Source: Radio New Zealand
Launched in 2021 Tāmata Hauhā works primarily with Māori land owners to provide them with strategies and funding to develop their land holdings and make them more productive, primarily through forestry. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
From growing a few Christmas trees “for fun”, to a diverse range of towering exotics and natives – there’s a bit of everything at Tāmata Hauhā’s demonstration farm outside Palmerston North.
“One of the reasons we created this farm is because farmers actually want to come have a look,” founder and chief executive Blair Jamieson told Country Life.
Launched in 2021, Tāmata Hauhā works primarily with Māori land owners to provide strategies and funding to develop their land holdings and make the land more productive, mainly through forestry.
It provides the finance for purchasing trees, preparing the land, planting the trees and managing the forest created, as well as carrying out all the administration.
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They grow about 46 exotic and 30 native species of trees across three farm sites.
“You can come here and see nearly every type of forestry system that can be applied.
“We’ve even got silvopasture agroforestry systems behind us, which show you how you can actually continue to graze and actually run a farm and stock underneath those trees.”
With adequate spacing between the trees, Jamieson said the systems also enable farmers to generate carbon credits which offer extra profit through the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
They also offer added benefits like shade and shelter for the stock.
Tāmata Hauhā founder and chief executive Blair Jamieson. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
Many of the trees on the farm were planted in 2022 and 2023. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
Many of the trees on the farm were planted in 2022 and 2023 – already many stand several metres tall.
There are various types of eucalyptus, elm, paulownia, cypress and poplar, along with different types of pine.
Jamieson said seeing the trees next to each other and understanding their growth helps land-owners in decision-making.
“We support them by saying ‘here is how much you get protected for this type of structuring. Here’s the the native integration you can have for this type of species’.
“I mean, ‘here’s the other options if you wanted to go down the alternative timber production route’.”
While there’s a push to move away from pinus radiata, Jamieson is not totally opposed to it.
“There are a number of people out there in this space who are, you know, just carbon-focused – all about the yield, don’t care what they plant.
“They just want the carbon for the coin and that has led to a number of, you know, outcomes which in the long term are not going to be very good. There’s going to be a lot of pine forests.”
His primary concern is how well these pine forests will be managed, particularly when it comes to large monoculture conversions.
They grow about 46 different exotic and 30 different native species of trees across three farm sites. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
Here various poplars are being grown to help with erosion control. Gianina Schwanecke / Country Life
While the Government has introduced tweaks to try and address some of these issues, Jamieson said this had also created uncertainty in the sector.
His view was that pine should be removed from the permanent category in the ETS.
“Encouraging the right type of forestry regimes is all that is needed to actually fix the underlying problem to stop mass farm conversions into pine.
“But that being said […] you can see some of the trees over across the river here are three to four times taller than pine planted at the same age and when you equate that I can actually go into those areas and plant 75 percent native trees, that will stratify and become the dominant canopy over time, I’ll get you there and you’ll make more money than pine and you won’t have the problems and you got more jobs.”
Jamieson said some of their systems, on a per-hectare basis, could create more jobs than farming.
He said it was about using “the right exotic to perform a job for a period of time to enable native growth”.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
