"It's basically lake sediment, mud and very easily churned up, but it has good levels of potash and doesn't require as much phosphate. It has great water holding capacity, so it keeps going over the summer. "

The mud overlays ash from a previous eruption 800 years ago, which is freer draining than the easily-to-pug mud, he said.

"It's pretty fertile country, but we have changed our system from heavier cows and so on. We got rid of those in 2001 and the lighter yearling bulls work well."

The bush left to regenerate is also helping the land, he said.

Ford has also continued and improved on his father's passion for dam building. He reckons there are 300 dams on the farm, forming chains down the hillside, which help minimise scouring during heavy rainfall events.

"We're stopping the big flush of water from a dump of 20 or 30 millimetres or more, causing any damage to our farm.

"And of course, it won't cause any damage further down or drag any nutrients into the lake, so the water has a chance to settle out in our dams before it flows on out."

Their efforts in the environmental sphere earned them the national title at the Ballance Farm Environment Awards in 2015

John was able to see just how much times had changed since his father's day when he discovered a box of accounts going back to the 1950s when laid up with an injury recently.

He did some sums and converted into today's dollars to compare costs and production.

"In the 1960s my father was making roughly $1200 economic farm surplus a hectare. And that compares to the last five years, which is somewhere between $550 and $600 a hectare for me."

He also made another discovery.

Over the past five years Ford has been producing twice as much meat and wool as his father did over a five-year period in the 1960s, but he has earned half as much, "which is quite a shock", he said.

After a tough year, Ford is optimistic as beef prices have come up and interest rates are slowly coming down, although the summer has seen half the average rainfall.

With so much change over the past century, and with forestry encroaching land nearby is Ford tempted to go into pine?

"No, no, I've spent a lifetime trying to make it a really good farm, and my father did that before me, and to go and see it all planted in trees would be heart-breaking."

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