Emeritus Professor Ralph Sims recently celebrated 50 years of service at Massey University in Palmerston North. Colin Williscroft reports on a career that has brought him international recognition in a variety of fields.
During the course of his tenure at Massey, Ralph Sims has seen his career go from the paddock to outer space, but it’s the people he’s met along the way that he appreciates the most.
Sims’ first role at the university was as a lecturer in agricultural machinery in the early 1970s, covering technology such as tractors and spray calibration.
It’s a long way from a Zoom call he was part of a couple of weeks ago to the United Arab Emirates, when he was helping to assess the performance of parts of the Government there, as they vie for the country’s government excellence awards.
“It’s very competitive. If you can imagine (in a NZ context) the Ministry of Health competing against the Productivity Commission or the Ministry for the Environment, and they’re all chasing this award,” Sims said.
Three years ago, Sims helped review the UAE’s Ministry for Climate Change and Ministry for the Environment equivalents, both of which he says were very good.
This time around, he’s looking at its space agency, its civil aviation authority and its telecommunications agency.
“But I know nothing about any of those, so I’m learning fast,” he said.
The same week as the UAE Zoom call, he was on another international call, this time as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he is a review editor for an upcoming report on climate change mitigation.
Sims and his wife Cathy arrived in New Zealand in August 1971 from England, the job offer coming via an aerogram.
He came to NZ on the back of an agricultural engineering qualification from Newcastle University, which he did after completing an agriculture degree at Reading.
“I was looking around for jobs and I’d done a lot of work on milking machine designs. NZ was of course pretty high-profile in the dairying area,” he said.
At the time, Massey’s agronomy department included a small group that specialised in agricultural mechanisation and that’s where he began work.
“We only intended to be here for two years but ended up staying 50. My father once told me that during your career, when you come to a fork in the road, take it,” he said.
During his tenure with Massey, Sims has held several positions and undertaken many international roles, including being a lead author for the IPCC on five major climate mitigation reports, as well as spending time with the International Energy Agency in Paris.
He has also been a supervisor to numerous PhD and masters students, although his role in that area these days is much less than it was.
He still takes the occasional lecture, as well as doing plenty of media work, including being called on by Radio NZ’s The Panel for his opinion on energy and climate change issues.
“It’s a win-win, I’m pleased to be still part of Massey in a small way, that I’m giving something to the university by way of publicity,” he said.
He says the move from there into the fields of sustainable energy and climate change mitigation was more by luck than judgment.
In the early ’70s, as part of the agronomy department, he got involved in experiments on oil seed crops, such as rapeseed and sunflower, as a response to the oil shocks of the decade.
That led to research on how to turn tallow from meat works into a biodiesel that could be used as a tractor fuel.
However, after the second oil shock the oil price dropped and interest in that sort of research fell correspondingly.
“But I carried on looking at biomass, at bio-energy, at growing short-rotation eucalyptus trees, which got me into renewable energy,” he said.
In the mid-90s he held a one-day conference at Massey on the potential for wind farming in NZ. Three or four years later the first wind turbines were built in the Tararuas, at the back of Palmerston North.
“That led me into solar, which led me into renewable energy and renewable energy is of course climate change mitigation,” he said.
Despite his international achievements, Sims says the highlight of his career are the staff and students he’s met at Massey.
He managed to catch up with some of his former colleagues from what he describes as “the good old days” of the ’70s and ’80s at a special function held at Massey to celebrate his 50 years there, just two days before the country went into lockdown last month.
As for former students, he runs into them when he least expects it.
He was in Palmerston North recently having a coffee with Cathy when he noticed tractors driving around The Square.
“I thought, of course, it’s the farmers’ protest,” he said.
After seeing placards with an anti-climate change message, he decided he would go and have a chat with some of those involved.
“As I approached somewhat hesitantly to initiate a conversation, one of the farmers called out ‘Ralph Sims’, shook my hand. He said ‘I always wanted to thank you for the A-plus you gave me’.”
Despite disagreeing with the sentiment expressed by some of the placards on display that day, Sims can understand the pressures farmers are under at present.
“I wasn’t born on a farm but I spent my youth milking cows,” he said.
“I’ve got an agricultural background, so I can understand where the farming community is coming from and the pressures on them with water and climate and everything else.
“They are trying to run a business and the floods and the droughts are getting worse.
“They deserve to be listened to. It’s a two-way thing.”
That does not mean agriculture can ignore its climate change responsibilities.
He says although the latest IPCC report identified carbon dioxide as the most important greenhouse gas to address “we can’t afford to ignore the importance of reducing our methane emissions”.
“There’s no way out of that. It’s part of our target of getting to zero carbon by 2050,” he said.
“We can’t just ignore it and leave agriculture to do its own thing.”
