Opinion by Tony Orman
More and more pines are being planted on highly productive beef and sheep farms for the dubious carbon farming theory.
Marlborough once was renowned as a region of diversity of land production but that has been swamped by the introduction and subsequent tsunami spread of grape production i.e, vineyards in the valleys and exotic pines on hills developing to a situation of duo-monoculture status.
But market forces, the catch cry of neo-liberal economists and their zealous followers, have caught up. Market preferences in wines have changed. Too many vineyards have taxed wine infrastructure.
The current downturn in wine returns particularly sauvignon blanc and according to informed sources within the industry, is set to last for “several years”.
The folly of allowing monocultures to develop is evident.
For decades and through to about the year 2000, Marlborough was extremely diversified in land use with oats, barley, orchards, dairying, sheep and beef farming, small seeds, vegetables and others. Any economic downturn in one production might occur but the buffer was the variety of land use. The variety was wisely an economic safeguard.
Today, monocultures in grapes and pines have destroyed the diversity.
Critics might blame the Marlborough District Council but in reality it is powerless to address the problem overall. On the other hand instead of worshipping the God of Wine and encouraging forestry corporates to invest in the region, the council could have been active monitoring and then lobbying any one of successive governments since 2000 about the potential problem.
The Culprit
The basis for the problem is the Resource Management Act – RMA.
Market forces will determine the best outcome neo-liberal addicts cry. The RMA is based on that economic philosophy and I recall Environment Minister Simon Upton – ironically now the parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment – saying umpteen years ago, that the beauty of the RMA is, it allows people to do what they want to do with their land.
That is not planning for the future both economically and environmentally. It is myopic and ignoring the human trend to “follow the money tail” as a good friend, a conservationist the late Bill Benfield would often say in observing human mono-greed for monetary values at the expense of environmental values.
Town and country Planning
Aback then, as a town and country planner, I was startled at Simon Upton’s naivety and misjudgement about the “beauty of the RMA.”
Allowing that freedom to land use as Simon Upton championed, is a sure recipe for poor planning of land use, high potential for environmental degradation and an invitation to people to ‘follow the money trail’ hence the strong likelihood for a monoculture to mushroom.
Greed in monetary terms knows no boundaries.
Consequently Marlborough has lost its land use diversity. The loss is not just in the environment but economically as the wine industry provides work for associated services whether irrigation, harvesting or a host of tradies like electricians, plumbers, cartage contractors, retail businesses and pickers.
I’m not against vineyards or trees for production, but as proved with the current wine downturn and its adverse impact on services associated, it’s both an economic and environmental disaster.
Marlborough doesn’t need monocultures.
It just needs vineyards and pines in the right place and in the right quantity.
Environmentally both grape and pine productions need water, grapes for irrigation and pines – well just to let the trees grow as fast and as big as possible.
The water resource from rivers and streams to the aquifer, becomes the victim, depleted of flow by the extraction of water for growing two crops – grapes and pines.
Vast quantities
Pines take enormous quantities of water from the ecosystem.
Figures are not difficult to obtain thanks to computers. the internet and more especially google.
“Established pines generally require about 38 litres (10) gallons) of water per week for every 2.5 centimetres (1 inch) of the tree’s trunk diameter, says one source.
So one pine tree 50 cms diameter (20 inches) and not yet fully grown, will take from the ecosystem almost 800 litres of water a week.
That is just one tree.
After pruning and thinning a commercial pine forest might contains 300 trees per hectare.
So extending that water consumption of one tree – a few sentences ago – in one week, one hectare of commercial pine forest takes 300 trees x 800 litres = 240,000 litres of water a week.
So in Marlborough there are some 80,000 hectares of mainly commercial pinus radiata.
So 80,000 hectares x 240,000 litres x 365 days gives the yearly extraction of water from the Marlborough ecosystem.
It’s almost 12.5 million tonnes of water a year. (that’s 12.5 BILLION litres ~ ed}
Then there is the wilding pine problem in the high country. Pine forests act as seed banks for wilding pines to establish. Unmanaged pine plantings for carbon credits have taken valuable sheep and beef farms out of production.
Radiata pinus trees and pine cones are not tasty or nutritious to eat.
Trickles
No wonder the Wairau River is a trickle at most summers’ end and that streams in the Marlborough Sounds and the Wairau River’s Northbank are running dry.
As a trout fly fisherman, I know the Northbank streams well. Once they ran all year round, were important trout spawning streams and provided public trout fishing for the spring, summer and autumn months as well as allocated irrigation for pastures and vineyards.
Irrigation for vineyards should matter little, if the amount of vineyard use is controlled by land use zoning, to be compatible with stream flows and ecological values.
But the Marlborough District Council has been short of effective effort. It has an environmental section of course. But this section operates in a weird way. To illustrate, the council’s pest strategy lists wallabies as the major pest, but there are no wallabies in Marlborough. As I quipped to an officer from the section, “Let’s make hippos and rhinos pests then!”
Needless to say she was not amused.
But the screwball workings go further. Old Man’s Beard proliferates everywhere, along council’s public roads, on council managed river beds and on farms. But Old Man’s Beard was removed from the plant pest list because council could not control it. It could have but it failed.
It was as I remarked publicly in Marlborough, “let’s pretend there’s an imaginary pest in wallabies, and pretend a real invasive pest in Old Man’s Beard doesn’t exist.”
Bafflegab
It’s by this bafflegab that bureaucrats keep their jobs and salaries ticking over.
Even worse is the Department of Conservation entrusted to safeguard native fish such as galaxies and freshwater eels as well as koura and invertebrate “nymphs.” Whether trout or native, fish need water – as simple as that.
But that simplicity is beyond DOC’s comprehension.
The department is nowhere to be seen – not a whisper – in the dewatering of the environment.
Marlborough has become a sad illustration of the folly of monocultures and the lack of planning and foresight in land use management.
Marlborough’s Top Valley stream bed. Pines are on the far ridge on the left and over most of the watershed.
Once Top Valley stream flowed all year round.
What is noticeable is the forest industry’s attempts to debunk the detrimental effects of commercial pine tree plantations. This shows they worried. However the diminished flows in creeks and streams is mute testimony to the very thirst of pines en masse – to the detriment of the environment.
Mature radiata pines are prone to damage from severe storm events than native forests, leading to downstream effects with slash and debris especially as storms cyclically intensify. Unmanaged carbon forests are a real threat. The very basis of carbon farming just another opportunity for speculative investors to make money while ignoring the environment, which is self interest above the public interest and environmental good.
With an election just a few months away, voters should know Labour and the Greens to appease their climate consciences, plan to plant vast, environmentally damaging unmanaged, unattended pine forests (carbon farming) as a way of offsetting greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s pie-in-the-sky stuff especially with food production from quality sheep and beef farms become wastelands of pines.
Have the Greens and Labour also factored in the seed banks that will be set up to increase the already massive wilding pine threat?
Thank you for the article Tony and to CORANZ too for the forum which is often very interesting and revealing as this article is.
There’s plenty of other “fad farming” disasters going on. Just look at dairy farming and the poisoning of our precious groundwater resources with nitrates. Remember goat farming in the mid 1980’s? The goats got loose and established feral herds. Same for deer farming. The list goes on…
Monoculture have long been recognised as disastrous environmentally and economically. Yet here is it happening in Marlborough, in Canterbury, South Canterbury and Southland with dairying and other cases. Marlborough was far richer in the broadest sense with the very diversified land production of last century (20th). Monoculture creates severe economic vulnerabilities for the community with market slumps as is happening with Marlborough’s wine, affecting everyone directly or indirectly.
Worse still the environment suffers as the article points out.
Forestry is one of the worst monocultures; it impoverishes the soil, acidifies the soil’s runoff and at logging time silt and debris slash pour into rivers or the sea as in Marlborough Sounds.
Trout rivers suffer with sedimentation.
But hey, apart from government and council, where ‘s DOC as the article asks, but where is Fish and Game on damage to rivers and where is the government elected to look after the public interest?
Oh but I forgot politicians like Shane Jones and Chris Bishop don’t care a wit about the environment. Politicians are too busy feeding their political donors.,
If this government is bad, the Ardern crowd were disastrous. Do not forget thet encouraged foreign consortiums to come and do carbon farming.
Thanks for the timely, questioning article.
We are told repeatedly that “diversity is our strength” but that diversity does not seem to apply to land use and farming where it would indeed be of great benefit.
Now that the IPCC has admitted that CO2 is not the problem we have been brainwashed about for the last 30 years it is time to put an end to this carbon farming and trading nonsense.
Why doesn’t the government show some boldness in the right direction by stopping in its tracks the fanciful and ludicrous carbon farming rort?
Not only is it a rort but it’s taking food production out.
I remember Simon Upton as the pseudo-intellectual health minister in the 1990s who tried to steer the public health system towards becoming health-as-a-business by introducing a fee of $50 every time someone used a public hospital service. There was such a public outcry that the government of the time dropped the charge.
I say pseudo-intellectual because although renowned as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, when I met Upton I asked what degree he got to which he replied that he didn’t get an Oxford degree because he didn’t stay long enough. But regardless of however academically qualified a politician might be, without practical experience, how can they effectively jump from one field to another?
I happen to have an Oxford degree but what opened my eyes to the reality of the public health system was two journeys throughout New Zealand in the 1990s meeting with local health professionals particularly in the small rural hospitals which successive governments decimated in the 1980s/1990s.
And so these supposed experts at everything keep popping up in all sorts of different (overpaid) positions – the old-boy network on a grand scale.
There’s a mural in memory of former prime minister Norman Kirk in Waimate. His rise to the position via a practical background of varied employment followed by local politics and then into parliament contrasts with the number of spoiled brats there today who go through school, university and into parliament by toe-ing the party line thereby missing out on practical experience of the world as it actually works. There are exceptions of course – but how many retain the down-to-earth approach of earlier generations of MPs?
I know I’ve strayed somewhat off Tony Orman’s environmental topic but it seems to me that the apparent ignorance of those setting environmental policy parallels that of so many people I’ve encountered in health administration and politics.
Little wonder the greedy corporate mindset dominates over the politicians who should be setting such things as a sensible environmental policies.
With the United nations now openly admitting that their climatologists were wrong and there is no global warming or cooling, surely carbon farming will be phased out. There is now no need to offset carbon footprints by big companies neither is there a need to push the green new deal and the crazy electric uptick.
Pines should be phased out and a more suitable replacement found. Radiata and vines has ruined Marlboroughs rivers and water courses as Tony has stated. The environmental impacts will continue for decades to come. The dry rivers to the heavily silted Marlborough sounds is disgraceful. Any person that took part in the signing off on these damaging practices over the last few decades should be hanging their heads in shame