Steve Thompson

From an interview on 6 December 2015 with Dr Steve Thompson, UK/NZ science go-between for the British High Commission in NZ. Formerly my boss as CEO of the Royal Society of NZ, 2001-2007

I met Steve at the end of the last Millenium. I was wearing my dated black crepe trouser suit, which was far too hot for the December day, and the bright sun showed up the dusty pilling on the jacket. It was the best I could do for the interview, having bought few new clothes in the previous five years when I was a student at Vic, studying physics. It was a lonely pursuit – 19 year old males did not want a 45 year old woman for a lab partner.

I knew I wanted the job at the Royal Society as soon as I set eyes on the wooden staircase in the old house in Thorndon, now occupied by the Chinese Embassy. There was a copy of the Joshua Reynolds portrait of Joseph Banks in the entrance hall.  I was nervous about my first formal interview in many years, though Steve tried to put me at ease.  His manner is always easy and affable.  One of the two times I ever saw him shaken was the day the Twin Towers came down.  He put his head around my office door to say something, but was too choked to speak.  The American Embassy was next door.  After September 11, they erected huge concrete barriers around the perimeter.

Not long after I joined the staff, Steve met Heather, one lucky day at the opera. They still celebrate “Rigoletto Day”.  As they should.  Such chance meetings of two highly compatible people, who just happen to both be available, are rare. Heather plays the French Horn in the NZSO, and Steve shares her love of classical music.  Anyway, here we were at lunch over ten years later.  It was the week that the SAFE people placed an ad in the Guardian about their exposé of apparent cruelty to bobby calves that had been shown on Sunday, TV1, 30 November 2015.  The ad depicted a calf’s head in a glass of milk, with a faint bloody pink suffusing the liquid.  It was also the week that new rules banning sow stalls came into effect, as a result of their activism and secret filming some years earlier.

Steve grew up in Sutton Coldfield, on the outskirts of Birmingham. He can summon a Birmingham accent, but his years in Canada and New Zealand have driven it deep. He and I both belong to the maternal haplogroup H, which is hardly a coincidence, since 47% of Europeans, and 40% of New Zealanders, also come down the same populous line from a woman who lived in Europe around the time of the last Ice Age.  I mention this here, to introduce what will be a recurring theme.

Back in the UK, his family were good friends with John and Mary Middleton in the village of Brailes, Oxfordshire, where John was a tenant farmer, coincidentally only about 10 miles north of the Wychwood villages where I am staying for a few weeks to study the farming community. From age 10, Steve went to Brailes during the holidays and helped out on the farm.  He loved it, and decided at age 15 to become a farmer, to which end he took ag-science at Reading University.  He soon realised that he didn’t have the money to buy a farm – and was not likely to in the foreseeable future.  It had finally dawned on him that John did not actually own the farm in Brailes the day hooves came clattering past the farmhouse when they were having a cup of tea. John leapt to his feet and hurried outside to see the Lord of the Estate who was out riding.  Steve remembers his nervousness and being told he had better be nice to him because he owned the land. Despite this ominous awakening to the facts of farming, Steve loved the peace and quiet of the country.

The farm’s 200 or so lambs were sold each year at the market in Banbury. The market was local, supply and demand in fine balance.

He recalls how the milk was cooled by running it down the outside of corrugated sheets into a 20 gallon “churn”. It was carried by handcart to the roadside then picked up by a truck.  They milked just 20-30 cows.  An economic unit is now more like 300 cows.

At that stage, in the late 1950s, they used one ancient carthorse – Tom was his name. It was a dramatic transition in the 1960s to the new combine harvesters, which had difficulty traversing the corrugations in the land, formed after centuries of ploughing.  The natural corrugations were accentuated by ploughing and provided natural drainage downhill.

Engineering in the agricultural sector had stalled in favour of military technologies during the war years, but raced ahead in the 50s and 60s. The new machines were dirty and noisy, and forced the pace. You had to constantly adjust the cutter to the corrugations. Thomas Hardy and D H Lawrence never lived to see the advent of industrial farming.

At the same time they had started getting rid of hedgerows, refugia for wildlife, but Steve says this slowed right down after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out in 1962.

On graduation, Steve was all set to become an aerial fertiliser salesman, but he was encouraged to do a PhD. His professors were impressed that he had taken the initiative to learn about computer programming in those very early days.  Since then, he has had a variety of jobs and teaching roles – too many to summarise meaningfully so I have listed them below.  He recently told his colleagues in a presentation about what he had learnt from all these experiences, that “leading the Royal Society was one of those (7-year) moments in history where the right team pulls together as a family. It was one of the most rewarding times of my life.” Ditto, Steve

Over dessert, Steve gives me a quick summary of some of the big developments and factors in agriculture, here and in the UK:

From 12,000 years ago

• The initial appeal of agriculture was being able to stay in one place and have a bit of time to do other things
• But the new social hierarchies and private land ownership create a large underclass of virtual slaves working the land. The profits are enjoyed by few.  Nutrition quality declines for many people, but overall agriculture allows more people to stay alive.

From the 1750s

• The great forests in the UK have gone, and the land enclosed. No longer common grazing rights. This impoverishes many people, and drives them out of rural areas.
• A rural depression in the UK during the 1870s, resulting from a flood of cheap grain from the US, results in mass migration to the colonies.

From 1960s

• Farms get bigger, and more specialised. The number of people required to work the land continues to drop.
• Unsustainable intensification of farming, which we are still paying the environmental price for.
• A huge leap in productivity with high-yield disease-resistant wheat strains developed by Norman Borlaug, Iowa

From 1990s

• People wake up and start move to sustainable farming, organics etc. Drive to diversification as profit margins get tighter. Trend for the farmer’s partner/wife to get a job off the farm to make ends meet.
• Consumers concerned about climate change, animal welfare, environmental damage from farming; they want to know where there food comes from and how it is produced. At the same time there is the pressure to feed billions more people.

From 2012

• Precision farming due to sensors, drones, and other technologies allowing precision application of fertilisers and other chemicals, water, detection of optimum ripeness, time to pollinate etc.
•  The Haber process, developed around 1910 for making nitrogen fertilizer, was revolutionary but uses so much energy. The problem of nodulisation for nitrogen capture is proving intractable.  (Idea that you can create hybrid wheat, for example, with nodules)
•  The big natural deposits of guano (bird faeces) have been used up. Phosphorus now mined from rock phosphate, but unrecyclable. Very difficult to trap. Drains into rivers then the sea, with adverse consequences for freshwater and marine life.
•  In cold and wet winter conditions, you get a lot of nitrous oxide coming off animal manure (2/3 nitrous oxide/1/3 methane). This is an argument for keeping cows inside during winter, but there is resistance to this in New Zealand from a cost and animal welfare perspective.
• Research quest to reduce methane emissions from farm animals?
• Large swings in prices for dairy products.

The future

•  It is predicted that by 2050, we’ll be harvesting more from aquaculture than the land.
•  Maori land-use plans much longer term. Waitangi Tribunal settlements allow iwi to invest in progressive, long-term, science-based approaches.
•  New Zealand farmers have had no government subsidies since the mid 1980s. A major shock. UK farmers get 3 billion Euros per annum but generally feel they are over-regulated by remote control from Brussels. EU bureaucracy too costly?  Brexit Referendum on 23 June, just days away as I write.
• What will happen to dairy farming? How much longer can we withstand the drop in prices?
• Water, water, water…not clean enough, not enough of it, and too much in the wrong places. The NZ Government has just allocated $100M over ten years to clean it up, and it looks like the Ruataniwha Dam will proceed.

A delicious lunch. Thanks Steve and Heather. Not just for lunch, but for your support with this project.  I would not be here at all, Steve, if you hadn’t hired me that hot December day back in 2000.

 

Summary of Steve’s career

1965-68: Pursued a PhD at Reading in agricultural investment methodologies

1968-71: Offered and took job at Reading as Assistant Lecturer. Finished PhD in 1971

1971-72: Post-Doc work at Max-Planck institute in Bad Kreuznach, Germany

1972-73: Designing computerised farm planning tools for Agriculture Canada, in Guelph

1973-76: Promoted to head of section

1976-78: Analyst at Economics Branch of Agriculture Canada in Ottawa

1978-82: Deputy and Acting Director, Animal Research Institute, Ottawa

1982-83: Policy Adviser, Agricultural Research

1983-84: One year at National Defence College, Kingston, Ontario

1984-87: Director General, Research in British Columbia

1987:89: Director General, Agricultural Inspection for Canada

1989-95: Senior Fellow, Canada’s National Round Table on Environment and Economy

1995-97: Professor of Forest Policy and Sustainable Development at U of New Brunswick

1997-2000: CEO, NZ Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (funding agency)

2000-07: CEO, Royal Society of New Zealand

2007-     Science Officer, British High Commission