Recipe for prosperity: take flat land, skilled farmers, fertiliser and cows.

Add cheap water. Fold in new tech­nology, lashings of debt and permissive environmental rules.

Voila! In a decade or two you have a thriving district with next-to-no unemployment, a rising population and a rate of economic growth almost twice the national average.

The district is Ashburton, sandwiched between two great braided alpine rivers, the Rakaia and the Rangitata, and serviced by a town bristling with farm accountants and consultants, agricultural-machinery and irrigation-equipment suppliers, and soon to be graced with a smart new art gallery and state-of-the-art sports centre.

The scorched greys and browns evoked by Bill Sutton in his famous Canterbury landscapes have been washed away by water delivered from the 66km Rangitata Diversion Race - an enormous canal built during the 30s Depression and sold by the Crown to local farmers in 1990 for $1 - and distributed through myriad irrigation schemes to 64,000ha of farmland.

Sutton would scarcely recognise this land, now cultivated to a vivid green and populated by giant centre-pivot irrigators that creep slowly across broad paddocks, watering the grass that feeds the cows that produce the milk that makes the region rich. Continue reading.

Source: The Listener

Image: John Cowpland