Volume 55 No 2 April 2007 - New Zealand Society of Soil Science

McCraw moved to Alexandra to initially begin soil surveys of existing and potential fruit growing
areas of Central Otago from Cromwell to Roxburgh. These were to be followed by irrigation surveys.
The Alexandra office grew with the addition successively of Cowie, Ward, Leamy and lastly Gary
Orbell. By the early 1960s these pedologists had mapped the soils of the Alexandra District, and the
Ida, Upper Clutha and mid Manuherikia valleys. These were areas where irrigation was the key to
pastoral and horticultural development of the dry basin floors.
Cowie was briefly in Foxton before establishing the soil survey office in Palmerston North with
Fitzgerald as his assistant. Together they surveyed the Manawatu sand country, recognizing a
topographically consistent soil pattern, referred to as soil associations. The soils on dunes and sand
plains differentiated the progradational Manawatu sand plain into successively older, but overlapping
Holocene dunes systems. In a career, the bulk of which was spent in the Manawatu, Cowie built-up a
comprehensive knowledge of the soils and their varied uses for horticulture and agriculture. Like
Pullar in Gisborne, he was able to use his knowledge of the soils to interpret the evolution of the
Rangitikei and Manawatu floodplains and of the many smaller rivers between. The presence of a
widespread tephra layer interbedded with silty coverbeds on the Manawatu downlands was the key to
recognizing loess, for the first time in the North Island. In the late 1950s Cowie, Brian Kear and Orbell
mapped the soils of Kairanga Count an area of the Manawatu downlands comprising small
floodplains, and terraces and floodplains of the major rivers, bordering the eastern side of the main
ranges. This survey further developed the idea of soil association mapping, producing cross-sectional
diagrams of landscape segments that depicted the relationship between the soil pattern, the landforms
and the underlying sediments. In the 1950s Wright moved to the Taita Research Station to establish
the soil biology section of DSIR Soil Bureau.
A new headquarters for DSIR Soil Bureau
Up until the end of the 1950s the DSIR Soil Bureau had been housed in less than adequate conditions
in a number of buildings in Wellington including the infamous 54 Molesworth Street opposite the
Parliament buildings. In 1949 Dr Grange had negotiated the acquisition of land at Taita on the eastern
side of the Hutt Valley and by 1962 the new buildings were ready for occupation. This was the first
time DSIR Soil Bureau staff, with the exception of the field offices, had been located on one site. By
the late 1950s the soil survey offices in the South Island were at Christchurch, Dunedin and
Alexandra, and those in the North Island at Whangarei, Rotorua, Palmerston North, and Gisborne,
with Gibbs the Chief Pedologist based in Wellington.
In 1962 Taylor and Pohlen published Soil Survey Method, at this time one of the most comprehensive
manuals available for soil surveyors, and the first formally published in New Zealand. It set standards
for soil description and mapping, and included the first published version of the New Zealand Genetic
Soil Classification with the common and a novel technical nomenclature. It was republished in 1968 as
part of the Soils of New Zealand volumes. The technical nomenclature was used for a time and
subsequently abandoned.
Taylor had invited the International Society of Soil Science to hold their 8th Congress in New
Zealand, but this was not acceptable to the Europeans, so he settled for an inter-congress meeting of
Commissions IV (Soil Fertility) and V (Pedology). In the years prior to this meeting, field and
laboratory staff made a New Zealand-wide collection of reference soils with descriptions, to which
were added chemical, physical and mineralogical analyses. The conference was held at Massey
University in 1962 and included field tours throughout both islands. The conference and tours were a
success, and illustrated the integration between soil survey and soil fertility, and the application of this
knowledge to agricultural, horticultural and forestry land-uses in New Zealand. It was an appropriate
culmination of Taylor’s career, as a soil surveyor and latterly as Director of DSIR Soil Bureau, from
which he retired at the end of 1962.
By this time Gibbs, Raeside, and Cutler were devoting more time to questions of land-use,
highlighting the limited areas of New Zealand soils with high versatility, producing classifications for
pastoral and cropping uses, and arguing for a limitation to urban spread on to the high value soils that
surrounded most of the New Zealand’s towns and cities. This case was well illustrated by later soil
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