You can make almost double just by shutting up your farm and not worrying about production in forestry if sheep and beef farmers convert to carbon sink farming, says Makairo farmer Lincoln Grant.
"It spells the end of farming in the Tararua District at this stage but its all dependent upon Government policy," he says. "You're at the mercy of it. The disturbing thing about selling New Zealand farmland to foreign countries to plant trees to claim carbon credits is that they will take the profit from the carbon credits back offshore. They will leave us with absolutely nothing.
"The medium to long-term effect for New Zealand is just dire from that. With stumps and slash, 150 years of fencing and tracking will be completely lost — it will be all ruined. To start from scratch with a pine forest it would never be economic to turn it back into a sheep and beef farm again.
"Industries would be lost, shepherds, shearers, top dressing pilots, vets. Someone said it's the equivalent of putting them [the farms] in concrete — they'll never be used for anything else.
"What Forestry New Zealand is saying is very misleading. I can't see how their claims of job creation are true. What's happening in the Tararua District is these carbon farms are being planted into no-cut pinus radiata. Once the initial planting has gone on there'll be NO jobs (thinning and pruning) compared to existing farms with a couple of fulltime shepherds, shearers, fencers, maintenance workers, right through to your farm stores.