Overseas forestry companies have spent nearly a billion dollars buying more than 100,000 hectares of New Zealand farmland over a decade.
If the farmland was placed side-by-side it would be larger than the combined urban cores of Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington.
Foreign farm-to-forest conversions have been controversial, and the government may limit them later this year.Purchases of entire farms by overseas investors require government approval. The Herald used the information released with these government decisions to map the land.Overseas purchases make up about a third of the total conversions of farms to forestry – the other two-thirds were converted by Kiwis.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about converting dairy farms into forests, but the forests we are planting on a burning planet matter right?
If we are going to see an enormous jump in forest fires, are we planting and managing forests that can cope in that new environment or are we planting kindling altho makes those first fires more intense and destructive?
Pine forests are kindling for future fires, indigenous forests are more sustainable.
Why are we allowing overseas interests to plant kindling for future fires with Pine that are poorly managed and cause vast scaring of the land and debris fields because of the slash?
Now Forestry Pimp Stuart Nash has been appointed to the Taxpayers Union Coven, expect the rights of Pine Forrest Owners to suddenly become the next great crime of Government.
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Yep, blind ideological stupidity.
Partly also stems from faulty climate modeling which rates pine trees as better carbon sinks “because” and doesn’t account for their (very) regular fires.
A lot of farmers would be more on board with native over pine plantations, pines poison the ground.
Corrupt Nash on the TPU is a blow to that organizations credibility.
That isn’t happening without government support, however. Labour deliberately killed the Forest Service’s sustainable native forestry practices off before they could be handed over to iwi, sadly, and there’s no chance of it coming back without serious investment. There’s only so much that the good people at the Farm Forestry Association can do.
No practical reason to convert a whole farm to forestry, can have mixed use on the same paddock. Also on hills but some should not be felled. Peter Andrews in Oz’ work was interesting on what to grow, soil, water, and that guy who has talked about close cropping with a herd grazing, and then I think fallowing. Monoculture is just agricultural factory system. We need to be specialists in management. But we have adopted the gross gold-rush, profit=seeking, upstarts approach. Yet talked about being as wealthy as Switzerland which manages its farm areas carefully. It keeps its own counsel too; wiser than we.
Entirely true, from an agricultural/forestry/agriforestry standpoint. It’s capitalist incentives driving this- it’s just not feasible for an investment vehicle created to package up land for forestry (especially carbon farming) or their local managers paid pennies on the dollar to do mixed used land management. A sensible government would ban such acquisitions, or force them to be done through LandCorp, and ensure any land more suitable for other land uses is managed appropriately.
What is baffling to me is that everyone is planting Pinus radiata, even on very steep country where they probably intend to never fell it. Why not plant longer-lived species that are less inclined to become hollow and/or fall over? Or better still, shut the gate and let it all regenerate to manuka? Manuka is a pioneer species and a nursery plant for ponga, which in turn are nursery species for native forest. Having a monoculture of one species seems to be asking for trouble. What if Dothystroma or other diseases of pines mutate to become much more pathogenic to Pinus radiata?
Multiple reasons here:
1) Radiata will grow well past typical rotation ages- I’ve been in 70+ year old planting trials that are far from senescent. Which will probably never be harvested because the piece size is going to be too hard to process in any regular mill for anything but chip, sadly.
2) The carbon forestry companies claim that either they’ll be investing in planting natives at some point in the far future (believe it when I see it) or that native will regen under the radiata (not entirely implausible, you see nice native regen waiting to come away once the canopy is clear under many radiata forests).
3) The carbon returns are not there for native planting, and that’s the only thing that a foreign investment group is going to care about, in the absence of funding that takes ecosystem (not completely absent in the case of radiata, there are some happy kiwis in radiata plantations up north) and aesthetic benefits into account.
I it would have been more accurate if you had written multiple excuses, not reasons.
I recently had some very old Pinus radiata felled. One was magnificent; the bottom part of the trunk took up a whole logging truck deck by itself. Two fences and a water trough had to be moved to fell it safely, though. The others were hollow and worthless.
If the trees are there for the long haul, why not put in something that will eventually be valuable, like Douglas fir?
When I was a teen I was one of several people planting Pinus radiata that are now not worth felling because they are on steep land and the cost of extraction exceeds their value. I still don’t know why we planted Pinus radiata.
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