Farmer King Country
THURSDAY JULY 17, 2025
King Country Farmer | 1
July 2025
Axing the pine explosion By Jon Rawlinson
More than 300,000 hectares of sheep and beef farms have been sold for forestry throughout New Zealand since January 2017, Beef and Lamb says. Its report said sheep and beef farm sales for conversion to forestry are continuing at an alarming rate. “It’s clear that more and more trees are going onto productive sheep and beef farmland,” the organisation’s chair Kate Acland said. “The numbers show whole-farm sales for conversion to forestry for carbon credits are continuing at pace.” Her comments come as the government pushes ahead with a bill to put a cap on conversions which Agriculture minister Todd
McClay said have been “gutting” rural communities. Mapiu sheep and beef farmer David Richardson told The News if the trend continued, rural communities would feel the pain across the board. “It’s mostly whole farms being sold and converted to grow pine because there’s such good money through carbon credits. We’ve already lost huge numbers of stock units to forestry, and it’s hit other downstream jobs like vets, shearing, drenching, fencing and all that.” Meat processing businesses have also been feeling the pinch, Richardson said. “The meat processors are being adversely affected by the increase in sheep land gone to forestry, which has happened in this area quite a bit. It’s mostly due to ‘carbon credit
farms’ that have been sold in the last 12-18 months.” Pine forests also come with their own environmental impacts through increased biosecurity, fire and flooding risks as well as damage and pollution from forestry slash. While native bush is better than pine from an environmental standpoint, it doesn’t generate carbon credits to the same degree. “A lot of farms in the King Country have some native bush, which is good at sequestering carbon, however it’s very hard to get this into the carbon market.” The new government bill should restrict whole farm conversions, but it can’t reverse the trend, Richardson said. “It’s pretty hard to convert a forest back into pastoral grazing land because of all the carbon credits required to do so. The
bill will probably help, but it’s not going to make that much difference because it’s too late – hundreds of farms have already been converted.” Richardson and other King Country farmers see the fallout first hand, but they are far from alone. Farmers who grow trees on their land are “part of the solution” Acland said, and government restrictions on whole farm conversions nationwide are positive but they do not go far enough. “Anecdotally, we’re still hearing of a significant number of farms being sold despite the government announcing limits last year,” she said. “We’re concerned some sales are continuing on the basis of intent to purchase land before the limits were announced.” Continued on page 3
Farms nationwide are giving way to pine forests.
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