Having recently returned from a trip to Northland to visit friends and family, I was shocked by the amount of good farmland covered with recently planted radiata pine trees.
My mind’s eye imagined what it would look like in 20, 50 or 100 years’ time – sombre regiments of monoculture trees darkening the roads and blocking the views.
I am of the mind that landowners should be able to grow the crops they choose and pine trees are one of those crops that has been grown successfully at scale since the seventies. Large tracts of land where cattle did not thrive because of ‘bush sickness’ were planted in pines mostly on the central plateau around Rotorua and Taupo. This instigated a successful timber industry requiring sawmills and employment in places where it was sorely needed.
It was discovered only afterwards that bush sickness was caused by cobalt deficiency and easily remedied by adding cobalt to the fertiliser mix when top dressing.
A scourge for Northland
Since then a considerable amount of that land has been returned to pasture. However the pines I observed in Northland, covering thousands of hectares, will more than likely never be harvested.
These farms have been bought up for the purpose of carbon forestry and are entered into the Emissions Trading Scheme to collect annual returns for the carbon sequestered by these trees.
Other than planting the trees, this money making scheme requires no further labour and the end result is a dying rural economy with derelict houses bearing witness to the folly of the ETS.
Vested interests across the land
The government has tinkered with the classes of land where carbon forestry can occur but hasn’t dealt with the core issue. Without entering into the climate change debate today, in my view, if you must have an ETS (and its merits are very debatable) and think trees are the answer, at least insist on those trees being natives rather than pines.
Take into account the biodiversity benefits that native trees would provide. In the early nineties the official view was that pine trees, due to their fast growth, were vastly better at sequestering carbon than native vegetation.
In later years, scientists came to the conclusion that pines were better at it in the first few decades of growth but in the long term native trees, despite their initial slower growth, would overtake the pines due to their longevity.
Unfortunately vested interests and inertia make it likely that those carbon pine forests are here to stay and add to the wilding pine scourge creeping across the land.
◾️Editor’s Note: Dirk Sieling has been harvesting the pine tree plantations on his Ohuka Farm.
