Friday, March 29, 2024

Farmers find DOC land use ally

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Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Dr Jan Wright wants to pick up the pace on the sale or swap of masses of stewarded conservation land for farmland. Stewarded land held in trust by the Conservation Department for almost 30 years amounted to a massive proportion of DOC’s estate, accounting for 30% of the eight million hectares DOC oversaw.
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It offered potential opportunities for farmers to incorporate into their operations and for more ecologically valuable land on farms to be offered to DOC’s estate.

Stewarded land had weaker legal protection than land fully categorised under DOC control, with some of it having high conservation value. However, other areas had little conservation value and should be offered for exchange or disposal.

“We are talking about 10% of New Zealand’s land mass held as land in stewardship. This is land that has fallen into a statutory holding pen and we need to get moving on it,” Wright said.

The land had typically been ceded to DOC either at its formation, with a view its future status would be determined soon afterwards, or it was land bought with ecological funds to preserve it but had not been granted full conservation status.

There was a statutory ability to swap stewarded land for private land but Wright cited a “clunky” system contributing to a slow process that would put many farmers off considering offering up some ecologically valuable land of their own in exchange for stewarded land suitable for farming.

“Because you can swap stewardship land and not other DOC land I am thinking a commercial person will go ‘yes’ there is an opportunity here’.”

Wright could see the potential for a commercial platform to facilitate the sale and swapping of DOC property with farmers. 

She agreed that could include the potential for some form of state-sanctioned real estate service to bring the parties together.

But she said the problem facing DOC in engineering the sale and swap of land was the lack of funds available to get the ball rolling and the need to ring-fence funds from sales of stewardship lands to fund future purchases.

In a 2013 report on stewarded land Wright found only a small amount of stewardship land had been sold or reclassified. Her report said only 51ha was sold in nine sale transactions between 2008 and 2010.

Swapping of land, while more common, had sometimes proved controversial.

That included Meridian Energy’s aim to build a hydro dam on the Mokihinui River on the West Coast and the purchase of Crystal Basin for ski field expansion in Canterbury. 

St James Station in North Canterbury was bought to be added to the conservation estate in 2008 for $40 million but today remained in limbo as stewardship land.

As Wright called for a more streamlined approach to dealing with low value stewardship land that could be sold, she also wanted to see that stewardship land of high value like St James was dealt with far more quickly.

“I am not wanting to sell off all the conservation estate.

"While some areas are obviously not going to be suitable for swap or sale, there are others in river valleys and on some of the terraced country we get here that would be ideal.”

KATIE MILNE

Federated Farmers

“Because it is stewardship land it is the most weakly protected and could be considered the poorest quality but often it is not.”

Federated Farmers West Coast president Katie Milne was very aware of the potential sale and swap of stewardship land offered farmers on the coast.

“We live in a region where 87% of the land area is locked up in DOC control. 

“While some areas are obviously not going to be suitable for swap or sale, there are others in river valleys and on some of the terraced country we get here that would be ideal.”

She knew of some farmers who had access to lease old riverbeds which could prove ideal for wintering stock on and could become good pastoral areas very quickly as topsoil developed and silt accumulated.

Alternatively, many farmers on the Coast had wetland areas they could not farm that would be ecologically valuable to the DOC estate.

However, locals had found the process of buying or swapping “very difficult” and a very bureaucratic process that soon put would-be players off.

A hurry-along from the commissioner was welcome, given how long the land had been in limbo, Milne said.

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