There are some interesting comments yesterday from Federated Farmers in a Herald op-ed. While much of the piece was related to farm emissions their relation to the ETS, something we wouldn’t blog about, there was also some interesting comments on land use policy.
The New Zealand Initiative think-tank argues that because less than 1 per cent of New Zealand is built upon, fears of using up all our farmland are grossly exaggerated.
Should not the first question be what percentage of New Zealand is suited to pastoral farming?
You see, about 12.3 million hectares is in pastoral farming out of 26.8 million hectares.
This is the same criticism I have had of people who claim NZ is only 1% urbanised so it won’t matter if we sprawl a bit more. Put simply not everywhere in NZ is suited to farming and/or urban development. The areas most suited to urban development i.e. generally flat, also tend to be those most suited to farming because as beautiful as the mountainous areas of the country are, we can’t really farm them or build cities on them. The article continues
In other words, only around 46 per cent of New Zealand is suited to pastoral farming and as Mark Twain famously opined: “Buy land, they’re not making it any more.” Landcare Research has also pointed out that Auckland’s urban growth between 1990 and 2008 has seen 4.1 per cent of its best farmland go under tarmac with another 35 per cent lost to lifestyle blocks.
What we need is more efficient urban land forms, the reuse of old industrial sites next, with greenfield sites becoming the last and not first resort.
We also need to take the lids off our cities. Only by building more compact cities will the cost of inner city rail loops be truly justified.
I think the lifestyle block issue is a very serious one being perhaps the worst of each world, land that is not urban but that is no longer practical to use for large scale farming, effectively becoming extremely unproductive. However I don’t agree that we need a more compact city to help justify the City Rail Link, in fact my understanding is that the way our transport and land-use models are set up, the greater the amount of sprawl around the rail network the greater the patronage predicted. This is because historically the rail network has performed better at attracting commuters making longer trips. It was perhaps one of the great ironies that the government pushed the council to adopt less a ambitious intensification target in the Auckland Plan but by doing so they unknowingly boosted the case fore the CRL. But of course that doesn’t mean I think we should have substantial amounts of greenfields development just to justify the project.
This isn’t the first time we have heard Federated Farmers make these comments, back in January we saw a similar op-ed while in April we saw them backing the councils Unitary Plan. Even so it is good to hear them continuing to push this. An example of just how much land different growth options would require is below
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We don’t have to blog about it but I’m going to comment on it anyway :-). If agriculture is not subject to the ETS, farmers don’t have an incentive to pursue lower-emissions farming. Which is bad. I recognise that NZ farming is typically lower-emissions than overseas equivalents, and that we don’t want to prejudice our export sales; however, there should be a reason for farmers to find ways to reduce their emissions. That’s a policy issue that needs to be addressed at some point.
I think the ETS is somewhat pointless without agriculture included. It clearly needs to be.
“land that is not urban but that is no longer practical to use for large scale farming, effectively becoming extremely unproductive”
So you maintain that only large scale farming is productive? Demonstrably false. If you bothered to take a look at parts of Franklin you would see highly productive small-scale horticulture on 1 to 5 hectare plots of owner-occupied land growing avocados, citrus, figs, grapes, olives, lavender, kiwifruit, passionfruit, tomatoes, garlic, artichokes, macadamias etc etc. Federated Farmers may regard industrialised pastoral agriculture as the pinnacle of food production. I don’t. Intensive dairy farming aimed at producing yellow fat for clogging arteries on the other side of the world may well be lucrative but it is far from ideal in my book. We don’t make a large turnover from growing fruit on our property but on a per-hectare basis it dwarfs the average dairy farm.
Compared to horticulture, pastoral farming is poor at food productivity (food value per unit area) and high in greenhouse gas emissions.
The issue is how many lifestyle blocks are like these “parts of Franklin”. Are they outliers or do they reflect the average lifestyle block? Another issue is how we measure the output or value-added of farming- is it just amount of food produced, export value, “health” value, etc.? Anyway, that’s not the main issue here- which is “greenfield sites (being) the last and not first resort.”
It’s irrelevant whether the Franklin lifestyle blocks are typical or not. In the past it has been claimed that lifestyle blocks are inherently unproductive and permanently so. Even a few examples disprove this. Federated Farmers want to frame the discussion in terms of pastoral farming and the “economics” thereof.
Lifestyle blocks are theoretically still productive, but I know half a dozen people/families that live on lifestyle blocks and none of them use the land productively at all. They have a shed, some neglected fruit trees and their few acres are occasionally used for grazing homekill cattle, but that’s all. I agree that those blocks of land are potentially very useful, but I strongly doubt the majority of people who live on lifestyle blocks try (or care to try) to make productive use of their land.
I’m not suggesting that lifestyle blocks can’t be highly productive but that it isn’t what 99% of them are used for.
99%? Do you have a source for that figure?
Ok. I’ve been on maybe 10 life sentence blocks and only 1 of them was used to actually farm anything in quantities that you could call ‘highly productive’. The remainder had nice looking fruit trees or the occasional beast for their own use.
Yes, and stand alone McMansions with 40 people living in them are a dense urban form, but they are rare. A lifestyle block is not inherently unproductive, but the vast majority are.
Lifestyle blocks are a scourge on both the urban and rural landscape.
It’s like as if cousins decided to shack up and have a child.
Since Mark Twain has already been called up I will use another of his quotes:
“Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”
It is actually brave of Federated Farmers to take a stand on this. In Australia, the farming bodies need to represent farmers who may want to sell out to lifestylers, so there has been little political lobbying on this other than limitations on the minimum size of a property on which a house can be built size in agricultural areas, which is I think 100ha. For pastoral sheep farming about 500-700 ha is required for a viable size.
However after a property of sub-economic size has a house on it, it is over-capitalised as a production entity and is generally managed for life-style purposes. There is a large belt of such land around Melbourne, stretching from Geelong to Ballarat, Bendigo, and Warragul.
I am an evil lifestyle block-er. I have a few fruit trees and a beast.. This land was owned by a farming family – who were in poverty. Leaking roof. No heating. Farm falling apart. They subdivided into lifestyle blocks and moved to a retirement home. Farmings hard work for all you apartment dwellers who have your green spaces provided by the council and so is looking after a lifestyle block. But i have a piece of land, which i tend and am caretaker of. I mow it, care for it and weed it , And it provides a buffer between urban metro limit and raw nature. It’s beautiful scenery for people driving past as my home is tucked away behind the fruit trees we planted. I don’t use more than my share of resources. We have no library, art gallery, sewerage, footpaths, and we pay more than our fare share of rates. I don’t commute. And i don’t contribute to sprawl. This farm already existed. It’s just being used in a new way. And maybe productive farms are not easy in Auckland anymore, but the internet and technology are a kind of productivity that can be done remotely. I work from home and my kids walk to school. And it’s not an elitist option. It seemed a good place to live seeing we couldn’t afford inner city. Lifestyle blockers can provide some greenspaces and access to a way of life that may one day be lost to many children. My kids run feral. There’s a stream on the neighbours farm, swings and trees to climb and fruit to pick. It’s healthy and we feel connected to nature. . And if we have a valid rail system connectng villages around stations, moving out to suburban then to green lifestyle blocks and then to larger natural spaces is a valid and desirable development model that doesn’t tax our roading system . Small farms: things i can buy at stalls farmed on my small street include, eggs, honey, nuts, orchids, passionfruit, feijoas. In our area large farms don’t sell easily as it doesn’t stack up financially. Perhaps a smaller lifestyle block is a valid smaller farm option usually supported by some other form of income. These farms exist and aren’t being farmed so how will they be used in the future?