A farmer who didn’t cut down just about every tree used to be seen as doing a poor job. But now landowners are taking a different approach and are increasingly planting natives.
A lone kahikatea in a Waikato field, photo David White
After years of making his dairy farm as productive as he could, Jim Cotman is now standing back and asking which part he can do without. He’s not planning to subdivide or sell – all he wants is to identify a piece where productive farming is difficult and he could therefore establish a stand of native bush, in addition to other natives he has already been planting near the house. A stand of native trees won’t earn him any money – in fact, it will cost him plenty to establish it – but he wants to do it all the same.
Cotman, who with his wife, Raewyn, milks more than 200 cows in North Waikato, says there are plenty of others like him, farmers in their fifties and sixties who have been through the stage of breaking in their farm and building it up, but now have different values.
“It appeals to our stewardship ethic and I hear this from many farmers. They do absolutely believe in our ethic of stewardship of the land.” The notion is that the farmers are custodians of a piece of land that will be sold or passed on, and they should try to leave it in a better state than when they started farming there.
Increasingly, that better state involves planting or protecting native trees, and it is happening, mostly in a small way, all around the country, which Cotman gets to see in his role as chairman of the New Zealand Farm Environment Award Trust. “I’m amazed at what’s happening out there,” he says.
In a completely different place, on his 253ha farm near Methven, Richard Fitzgerald is also watching his native trees get established. He admits that “a quick glance over the fence doesn’t show much at the moment”, but in time he is confident that small pockets of natives will dot his farm. Fitzgerald, who is also chief executive of New Zealand Young Farmers, has been gradually removing shelter belts of old introduced trees and is in the process of planting clumps of native trees.
“For 150 years the Canterbury Plains have been pictured as flat, pastured and broken by lines of dark trees. With efficient use of water we will be able to achieve that again, and be more productive,” he says. “Planting is well under way. The new trees are indigenous and native wildlife is flourishing.”
If the idea spreads, it may change the look of the plains. Canterbury was virtually treeless when European settlers arrived. In 1844, pastoralist Dr David Monro described the plains as large, brownish-yellow and with “hardly any timber”. He regarded the “want of good wood” as a major drawback for settlement – almost a fatal objection.
For British settlers used to forests, planting was a priority, but their preference was for exotic rather than indigenous trees as they created a new rural landscape – doing what Eric Pawson, editor of Oxford Environmental Histories of New Zealand, called “God’s work”. The trees planted then are now over 150 years old – those that are left, that is.
There has been significant change in Canterbury since 1993 when Larry Price, a geographer on sabbatical at the University of Canterbury, wrote that “the Canterbury Plains have one of the most impressive displays of hedges and shelter belts found anywhere”. Price calculated that these dominant landscape features extended for an extraordinary 300,000km and provided an indication of the extent to which human activities have transformed the land. He concluded that any modification of the conspicuous shelter belts, including the re-establishment of native species, “would encounter problems at both the private and public level”.
But the trees have been disappearing, and quickly, with the denuding of the landscape apparently reflecting in part the original choice of the trees now associated with the Canterbury Plains. Macrocarpas (monterey cypress) were planted in New Zealand as relatively fast-growing shelter, usually in rows. The wood was used for fence posts, railway sleepers and furniture. It is also useful (but sparky) firewood. As the trees mature, however, they shed branches. In New Zealand, in the absence of many native pathogens, macrocarpas grow very large – trees have been recorded at over 40m high, with a trunk diameter of 3m. That’s a lot of shelter, but it’s also a large area where little else grows. At maturity – the lifespan of a macrocarpa is generally 100-300 years – they can also become a health hazard, as big branches sometimes break off. The usual method of trimming involves whirling blades akin to a sideways helicopter.
Partly for these reasons but also because of changes to irrigation on the Canterbury Plains, macrocarpas have been cut down, and commercial pine forests have also been removed as the shallow soils have not supported good commercial timber. Overall, the landscape has started to again look rather as it did in the 1840s. But replanting is occurring – sometimes of natives in preference to exotics – and not only in Canterbury.
Retired botanist John Dawson, co-author of New Zealand’s Native Trees, which was published last year, says many native trees have been planted – on farms in particular – in the past decade. For many farmers, re-establishing a patch of native bush is as simple as fencing off a surviving area of it, he says, perhaps in a gully or somewhere it was too steep for pasture to have become established.
“That has a remarkable result, because once there’s no more stock browsing in there, seedlings that normally got eaten can instead grow into shrubs and eventually trees, and in quite a short space of time you can get tremendous regrowth in those forest patches. In some cases they can be quite extensive areas.” Apart from the re-establishment of native bush by landowners and community groups, Dawson, 83, thinks nature itself is regenerating forest.
“There were always gorse fires each summer bringing everything back to the starting point, but in recent years there don’t seem to have been as many fires, and gorse can’t stand shade, so once you get a few taller forest species, the gorse dies out. It takes a long time to get back to original forest, but the pioneer plants that lead on to established forest do come back very quickly.
“If you eliminate forest entirely with fire, manuka tends to come in as a pure crop. And as that gets taller and starts opening out a bit, other things that can take a bit more shade can get in amongst it, including tree ferns. Manuka, like gorse, can’t stand shade, so it dies out, but by then it’s served its purpose as a first crop.
“People mostly think in terms of letting nature do it as it’s always done. If you have a farm, then concentrate on the surviving bit of native forest, or any areas where there’s been gorse and native plants have come through.” One drawback of New Zealand’s native trees is that many are slow growers, which helps explain why plantation forests tend to be exotics like Pinus radiata. “It grows here far better than where it came from,” says Dawson. “I’ve seen it in California, where it’s restricted to a couple of coastal headlands, and you can’t chop them down because they’re sacred.”
He has seen the same with macrocarpa, which also came from one place in California. “I was there once and they were making a road. There was a macrocarpa in the way, so they realigned the road to go around it. Painters would sit there painting these remarkable trees on the coast, yet we don’t think anything of them at all.
“The trees that are planted here are generally introduced species that are known to grow reasonably quickly and give a timber that can be used or pulped. Native trees are generally considered too slow-growing and you’re not going to get anything in your lifetime or maybe even longer than that.”
The slow growth of native trees is a big disadvantage, requiring people to take a long-term view. Cotman knows that all too well. He has a few stands of pines on his farm, which he says fixed a problem on some steep land. The pines were easy to establish, required pruning at three and five years and now, just 10 years after they were planted, provide sturdy shelter and prevent erosion.
But they are the last pines he will plant. “I’ve seen what other farmers have done and protected, and I’m jealous of that. When my wife and I came here, we said, ‘This will be our stepping-stone farm and then we’ll go and buy a farm with a whole lot of bush on it.’ Well, the reality is you’ve never got enough money to move off your stepping-stone farm, and then you buy a bit more land and the farm becomes big enough, so you stay. Now the development of any native planting will be on this property.”
He sees a real generational change in younger farmers, many of whom have an awareness of the need to protect the natural environment. Having native bush on a farm might mean surrendering productive land, but the key is to see the environmental aspect as part of the business. “It’s not about doing agriculture with the environment on the side – it’s agriculture with environmental protection incorporated within it.”
Landcare Research ecologist Colin Meurk believes 10% of the agricultural landscape could be cloaked in native bush without loss of farm productivity. A more accurate figure has yet to be calculated, but the change is already happening.
The QEII National Trust, set up in 1977, oversees more than 3500 covenants on private land under which landowners agree to preserve and protect special features of natural and cultural heritage on their land in perpetuity. The covenants protect various features, including stands of native bush, particularly in areas where little remains. They range in size from as little as a hectare to more than 6000ha, with the average at 25ha. They include alpine areas and limestone outcrops with unique flora.
QEII Trust chief executive Margaret McKee agrees with Cotman that there is an increasing awareness “of the value of natural New Zealand”. She thinks some of the drivers for the change are to do with a generation of farmers, now in their sixties and seventies, who in their day earned government subsidies to clear their land and are now gradually moving off it.
“They were subsidised to clear it and to put every square inch into production, and if they didn’t do that they were seen as a poor farmer. The mentality they grew up with was that every swamp had to be drained and every tree had to be cut down. You’d have to be 60 now to have been part of that regime. The new people have been brought up with a different mindset. They see their land and relate to it in quite a different way.”
The political landscape has changed, too, she says. The financial incentives for clearing land have shifted to support, in some circumstances, for fencing waterways and planting native trees. That’s not to say no bad practices remain among some farmers and developers. There are plenty. But McKee believes the “average” land manager today has a huge awareness of nature protection, particularly the need to protect fresh water. “A lot of people know what their ancestors have done on the land and want to now do it differently, and they feel the need to leave a legacy for New Zealand.”
Back in the Waikato, Cotman and his wife have been planting native trees and think they have identified the place they would like to establish a proper stand of native bush, if they can. It will be a struggle in the heavy clay conditions, “but it will happen … We won’t get the benefit from it, but whoever comes after us will have a nice patch of bush to enjoy looking at. That’s the sort of thing that even those of us on small farms are thinking.”
Jacqueline Rowarth is Professor of Pastoral Agriculture, Massey University. She worked for 12 years on the Canterbury Plains with AgResearch and Lincoln University.