Farmer’s plan to avoid ‘blanket of pines’
One farmer’s novel pitch to big firms to use her land for carbon offset tree planting is being touted as a win-win for both the business and agricultural sectors.
Federated Farmers say the idea could catch on and they could be the organisation to make it work.
The idea has been sparked by King Country farmer Dani Darke who posted a proposal on social media to offer up 10 hectares of her own land to plant native trees.
She pitched the idea to Air New Zealand, Genesis Energy, Contact Energy, Z Energy, and anyone else who wanted to participate.
The companies pay for the fencing and planting, and they collect the credits to offset their emissions.
Darke will retain the land ownership and ensure the right tree gets planted in the right place.
Federated Farmers president Andrew Hoggard thinks it’s a better offer than the blanket planting of pine trees.
‘‘If you amalgamate what could be done across New Zealand farmland it equates to quite a bit,’’ he said.
‘‘And rather than Air New Zealand and the likes just buying up just a couple of farms to blanket plant them in carbon forestry, they could be looking at farms that are sequestering soil in their carbon, wetlands and native forestry. That could be a way for them to show their carbon neutrality but with the offsets.’’
He admits the challenge for those large companies is that they probably don’t want to deal with hundreds or thousands of farms, whereas with carbon farming one contract is all that’s needed.
This is where Hoggard believes there may be a place for Federated Farmers to act as the intermediary.
Darke was concerned for her community of Aria if corporates bought swathes of land for blanket planting under the Emissions
Trading Scheme.
‘‘We’ve got a wonderful community, but we don’t have huge numbers of people in our community, so we really don’t want to be losing families out of the district and driving down the road with pine trees on either side of the road,’’ Darke said.
On her own sheep and beef farm there is a special biodiversity in the area that she would love to see protected.
‘‘We have native bats on our farm so there is an area there we would love to protect and there are freshwater mussels up the valley. We’ve definitely got ko¯ura, freshwater crayfish.’’