For the last decade, there have been major concerns about productive farmland, not only being converted into subdivisions, but being converted into forests. These concerns were ramped up in recent times with the previous administration’s One Billion Trees project.
The area of land planted in trees is actually down from where it was two decades ago. New Zealand has about 12.1 million hectares in farmland. Another 1.7 million is in forestry, down from 2 million hectares in 2002, but reaching the 1 billion trees target by 2028 will require the planting of an estimated 43,000 hectares per year.
Of course there's a distinction to make between the different sorts of forestry – plantation forestry is different from carbon forestry.
Plantation trees will eventually be harvested. Carbon trees will never be harvested because the owners make enough through carbon credits alone. So what happens when a farmer sells their land for carbon farming or turns it over to plantation farming?
It really does take a village to maintain a farm, to keep a farm alive. Dairy farms, beef farms, sheep farms require people and those living in rural communities are worried that as the trees advance the sharemilkers jobs will go, shearing jobs will go, along with the shepherds and the truck drivers and the families. The vets will go, the mechanics, the retailers, the schools. They'll become ghost towns filled with trees.
Beef and Lamb NZ's sheep numbers fell 4.3% in the year to June. There was a 2.8 percent decrease in beef cattle numbers. And the lamb crop for spring 2025 is expected to fall nearly 5 percent.
Now part of that is farmers reacting to the low prices they get for their stock. Some parts of the country it's drought, but the primary driver, according to Beef and Lamb, is land use change, as a result of the conversion of livestock farms to forestry.
The Ministry for Primary Industries Todd McClay says the government is concerned in regards to excessive conversion of food-producing land to forest, however, he says it's also important that farmers retain choice over what they do with their land.
Imagine you've slogged your guts out all your life, you and your husband, you and your wife. You have worked every hour God sent from sunup to sundown. Finally, after 40 years, the kids don't want the farm. They have gone off to university or they've gone overseas and they're living their best lives. The kids don't want to get into the farm. What do you?
Of course there's a distinction to make between the different sorts of forestry – plantation forestry is different from carbon forestry.
Plantation trees will eventually be harvested. Carbon trees will never be harvested because the owners make enough through carbon credits alone. So what happens when a farmer sells their land for carbon farming or turns it over to plantation farming?
It really does take a village to maintain a farm, to keep a farm alive. Dairy farms, beef farms, sheep farms require people and those living in rural communities are worried that as the trees advance the sharemilkers jobs will go, shearing jobs will go, along with the shepherds and the truck drivers and the families. The vets will go, the mechanics, the retailers, the schools. They'll become ghost towns filled with trees.
Beef and Lamb NZ's sheep numbers fell 4.3% in the year to June. There was a 2.8 percent decrease in beef cattle numbers. And the lamb crop for spring 2025 is expected to fall nearly 5 percent.
Now part of that is farmers reacting to the low prices they get for their stock. Some parts of the country it's drought, but the primary driver, according to Beef and Lamb, is land use change, as a result of the conversion of livestock farms to forestry.
The Ministry for Primary Industries Todd McClay says the government is concerned in regards to excessive conversion of food-producing land to forest, however, he says it's also important that farmers retain choice over what they do with their land.
Imagine you've slogged your guts out all your life, you and your husband, you and your wife. You have worked every hour God sent from sunup to sundown. Finally, after 40 years, the kids don't want the farm. They have gone off to university or they've gone overseas and they're living their best lives. The kids don't want to get into the farm. What do you?
New research warns of significant transition of livestock farms into pine forestry unless policies are reconsidered
Imagine if the government said no, you cannot sell it to a nice fat cat overseas buyer who's going to put it all in trees because we need that land for you to produce food. No, you keep producing food until you collapse in the field. I mean, no government's going to do that.
Farmers have every right to do what they wish with their land. I mean it really is under threat, that kind of productive land is under threat as we heard the other day from alternative energy sources, from subdivisions, from plantation forestry, from carbon forestry.
It's like watching different armies advancing towards these poor farmers standing there going, bloody hell, what am I going to do? I'm not getting enough on the international market for my product. I love farming. I don't want to sit there and watch pine trees growing, that's not my life’s dream but what am I to do? What can we do? What makes it worth a farmer's while to keep their land in livestock?
For those of you who have stock, who have beef, who have lamb, who have dairy, do you sometimes look at the trees and think imagine, I wouldn't have to do a bloody thing.
I could sit on the porch, think my thoughts, never have to go out because it's raining and wet and cold, and the baby lambs are going to die unless they get some shelter. Never have to get up early again. Just acres and acres of pine trees. Do any farmers think bliss?
And when it comes to the rural communities, how are you going? How are you surviving? Do you see yourself as under threat or are you regaining lost ground?
Kerre McIvor, is a journalist, radio presenter, author and columnist. Currently hosts the Kerre Woodham mornings show on Newstalk ZB - where this article was sourced.
7 comments:
Dependance on pine is concerning. Some calamitous disease always very possible. And as the maori insurgency progresses colonist inspired plantation forests will be easy targets for firing.
Thank you Kerre for a balanced review of the situation faced by many rural communities currently struggling to make a living from the once highly profitable farms that have been the backbone of the local economy for a very long time.
From one who lives and farms at the epicentre of where this question is being asked on a daily basis, the answer to your question is still “Yes” but recent climate events have forced owners of property in the regions where the options are limited to rethink the mix of farming practices in order to peacefully coexist with the fragile environment that has been abused for far too long.
And ironically, it has been these events that will ultimately force the transition to more acceptable activities that have the capacity to save us from ourselves.
Here on the North Island’s East Coast traditional farming practices on the erosion prone hill country have been exposed as unsustainable operations for country like ours that is based in the main on erosion prone but otherwise fertile soils suitable to both forestry and livestock farming.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, this mix of farming practices remains the best use of our regional hill country on which the local economy is based and so we will just have to limit the activities of both industries to the extent that they no longer endanger the existence of those communities that have traditionally depended on them for their own existence.
Fortunately the leaders of both industries realise they have no choice but to make the changes necessary so that we don’t destroy the goose that laid the golden egg.
Most regions like ours where this problem has become a priority for Local and even Central governments are working with land owners to find ways that will enable these industries to continue, albeit at a significantly reduced level of activity, while introducing new high value, non pollutant land use opportunities based on currently under utilised assets that are available within the regional boundaries.
I am in no doubt that we will survive this painful transition period and in the end we and the whole country will be better for it both financially and perhaps more importantly ecologically as well.
The biggest crock is that you can get money to plant trees, watch them grow and never harvest them. Any scheme which encourages this is lunacy and vandalism for NZ. If 'carbon farming' (what a stupendously stupid term) was not available, farmers wouldn't have the option to sell to overseas fat cat investors. If the Coalition really gives a damn about the country they would put everyone on notice that there is no future in carbon farming and the unrealistic prices for farmland would drop to a commercially supportable price.
Pinus Radiata is purely and simply a toxic disease that destroys our green and fertile lands.
Driving from Wellington to Rotorua for example and just look at the areas where the pines have been cut down. The land is raped, poisoned and basically destroyed for all future crop or farmland.
Then, of course, we get the slash from the harvesting pouring down our rivers and destroying houses, bridges and farms.
You are Absolutely Right, Alan !!
Ewan McGregor
There’s a conundrum here. New Zealand-grown radiata pine is an extraordinarily productive softwood timber tree, enhanced by our world-regarded expertise in its genetic enhancement, cultivation, treatment and processing. How much of the timber that we use in building construction, fences, walls, horticultural props is not radiata. In addition, we have enough left over to export, earning what is exceeded only by dairy production and meat. (I suspect that pine from logs to paper will soon overt take meat.) This species contribution to the economy is enormous.
But how much land planted in pine is too much? Carbon credit payments has changed the trajectory, with increasingly better farm land now being converted to pine, mostly with ownership being by overseas interests, with little, if any, interest in social and landscape considerations, both of which will be utterly transformed. There are also enormous risks here; disease and fire, as Robert Arther points out. What damage can a delinquent do with a single match. (There is something else that I think has not been considered. A large conversion to pine is about to take place westward of Napier city. In due course we can expect large yellow clouds of pollen drifting eastwards. Will there be much coughing and wheezing as a result? Just saying.)
Yes, we need more trees over our landscape, and there are options that allow for trees and pasture – silvopastoralism – to co-exist over the same piece of land, allowing for farming to continue, with high-value timber production, albeit on a longer rotation, and with our rural residential social structure and our scenic values protected.
This is a debate that needs to be taken on a national scale, and urgently. This landuse conversion will not only be transformal, but likely to be irreversible for as far ahead as we can see.
Pine trees are a big solar battery, absorbing energy from the sun and storing it.
The same batches of radiation, born together, are going to die at more or less the same time if unharvested.
A lightning strike or a match are going to release all that energy in an uncontrollable conflageration.
Go figure where is all that stored CO2 is going ???
Duh , more short term thinking by the climate activists.
I have a helluva job getting younger people to realize that some grown today is going to need millions of years to sequester the CO2.
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