Farmer warns of hidden risks from forestry neighbours

That's the message from Bruce Wills, former president of Federated Farmers and successful businessman, who says he personally knows what's ahead of theses farmers and they may not know what is coming their way.

He says he lived with the situation for many decades on his farm, Trelinnoe Station, on State Highway 5 just north of Napier. The property was famous for its beautiful garden as well as its farming operation, but the beauty was constantly under threat from the surrounding forestry.

"We were an island of grass surrounded by trees. We had four commercial pine tree neighbours and then DOC," he told Rural News.

"The forest gives our pest animals shade and shelter during the day then at night they come streaming out onto any open pasture and consume the grass that we have carefully grown at a cost for our own stock," he says.

"Farmers live on their place 24/7, unlike the forestry people who generally don't work on the weekend or public holidays, and trying to get them to fix the fences their trees broke down was impossible. Some of the owners were overseas and just not interested in our problems, so in the end we just gave up. The result was it cost us thousands of dollars repairing the fences ourselves, and dealing with the other problems forestry caused," he says.

Wills says having a forestry owner for a neighbour is way different from having another farmer whom you know and who is part of the local community. He says forestry people are seldom part of the local community. He says basically a gang comes in and plants the pine trees and it's often years before there is any contact with the owner of a forestry block.

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Wills says the widespread advent of carbon farming next to their pastoral block is a challenge that many farmers would not have given much thought to.

"As forestry conversions continue, the problem is going to get worse and farmers need to be prepared to deal with what will be in store for them," he says.