Rural: Forestry stacks up as viable option

Log prices are good but forestry planting seems to be reducing. Photo/File

Bulls-based forestry guru Denis Hocking is genuinely puzzled about why forestry planting has slowed to a trickle in New Zealand.

It concerns him, because he says there are one million erosion-prone hectares in the North Island that need afforestation.

It's hard to say exactly how much planting is going on. He's guessing 1000ha to 2000ha nationwide this year - the average for a year is 20,000ha to 30,000ha.

The big corporates were not doing any new planting, he said.

He didn't understand why, because log prices were good and the return from reasonably accessible hill country put into forest was $1000 per hectare - twice the return from grazing the same land.

"There are no instant riches with forestry, but I have just harvested a joint venture block and my joint venture partners are absolutely rapt."

Timber prices do fluctuate, he said, but with trees landowners have the option to leave milling for a few years until the price is right. During that time they just get bigger and more valuable.

Mr Hocking rejects the claim that land in forest erodes more than land in pasture. He looked at that after the 2004 floods.

"Indigenous forest had one third the rate of slips as pasture, and it was on steeper land," he said.

He's wondering whether landowners in the Wanganui hill country have decided forestry isn't their thing, despite encouragement to get into it through Horizons Regional Council's whole farm plans.

"People are queuing up for whole farm plans. They're not nearly as enthusiastic about getting out the planting spades."

The other reason for the country to have more forests is to lock up carbon and prevent climate change. The emissions trading scheme was supposed to encourage forestry, but Mr Hocking said the current government had "quite deliberately allowed the scheme to become nothing more than just a flag waving exercise".

With forest coming down, New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions were likely to be high for the next 10 years. Taxpayers would either have to pay for carbon credits or the Government might pull out of international agreements - at a cost to the country's clean, green image.

Forestry planting didn't have to mean a blanket of Pinus radiata either, Mr Hocking said.

Poplars, cypress, eucalypts, redwoods and native trees all had timber potential. Horizons' afforestation grants usually only pay for pines, but he said landowners could put in extra money and grow other species.

Pines did make the soil more acid, he said, but it was a myth they wrecked soil in two or three rotations. "I'm now on the third rotation of pines on sand dunes and they're still romping along."