While the government says farm-to-forestry conversions will not get away with continuing to plant despite restrictions, a southern farming leader says the horse may have already bolted.
After restrictions on the conversion of pastoral and arable land to trees were put in place in December last year, unhappy beef, lamb and dairy farmers said converters are continuing to exploit loopholes in the regulations.
Farmers say prospective forestry conversions were getting around the rules by buying seedlings or saying they had planted on other farms they owned so could plant on new properties.
Despite the government’s December moratorium, an exception remains for those who can prove they had an "intent to afforest" before the December deadline.
This week, Agriculture and Forestry Minister Todd McClay said in a statement that "merely having or ordered trees alone" — as some say is the problem loophole — will be "unlikely" to prove previous intent.
The minister said the full farm-to-forest conversion restrictions and ban will come into law in October.
Federated Farmers Otago president Luke Kane said the use of the word "unlikely" in the minister’s statement did not bode well for certainty.
He said the new forests that he could see popping up around West Otago will be all be planted by then.
"Bloody hard to convert them back to productive farms after the fact," he said.
Mr Kane said he took two Act New Zealand MPs, who he preferred not to name, and some of the Federated Farmers policy team on a tour of his area, to show them the land being converted into forestry.
"To show them our concerns around pest management after afforestation and also [that] the ongoing planting ... is going to be dubious at best as far as getting around the rules," he said.
He also wanted to show the politicians that this was not "ugly country", he said, but highly productive farmland.
"There’s nothing like showing someone directly what you’re talking about, right?"
He said converters were free to do what they liked with their land, but it was the neighbouring property owners who had to deal with the increase in pests, risk of fire and shrinking of a workforce — and therefore communities — that forestry brings, he said.
"So we took them up to the boundary fence."
He said schools were slowly disappearing.
"Some of this land is really good fattening land. I’m a dairy farmer so a lot of our non-dairy stock that go to fattening go out to this country.
"So the more that we lose these farms, it will have an impact on me because my ability to sell calves, fattening calves, gets less and less."
