Professor was hugely influencial agricultural educationist

The doyen of farm management education and research in New Zealand, Sir James Douglas Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Farm Management at Lincoln University,  died in Christchurch on Friday 19 February aged 84.Sir James was successively a student, lecturer, professor and principal at Lincoln University in the days when it was Canterbury Agricultural College then Lincoln College. Born in Wanganui in August 1925,  Sir James was a Cantabrian by adoption, his long association with the province beginning in 1944 when he was selected as a Rural Field Cadet to study at Canterbury Agricultural College.The Canterbury connection ran deep over the years and not only in education. Rugby was an abiding passion and from student days as a front row forward and captain of Canterbury Agricultural College's 1st XV and as a New Zealand Universities representative, he progressed to Canterbury  representative honours, then ultimately became Canterbury's selector-coach. After completing his Canterbury Agricultural College studies, Sir James joined the Department of Agriculture as an economist but, in 1951,  on the exhortation of his old College Principal, Professor Eric Hudson, he switched to teaching and took up a vacant assistant lectureship in farm management at Canterbury Agricultural College.  So began his life's calling. On the teaching and research side, equipped with his Lincoln valuation and farm management qualification, and later an MA in economics, and a doctorate from Reading University in the UK, Sir James advanced his career in farm management education and in 1965, after 14 busy, productive and increasingly influential years he was appointed New Zealand's first Professor of Farm Management. Nine years later came the distinction of appointment as Principal of Lincoln College. As a researcher, Sir James had a long and significant research association with Ashley Dene Farm, south of Lincoln, where he conducted pioneering work on light land pastoral farming and particularly the use of lucerne.  Among other important work in Canterbury, he made a comparative examination of profitability on irrigated and non-irrigated sheep and cattle farms. Nationally, in the late 1950s,  he collaborated on a major research project examining the interrelationships between investment and output in New Zealand agriculture, which had a major influence on agricultural policy  in New Zealand for the following two decades. A close partnership with Bryan Philpott, the foundation Professor of Agricultural Economics at Lincoln College, led to the establishment of the influential Agricultural (now Agribusiness) and Economics Research Unit. At the end of the 1960s he was one of the founders of the New Zealand Society of Farm Management, now the NZ Institute of Primary Industry Management.