Substituting food producing land for locked-up carbon forests just so international companies can avoid reducing their emissions appears to farmers as the ultimate in bad environmental policy. Phil Orme reviews what farmers can do to avoid the worst of it

Phil Orme from Orme & Associates travels the country talking to farmers and landowners about The Emissions Trading Scheme, and how carbon within their farming systems can offer an opportunity for them.

He says it's not necessarily all about pine trees. It's a lot of reversion, soil conservation plantings, and they all qualify and can contribute significant amounts. But many farmers don't understand the system and the opportunity that's sitting there.

Afforestation in the country is a big issue for New Zealand farmers, the economy and rural communities, I asked Phil – are the current ETS settings right in his view? “The settings haven't really changed, the emissions trading scheme basically allocates carbon for land that wasn't forest land, it's been turned into forest land."

“One of the things that happened two years ago when carbon was only around $20/t, there wasn't as much of an issue. But how it works now is if you turn farm land effectively into a tree species and it meets the criteria, you can be allocated carbon credits going forward and to a certain extent, if there's no constraints within the Regional District plans, you only have to meet the national environmental standards for production forestry if you're planning production forests."

"But unfortunately, if it's for carbon credits only you don't even have to follow those rules. I think that's the major issue. It's not so much ETS settings, it's the guidelines around allowing major land use change without having a full discussion, because there is a lot of land on farms that should be in trees. But is a whole farm conversion the right thing to do? Maybe it is but at least have the discussion.”

I asked Orme if he could make any changes to the ETS, what would they be?

“The changes would be around how much and what sort of land could get planted. I think from the personal point of view once you change food producing land into trees with the current price of carbon, it's going to be very hard to change it back again without significant hardship. There was discussion about excluding exotics from the permanent forest category, but doing that would impact 90% of the landowners that need 10 or 20, or 30 hectares on their properties that deserves to be in trees in the permanent category. So if there was going to be some form of change, then maybe set a percentage limit on how much land on a farm could go in or make it 100 hectares before you have to have a discussion. So that's where I see it you've got to keep the opportunity for the farmers who know the land best, and what they want to do on the property to keep them viable.”

"Carbon farming or lock-up-and-walk-away forests in New Zealand is short-sighted and it's a quick dollar, but I'm not convinced that's the right long term strategy for New Zealand. It doesn't require big emitters to make real change, it just allows them to dump their pollution on the land."

I asked Orme of he thought carbon farming was short sighted and if it’s a good path for this country?

“I don't think it's necessarily the right path. Planting trees is not going to solve the climate crisis, only changing behaviour is going to change the climate crisis, so this is a short term measure to get a step up, but long term? No, I don't think it's right from a personal point of view. But at the end of the day our client base is largely farmers, people who have a huge affinity with the land and people that are still farming should be allowed to choose what they do on their own properties. I think the real issue is these major full farm conversions where not enough thought has been given to the long term impact.”

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Angus Kebbell is the Producer at Tailwind Media. You can contact him here.