“It’s a half-time position for someone to focus on areas like East Cape, Hawke’s Bay, King Country and Wairarapa where there might not be the support from local government, he said.
Norton sees the restoration ambassador as the first step to realising the vision of biodiversity ambassadors working with farmers helping to facilitate positive biodiversity management across rural New Zealand.
The first ambassador will travel widely, teaching the basics of restoration and other biodiversity management activities like cost-effective pest protection to farmers, community groups, iwi and others interested in sustaining and enhancing biodiversity in rural areas.
An example of the type of information shared is the story of a Gisborne farmer who found that to stop deer all she needed was one single line of white electric tape about a metre above the top of a standard fence.
A breakthrough like that has real meaning for farmers, Norton said.
“Rather than building a new $24/metre fence or whatever, just run some electric tape around the existing fence.”
The appointee will be able to test some of the material that will go into a biodiversity extension website being developed through a Biological Heritage National Science Challenge project, led partly by Norton.
The information focuses on what biodiversity is, how farmers can know what they have on their farms, how they might manage it and how it fits into a land environment plan.
Norton works with Beef + Lamb and several farmers on alternatives to locking up land.
He finds whereas high country stations might manage tourism, forestry, sheep, beef and irrigation, a smaller, unirrigated, lowland sheep and beef farm might have just a single bush patch.
“I don’t think farmers are inherently anti-biodiversity but they’re busy people, they’re running a complex enterprise and they’re not trained in ecology. One of the biggest gaps is that there is not a big resource base to help farmers know what they’ve got and to make decisions about what they’re going to do with it.”
Norton hopes the restoration ambassador will help farmers and others understand how they can help manage biodiversity.
“I believe, so strongly, that we, as ecologists, don’t put the information to farmers in a way that farmers can understand. It’s either lost in some journal article, which is wonderful, and my colleagues have written some great stuff about what’s happening on farmland, or it’s all tied up with people who are pushing a political barrow.”
Norton finds most farmers reject anything that seems like hardcore conservation ideology.
“Farmers need independent advice. We’re developing extension resources, which are going to be an independent online resource, which, we hope, will give farmers the knowledge to make the right decisions.”
The ambassador role will be funded through the Billion Trees programme but will be as independent as it can be.
It is clear to Norton a lot more biodiversity extension is needed, especially because only a small percentage of all the native forest on sheep and beef farms will ever be covenanted.
“QE2 will never have the resources to do all of it. And a lot of people don’t want to covenant … for a variety of reasons.”
Farmers most need pest control advice and resources, he said.
“You can’t bring back kakariki into these landscapes … they need nesting sites and they need connectivity, robins won’t cross farmland, North Island brown kiwi will cross 300 metres of farmland but that’s a maximum. They can cross kilometres if they have stepping stones that are created through restoration.”
The restoration ambassador will help farmers make decisions about where to put restoration plantings and how to manage other areas of native biodiversity.
Advice needn’t be complicated or based on a premise of permanently retiring land through QE2 covenants and the like.
The National Parks Act, Reserves Act and regional plans wrongly interpret what conservation meants, Norton said.
“Preservation is only one option for conservation. There are other options. At the end of the day DOC don’t have the money to do what they need to do on the third of New Zealand they’ve got to manage so why on earth should we expect DOC to manage other areas?”
In a 2013 book, Nature and Farming, co-authored with a colleague in Australia, Norton talks about NZ and Australia, including case studies, like the Murray family at Glenmore in the Mackenzie Basin and Dugal and Mandy Rutherford at Hawarden.
“Our conclusion in that book was that we need biodiversity ambassadors. We need people in rural NZ and rural Australia, lots of people who can go out and provide free advice to farmers, explaining to them what biodiversity is and why it is important and helping them with the knowledge to manage it and to find funding.
But they must be independent of district and regional councils … because if they don’t then the farmer is never going to trust them. Farmers know that council staff will go back at lunchtime, sit around the table and someone else is going to ask ‘Did you see that spraying up there? Whose land was that? Straight away it breaks any trust down.”
Through the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge Norton has been measuring the amount of native biodiversity on farms. As part of the project he has also worked with B+LNZ on a phone survey asking farmers what they know about biodiversity and what it means to them.
The challenge programme partners, including Auckland University of Technology, Auckland University and Lincoln University are also consulting with Maori and have a close relationship with three study farms, one in North Canterbury, a Maori Incorporation at Taumarunui and a farm at Kaipara.
