James Douglas Stewart

Professor James Douglas Stewart, MA.,PhD. DipVFM. FNZAS.

Principal of Lincoln Agricultural College (1974-1984)

BLEDISLOE MEDAL 1976

Professor J. D. Stewart

The Department of Farm Management and Rural Valuation has a wide participation and responsibility in almost every aspect of Lincoln College operations. Its students move on into fields of influential standing throughout New Zealand and beyond, in farm advisory work, Government offices, rural banking and commercial firms. Many take their knowledge into their own practical farming careers.

The Diploma course run by the department for thirty-seven years has now been phased into a new degree form, and is fitting that one of the department’s outstanding graduates and architects, and the first enactment of the Chair of Farm Management, Emeritus Professor James Douglas Stewart, should be awarded the Bledisloe Medal for 1976.

James Stewart came into the discipline of practical work and in-course instruction as a Rural Field Cadet in 1944. Two of the next six years of his training were spent in Full-time Lincoln studies to qualify for the Diploma of Valuation and Farm Management at the end of 1949, and he then spent a year in the Economics Section of the Department of Agriculture, being especially involved in the economics of problem areas in New Zealand farming.

He then Director of Lincoln College, Professor Hudson, offered Stewart a position as Assistant Lecturer in Farm Management during 1951, and while so employed he continued with part-time university studies, gaining his M.A. Degree in Economics at Canterbury University College. He was promoted to Lecturer in the mid-nineteen-fifties and was closely associated with Professor Brian Phillip Bell in the field of Agricultural Economics. Their combined efforts won for them in 1953 the award of the Royal Agricultural Society of New Zealand for what was judged to be the best series of published papers on agricultural economics.

A Shaw Savill Centennial Scholarship took James Stewart to the University of Reading in 1959, and he returned to Lincoln as a Senior Lecturer in Farm Management in 1962 with a Ph.D. He then embarked on the advancement of applied farm management within and beyond the College, with substantial emphasis on production economics and techniques of operations research which served a new generation of well equipped management advisers while also strengthening management methods on the Lincoln College farms themselves. At Ashley Dene, for example, he developed the tractor licence system under high stocking rates, consequence of which was under the same and extensive work which was of considerable benefit to the general farming community.

In 1964 Dr Stewart became the first Professor of Farm Management within the New Zealand University system. He sharpened the analytical approach to management and developed postgraduate work with emphasis upon specialised research in New Zealand and abroad. Professor Stewart’s appointment to the Chair coincided with his participation in agricultural deliberations at national level. He was Chairman, for example, of the Sale of Farm Committee of the Agricultural Development Conference, and made a notable contribution towards expanding the New Zealand programme of economic aid to developing countries abroad. He led a New Zealand mission to Indonesia in 1971, and following a similar mission to Sumatra led by Professor Ian Coop, sub-missions were made to the World Bank on the development in Indonesia of beef cattle industry. In 1973 he visited the World Bank in Washington, D.C., the University of Wageningen Plan in New York, and the Ministry of Agriculture in Iran to review areas of possible New Zealand participation in agricultural development. A year later he led a mission to Saudi Arabia to report on management of the Hajar irrigation project, and made also the trip to identify projects suitable for New Zealand participation.

Last year he was consultant for the Food and Agricultural Organisation in Uruguay which made an appraisal of farm extension services there, and in 1975 he was visiting in Morocco, in Hungary, and Rural Planning Unit of the Hellenic Country in Europe. In the New Zealand Government’s 1975–76/?? Programme of New Zealand’s Advisory Committee on Overseas Aid and Development he chaired the research and the responsibility of monitoring the overseas aid programme and reporting to the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

This extensive record, which has widened the orbit of Lincoln College’s influence in farming practices in New Zealand and overseas, would be sufficient justification in itself for Council to award the Bledisloe Medal to Professor Stewart, but he has now entered another field in which his influence can be still further felt. Dr Stewart resigned his position as Head of the Department of Farm Management and Rural Valuation to accept the Principalship of Lincoln College.

It may be added that in circles not exclusively associated with educational and farming practice, Professor Stewart has earned equivalent fame. His name is intimately linked with a certain sport known as rugby football. For a quarter of a century he has been successively front row forward for his University and for Canterbury province, and as a captain, selector and coach his example and leadership have been much to the advantage of New Zealand rugby.

He appears to have shared limitless talents among the sporting, academic and practical farming worlds.

This award of Lincoln College’s premier honour, which is esteemed throughout the country, is in substance a tribute and testimony to those who through the years devised and guided the V.F.M. programme together with the hundreds of young men produced from that course. Professor Stewart stands for them as evidence of the fulfilment of the hopes of its founders. (1976 Lincoln College Magazine (No. 101 1976), P43-44)