Tony Orman: the Environmental Disaster of carbon farming

… about 72 per cent of pine forests were foreign-owned, with United States companies owning about 35 per cent and Asian companies about 12 per cent. –Keith Woodford, Professor of Farm Management and Agribusiness at Lincoln University, 2010

Rivers drying up

In April last year, I went trout fishing to a stream that is a tributary of the Wairau River. It is also an important spawning stream for both brown trout and probably some salmon. It is also a habitat for native fish.

At the road bridge just above its confluence with the parent river, it was a mere trickle. A couple of kilometres upstream it was dry river bed, whereas in previous decades it always had a healthy year-round flow.

The reason was not hard to identify.