Excerpt from Farm, Stock and Home, 1918, Vol. 34: The Northwest's Foremost Farm Paper J ust what does this, out new job, mean It means more food produced by fewer hands, for some of us must join the legions in France while the rest of us march in the armies of bungei-conquest at home. It means more livestock and the speeding up of in every possible way of the farm's productive powers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

During the 19th century, New Zealand's South Island underwent an environmental transformation at the hands of European settlers. They diverted streams and drained marshes, burned native vegetation and planted hedges and grasses, stocked farms with sheep and cattle and poured on fertilizer. Through various letter books, ledgers, diaries, and journals, this book reveals how the first European settlers learned about their new environment: talking to Maori and other Pakeha, observing weather patterns and the shifting populations of rabbits, reading newspapers, and going to lectures at the Mechanics' Institute. As the New Zealand environment threw up surprise after surprise, the settlers who succeeded in farming were those who listened closely to the environment. This rich and detailed contribution to environmental history and the literature of British colonial history and farming concludes—contrary to the assertions of some North American environmental historians—that the first generation of European settlers in New Zealand were by no means unthinking agents of change.