The recent insights from Kate Acland, chairperson of Beef+Lamb and a farmer herself, into the Orme & Associates report on land use change highlight the urgency of the issue New Zealand is facing with farmland increasingly being converted into forestry for carbon credits. This shift, as she emphasises, is not merely a statistic but a real and accelerating trend impacting rural communities, food production, and New Zealand’s agricultural legacy.
Acland makes it clear that Beef+Lamb commissioned the report to provide real-time data to counter the significant lag in the government’s own figures on forestry conversion. “We think there's about a two to three year lag between farm sales being finalised and trees being planted,” she explains, illustrating that official data cannot keep up with the rapid transition of farmland into forestry. This delay, she argues, blinds policymakers to the speed at which pastoral land, especially productive sheep and beef farms, is being lost.
Between 2017 and mid-2024, 261,000 hectares of sheep and beef land were sold and converted to forestry, involving entire farms, not merely marginal corners where trees might be sensibly planted as part of a balanced farm model. Acland points out that much of this converted land is class six, or hill country, “but it’s good, productive breeding country,” she says. The result is a direct impact on livestock numbers, rural jobs, and ultimately the economic backbone of farming communities.
The roots of this trend as we know lie in New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which incentivises large-scale forestry through carbon credits. Acland underscores that this is not about specific organisations, but rather policies that drive their decisions. The ETS’s settings encourage both local and overseas investors to acquire farmland for carbon-only forestry, which requires minimal human involvement and virtually no contribution to local communities or export revenue. Unlike production forestry, which generates some employment around harvesting activities, carbon-only forestry offers no such benefit. “For every 1,000 hectares, farming creates 7.4 jobs, versus 5.1 for production forestry,” she explains. “But when you go to carbon-only farming, you’re looking at 0.6 jobs per 1,000 hectares,” and these few jobs are often not local, being tied to forestry operations remote from the rural communities losing this all important productive country.
Acland’s observations draw a stark picture of the ripple effect carbon forestry has on communities. “You just have to go to parts of the North Island to see the impact,” she notes, mentioning school closures, loss of local services, and dwindling populations. Rural New Zealand, she says, is experiencing devastating shifts. Entire communities built around agriculture and livestock are dissolving as children leave schools and families move away. Farming contributes not only to rural economies but also to social cohesion—a vital link being eroded by rapid land-use change.
As for food prices, Acland sees a clear upward trend due to the shrinking sheep and beef sector. “We need really profitable processing companies and a really profitable sector, and that requires the industry to be of a certain size,” she explains. Without that critical mass, processing costs rise, product availability dwindles, and prices increase for consumers. Acland alludes to plant closures like the one in Timaru as signals that this is not just theoretical; real consequences are manifesting in communities today.
Carbon farming, as Acland points out, contributes nothing to New Zealand’s export earnings or domestic production. “Carbon farming is purely about ETS credits, so it adds absolutely nothing to our country,” she argues. The only revenue it generates is from ETS credits purchased by other industries aiming to offset their emissions. In essence, carbon farming allows these businesses to bypass genuine efforts to reduce emissions, pushing the environmental burden onto New Zealand’s rural communities. Acland notes that while exotic trees like pines have a role within mixed farming, whole-farm conversions for carbon credits alone don’t benefit New Zealand in any tangible way.
When questioned about the long-term implications for export revenue, Acland explains that without exports, there are no jobs. The farming sector’s economic contributions are grounded in farming the land, not in passive land ownership for carbon credits. Acland is particularly concerned about the impact on New Zealand’s renowned farming landscapes, its biodiversity, and even tourism. Converting productive farmland to forests risks turning these iconic landscapes into monoculture zones, devoid of the rich, pastoral character that has long been a feature of the countryside.
Interestingly, Beef+Lamb is not against forestry. In fact, many farmers, including Acland herself, see the value of integrating trees within farms as a part of achieving climate goals. “On our own farm, we've actually got 10% of the farm in forestry,” she says, emphasising that Beef+Lamb supports forestry as a diversification strategy that complements livestock farming. However, current policy settings that incentivise wholesale conversion are, in her view, far too permissive. The National Party’s pre-election manifesto suggested restrictions on whole-farm conversions, a measure Acland supports to protect productive land classes while still allowing farmers to plant less productive corners of their farms.
Acland acknowledges that the ETS has created an artificial market, distorting the natural land-use dynamics traditionally driven by market returns. Unlike the Canterbury dairy conversions, which were propelled by profitable opportunities, the current shift towards carbon forestry is not grounded in market demand for forestry products or local needs. Instead, it’s driven by policies favouring short-term gains that neglect the longer-term impacts on rural communities, agricultural resilience, and food security.
The consequences of unfettered carbon farming reach beyond New Zealand’s shores, as a reduction in sheep and beef farming weakens the nation’s export base and global agricultural identity. With 261,733 hectares already gone to carbon farming, the scale of this transformation is staggering, and the pace appears only to be accelerating. If policy makers really care about farming and value our red meat sector like they say they do, where are the policies that support this narrative?
Acland’s view encapsulates a widely held frustration in New Zealand’s farming community. That policymakers can speak about the importance of agriculture while allowing farmland to vanish into forests at record rates strikes many as contradictory. The statistics—7,004 hectares in 2017 escalating to nearly 64,000 hectares annually by 2022—tell a story of a country at risk of losing its agricultural heritage. The time to address this is now. The breaks need to come on and they need to come on now, we need a widespread call for policies that support a future where agriculture and forestry coexist, enhancing New Zealand’s economic resilience rather than undermining it.
Have a listen to the podcast to hear the full story.
Angus Kebbell is the Producer at Tailwind Media. You can contact him here.
28 Comments
People have been moving out of remote areas for decades, get over it. There are farms that have been on the market for a long time and no buyers.
No one is stopping anyone wanting to continue farming from farming. The fact is more want out than there are serious buyers who would keep farming.
I suppose Angus Kebbell would like to force people to stay on their land and keep it looking how he perceives it should look. Get a life chap.
Edit, sorry Angus realized you are just writing the story. Kate is just another Fed stooge.
"...New Zealand was a net CO2 sink of −38.6 ± 13.4 million tonne C yr−1."
A Comprehensive Assessment of Anthropogenic and Natural Sources and Sinks of Australasia's Carbon Budget
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GB007845
Prof has got this analysis he likes to wheel out regularly that says all NZ CO2 emissions minus all sinks within NZ and it's continental shelf currently results in a net sink. i.e. we store more CO2 than we emit. It's not quite as rosy as the greenwash prof applies to this study though, because it includes absorbtion of CO2 by the ocean out to the edge of the continental shelf. Don't know anywhere that includes this metric in calculations? Probably because warming oceans store less CO2 and ultimately could become a CO2 source with outgassing.
Sadly your right Hans. Carbon or no carbon the economics just dosn't work on a lot of hill country land anymore - for any use at any price.
Blaming something or someone is not going to change the reality of whats been happening for the last 30 to 40 years. Theres no end of reports on farmers losing money, getting old (average age well over 60 on S and B), young ones not wanting to take on the farm (they have endless other options here and abroad now) - the list goes on.
When you look at it the world population has dramatically increased in the last 30 years and there are many more mouths to feed. Yet in that time the economics has become worse. Someone, somewhere doing something is providing enough food at a price that feeds those that can afford it (at the end of the day we need wealthy buyers not poor people to survive ourselves) at a price we cannot afford to be economically viable at on a lot of our land.
With a rapidly ageing, and now shrinking population in many countries, the change has only started.
The problem is that the discussions of the problem - like tis one - fail through lack of perspective.
Big picture, we overshot our population by adding fossil energy to solar, producing food (think: Haber Bosch, tractors, trucks, all the stuff like fencing, plumbing). It was many calories of fossil energy, to one of produced food - B&L included.
That was temporary - the surplus energy is so low now, that fossil-energy Co's are needing increasingly subsidised, using debt that will never - can never - be repaid (because debt is a demand for future energy, and resources).
So the end of the System which pays the likes of Ackland, is in sight. Her wish to pile up bank-computer-held digits, while degrading the habitat she and her family need, to survive - is going to eliminate their chances of survival. Someone should tell her. This should have been exposed and put to bed a long, long time ago by the MSM - but the farmers weekly propaganda 'newspaper' I occasionally get to read (is it cheeky enough to be part of the Press Council?) is hell-and-gone from dispassionate journalism.
for any use at any price
Disagree, at zero cost I think all (or very close to it) places would work for someone. What you mean by 'economically' isn't defined but if you demand an arbitrary return of xx then your statement may be true.
Profile is correct, the price discovery of land has been affected. If your quote above was true, we'd see debt free farmers walking off the land. Do you see that happening? I don't.
young ones not wanting to take on the farm
I know plenty of young people that would like to have a crack at farming themselves. What they don't want to do is take on the debt for the land.
Heck, show me the listing of a farm for a dollar and I'll buy it just to prove the point - and I'm not even young!
Some locals did complain, one reason was it was harder on the land and water ways (creeks became undrinkable for stock etc).
It was a significant change when an area converted to dairy. Multi-generation family farms were then run by sharemilkers that might move on every few years. So, some positives (more jobs and children for the rural school) and negatives (they weren't as invested in the community).
Currently cattle are selling at record prices. Lamb is doing it hard but wool of all things is up. One day soon, as our export receipts drop maybe the penny will drop too. We were rich once. Then we took all the infrastructure that we built and trashed it. To plant a weed.
It is literally a weed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilding_conifer
Perhaps Palmtree you should have a chat with the folks on the East coast that got trashed in 2023 from the remains of pine plantations.
I live next to a plantation that is being harvested. The incredible input of fossil fuel to road the property then harvest is disturbing. It would outdo my 30 years of farming 100 times over.
If anyone thinks those pines being put in the ground as a carbon sink will not be harvested or burn or be sprayed out at some point, they have rocks in their head. I well remember the helicopters around 2009 spraying out young pine plantations and properties going back to being farmed. Priorities change.
In the meantime water lines have been chopped up, fences ripped out, buildings removed. People have gone. It will end in tears for New Zealand.
It is a bit rich that beef and lamb farming, which contribute significantly to NZ’s greenhouse gas emissions, but largely have avoided needing to address this, is proposing to restrict carbon farming as well. How does the industry propose NZ deliver its climate change commitments?
Alpha- i wasn’t suggesting otherwise. Your point would be fair enough if farmers and consumers actually paid the climate change externalities associated with farming and consumption of meat products. I do object to the current policies which effectively subsidise that choice.
This is a problem for production forestry as well as farming. Production forest owners that are pre 1990 get lumped in with the Carbon credit forests and have to fight off the council bureaucrats that hate pine trees but want a slice of the carbon credit money and are busy thinking up ways to ping the forest owner regardless of whether the forest owner can actually pay or not.
It would be better if the farmers dropped some of the neo-liberal attitudes that they have had in the past where they don't need govt help just need govt to get out of the way etc, and start to formulate policies more along the European lines. Policies that take an overall approach, recognise the need to retain the rural population on the land and enable mixed use on the land.
It isn't a sustainable future to have all the land in pine trees that can never be used for productive purposes. Ending up with a poverty stricken lawless rural population will mean that eventually stuff that New Zealanders can't contemplate now will happen. When Gang/mafia controlled illegal logging means that the carbon forests are not actually meeting their purpose because they are being chopped down what does the govt do then? Pay the credits back?
I think the comments about pine trees being weeds and rural land being worthless are thoughtless. Any plant is a weed out of context. Billion dollar industries have been built up from nothing on the back of two such weeds - pines and kiwifruit vines. Land is never worthless if policies encourage the beneficial use of the land..
This is a good article and hopefully the Minister for Agriculture and the Minister for Forestry might actually have it brought to their attention. I understand the point of the article being that govt needs to make a plan to retain people on the land. Perhaps a policy that enables some carbon credit farming on a proportion of a farm but not all of it, and a biodiversity credit system that subsidises land owners for having fenced corridors of biodiversity on their land might be a start.
NL - don't worry. The global growth-forever scheme is coming up hard against the Limits to Growth. It relied on fossil energy, and was therefore temporary.
It turned many calories of fossil energy into a single calorie of food, and allowed us, temporarily, to be fed by few workers (and many tractors etc).
Beyond that, there will be a reversal of the drift-to-urban (most city 'jobs' are discretionary waffle) and probably much faster than the drift in - perhaps almost overnight. There will be many more workers per food-producing acre (how many to replace a tractor?). Don't laugh - the System is real trouble, if you know how to view macro-geography/politics.
So, take a 50 year perspective....
Labour weekend our beach in rural southern Hawke's Bay was chocker.
1 fire callout and 3 ambulance callouts - all crewed by local volunteers.
Taking firefighting, 86% of fire fighters are volunteers, protecting 95% of NZ land area. If you were in Christchurch over this last weekend, around Te Pae convention centre precinct, you would have seen hundreds of fire fighters gathered for the annual United Fire Brigades Association AGM and conference. 99% OF THOSE IN UNIFORM PRESENT WERE VOLUNTEERS from brigades spanning the length and breadth of NZ.
With accelerated urbanisation, urbanites still want their time away in rural areas of NZ. Depopulation of rural areas has very real and very serious consequences for the emergency services urbanites take for granted in their urban centres.
Carbon forestry viz a viz whole farm planting has serious, unappreciated consequences for all NZ people.
The real issue is rural ageing - many of our rural regions are forecast to have a 30% plus decline in the working age population over the next few decades - this hasnt been caused by trees but been in train for decades and is happening all over the developed world. Again we need to look at the facts and realities of a changing world.
I'm not advocating for covering the place in trees - far from it but ignoring the reality of whats going to happen is mad. The truth is very unpleasant at times.
The real problem is despite planting a lot of trees, we are still not meeting our carbon commitments. This is not accounted for, they argue that the cost of what we will have to pay in 2030 is not known, so no point putting it in the current accounts. I would argue it would be at least the current cost, so at least budget that.then the " virtual, fairytale or whatever else you want to call carbon costs", would have some real cost. Then we can at least know how much we are falling behind, and cost policies to at least that cost, even though it is likely to be at least double that.
Or buy those overseas credits after each years shortfall is known.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.