LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 75

known as 'cow and cocksfoot' country (Petrie, 1963), and most valleys had a small
cheese or butter factory. Cheese and butter production were strictly regulated by
the state, but grass seed production was not. It was, however, subject to increasing
commercial oversight as seed companies in Christchurch and the southern city of
Dunedin sought to distinguish their product in a crowded market place. They did
this by means of various metrological claims concerning relative freedom from
contamination and germination rate (Brooking and Pawson, 2011).
The Peninsula industry began to shrink in the mid-1920s. Akaroa cocksfoot was
expensive as the topography meant that production would always be reliant on a
high degree of hand processing. Increasingly the industry began to shift to new
seed-producing areas on the much more easily worked Canterbury Plains. The
local strain was also under challenge from new ones developed overseas, notably
in Denmark. In 1926, the highly regarded British grassland scientist George
Stapledon visited the Peninsula while on leave from the Welsh Plant Breeding
Station in Aberystwyth, Wales. Stapledon had established the station in 1919 in
response to government concerns about the state of British pastures. He
subsequently developed the S.37 and S.143 strains from Akaroa seed (Brooking and
Pawson, 2011). By then, cocksfoot was losing its popularity in grass seed mixes as
new ryegrass strains had finally resolved the lingering controversy of the 1880s.
Nonetheless, this episode reflects another characteristic of Anthropocene land-
scapes, the global exchange of genetic material through complex and contingent
webs in order to develop plants best adapted to conditions prevailing in any
particular site of production.
Transitioning to a middle landscape?
In the 1920s, less than 1 per cent of the Peninsula's land area remained under old
growth forest (Wilson, 2008). The frontier of bush clearance moved elsewhere, as
pastoral farming developed in the hill country of the North Island in response to
FIGURE 5.5 A cocksfooting gang at work. Photograph by Jesse Buckland, c. 1925.
Source: AK: 2003.18.2.30, Akaroa Museum.