On Sundays Robin and May Murphy used to travel the back tracks of Waimate District looking for seal and shingle in need of repair.
Murphy was a local councillor so they figured they had to do their bit.
He reckons he got to know 95% of the roads.
“May and I would go for a drive and pick up some new roads so you knew what was going on.”
He was determined during his two terms on the South Canterbury council that rural interests would get a fair shake, right down to funding community halls like the one in hometown Glenavy.
As a dairy farmer he also wanted to show the industry contributing to the country.
“In the district plan there was a bit of a backlash against dairying.
“When I was on the council I was lucky there were six new ones on at the same time and we were quite rural-based so we were able to get quite a lot of things done.”
As part of the council’s economic development group Murphy tried to ensure farming was recognised for its power to share wealth.
“Prior to that everyone was just trying to knock dairying around because it seemed to be successful. My argument was everybody should be successful.”
He’s a driving force in a welter of irrigation projects, committees and boards including chairman of the innovative Morven Glenavy Ikawai (MGI) irrigation company for the past 20 years.
Water storage and reticulation has consumed most of Murphy’s working life: rallying funds, stoking enthusiasm and providing governance.
At age 18 Murphy started doing cream supply on a farm at Seadown, near Timaru, and in 1975 moved to Middle Rd, Ikawai, beside the Waitaki River.
These days Ikawai and neighbouring Glenavy are swathed in lush, irrigated dairy farms but in the 1970s it was mainly sheep and beef country. Most dairy farmers toiled away on town supply, making the most of boggy paddocks and the state-owned irrigation schemes of the day.
The Murphys had to prove themselves. When the couple took over 60ha at Ikawai they applied for a loan from the Rural Bank.
“The officer backed us and his boss said ‘Oh, you made a mistake there’.”
The Murphys converted the farm to tanker supply for Cloverlea Co-op and doubled production in the first year.
Murphy was soon a Cloverlea director, helping it secure more supply.
“I think that first year we shifted to Ikawai there were only four farms supplying Cloverlea and then the following year we got the Waimate town milk supply on board and we had another shareholder come in. It just grew from there.”
By the early 1980s dairying was expanding rapidly around on both sides Waitaki River. The Murphys moved to Glenavy with son Bruce on June 7, 1984. He is precise about the date because it coincided with the momentous Lange Labour government coming to power.
The Murphys and a young staff member knuckled down and built a cow shed. By August 15 that year they were milking their 370 cows.
At Ikawai the farm’s irrigation came from the government-owned, Public Works Department-built Redcliffs scheme, built in the 1930s and one of the first of its kind in New Zealand. At Glenavy farmers drew on state-controlled water from the Morven Glenavy project, built about a decade before.
In 1989, a group of farmers including Murphy as a founding director bought Morven Glenavy and Redcliffs (Ikawai) from the Crown, creating bedrock for today’s Morven-Glenavy-Ikawai (MGI), incorporating Waihao Downs Irrigation.
By the time Murphy became MGI chairman in 1998 the scheme was ticking over nicely.
“When we bought the scheme we had quite a lot of debt to the Crown.”
The new owners quickly paid off that debt and expanded the irrigation network. In private hands MGI started with a combined 11,000ha of developed irrigation. Water flows for piped pivot irrigation and a bald comparison of hectares doesn’t fully explain the metamorphosis to 2018. MGI now has 163 shareholders, some of whom are among the biggest-producing dairy farmers in the country.
Murphy says virtually all the schemes were built with capacity to expand over years and decades to come. Farmers today considering whether to invest in Hunter Downs can make a similar sort of investment in the community, he said.
“Our forefathers made those decisions to put those schemes there and I believe that the generation that’s there now, whether they like it or not, it’s up to them to put something in place.”
Finance Minister Roger Douglas was soon dispensing his radical prescription to unshackle state control of the economy. By 1986 interest rates steepled to about 20% and farm subsidies were virtually history. The Murphys survived but he’s sure New Zealand lost a sense of “we:” in the process.
“I don’t altogether disagree with what Roger Douglas did but it was bloody tough.
“He collapsed provincial NZ. He should have collapsed the cities at the same time and we’d all have been better off, instead of taking money off the country.”
Murphy has done his best to re-inflate rural NZ, serving on local domain and hall committees and bigger bodies like the Lower Waitaki-South Canterbury coastal zone committee, a major part of environmental planning in the region.
He has served on numerous farming and local body groups, including the Bovis Action Group helping South Canterbury and North Otago farmers take ownership of the response to Mycoplasma bovis.
In the 2017 New Year Honours he was made an Officer of the NZ Order of Merit for his contribution to land and water management.
His family business, Murphy Farms, runs 5100 cows on 2150ha and employs four lower-order sharemilkers, two dairy managers and a runoff manager.
Irrigation has been essential for the business and many others like it, drought-proofing, keeping production consistent and giving certainty of income.
Thanks partly to water Murphy Farms’ annual production varies by no more than 1-2%.
“And I think of all the years we’ve been farming here there’s only one year that we haven’t increased production. If you’re a grassland farmer you need water.”
In Canterbury every decade brings an 18-month to two-year drought.
“This decade we haven’t had it and somewhere along the line you’re going to have a real dry period. I think people have got to assess the cost of that lost income versus being able to put that irrigation scheme in.”
Murphy looks forward to growing more grass in future as border dyke irrigation continues to be replaced by spray systems. The more that farmers can match their irrigation requirements with soil moisture levels the better they will be.
Personally, it’s satisfying for him to have son Bruce and daughter-in-law Lesa as business partners. It feels like the succession planning he and May started with Bruce in 2000 is paying off.
“I’m probably pretty fortunate that I’ve been able to take a helicopter view of a lot of things. I’ve had very good support from May and my family. And on the other hand I don’t work a 40-hour week. A lot of that other work was done on the weekend or at night.”
He gives only a hint of slowing down his farming and community commitments but says whenever he does step away from a commitment he’s sure to make it a clean break.
“When I went off the zone committee I told them that when I retired they won’t see me for a period of time and they haven’t.”
His approach to retirement is “I’m gone. Don’t worry, I won’t be annoying anybody.”
Likewise, a general manager appointed three years ago has picked up some of Murphy’s institutional knowledge and kept gathering data to keep the company in good shape.
