We've got a couple of neighbouring blocks next to us that have been sold to go
into forestry. All of those blocks will be planted in trees, and that is definitely worrying for
the community, and the industry in general. Those blocks have got a couple of houses on them. They
won't be in those houses anymore, so there'll be less kids at the school. If you're going to
blanket plant a lot of the farms around here that kind of eats into our great community.
But while blanket planting of pines, we're all against that, all forestry is not bad,
basically. People need to be aware of what the options are. There's quite a few rural
opportunities in terms of what that could mean for hill country farmers, and how they could
integrate trees both for production forestry and for carbon into their farming systems.
I'm Fiona, I'm Jon, and we're farming in Waingaro, Te Ākau
We're farming a thousand hectares, it's two blocks.
This is the home block here, about 660 hectares, and
we've got another 440 hectares effectively at Kerr Road, which is about 20 minutes drive from here.
We've got Chris Kereopa, he's supported over at Kerr Road with his wife
Amy, and Leo here on the home block runs this block for us.
It's family owned, and we're overseeing the management of both blocks.
My brother and sister and their family live quite locally, in Hamilton.
There's definitely a desire to keep, especially this block, in the family.
We basically went through a strategic plan process, where we were trying to marry up what
the best opportunity is for the land and for the business.
With some of that class 7 country in particular,
there's no way sheep and beef farming can compete, from a financial point of view, versus
forestry and carbon. So it makes real sense for our business to look at that opportunity. We'll
be looking in the end to have up to 300 hectares of our 1100 hectares in trees of some description.
The land that we are looking to plant up is actually marginal land anyway, so we won't
have to drop our stocking rate as much as you'd think you would. Then we can concentrate on
our better dirt anyway. With the dryer years, it's the steep hill country that is the first to go off,
and it's the last to come back in terms of growing good pasture.
It just makes it more and more tough to make a living off that land. You certainly can't
blame farmers for selling up and walking off into the sunset, you can't blame them for that.
But there's definitely opportunities for individual farmers, where appropriate,
where they've got class seven, and harder class six country, to look at doing that themselves, and
to go and find the advice and work out how they can make that happen. It just gives them another
option, you don't have to sell. For some farms I think it could be a game changer.
We've been involved in a preferred grazing trial with AgResearch. So that's about shutting the gate
on paddocks, letting them reseed, letting that pasture rejuvenate, and shifting that feed from
a surplus time into a time in the summer, like from February onwards, where you typically very
much need it. So not only are you shifting feed, but you're getting a rejuvenated pasture at the same time.
There's your clover and your rye grass, and that's all from deferred grazing. This is the non-deferred
grazing side, and there's a whole lot of flat weeds and there's not much grass in through there.
You look at some of those things that we're doing there, and a lot of it is due to the climate
changing. We are trying to front foot as much of that as we can. There's lots of work being done
in the industry to try and work out how we can handle that, and it's just up to us farmers to
run with some of that stuff that's out there. We're doing this not just for us,
we're doing it for our kids, and their kids, and Jon's siblings kids, and the whole Sherlock
family. We're building this up for the next generation, and the next generation after that.