Some big decisions need to be made by land owners in the wake of both the Cyclone Gabrielle floods, when the frailties of planting great swathes of farmland in pine forest came home to rest…on the beaches of the Hawkes Bay and Tairawhiti, and the results of years of nitrogenous fertilisers being applied to the leaky soils of Canterbury and parts of the North Island showing up in water quality problems in rivers, lakes and groundwater.
Things need to change, and an interesting podcast by Bernard Hickey called The Future of Sustainable Farmlands, talking to vet and farm consultant Alison Dewes and farmer John Burke makes for very interesting listening.

The tragedy of the commons has meant that the externalities of intensification of farming systems over the past 30 years is now a cost being borne by wider society groups - forest slash on beaches has taken out bridges and silted up downstream properties and nitrogen applied to farms turns up as lake and river degradation downstream and sometimes years later. So what to do?

The sweet spot of economics and ecological outcomes will vary according to different soil and land types but the move towards funding for Jobs for Nature and the establishment and funding of catchment groups means the bottom up approach has much more chance of succeeding than the old top down regulatory approach Dewes says.

But first must come a vision for the country - how do we want our landscape to look and function over the next 100 years, solving the problems of the past 100 years while taking into account the resilience needed to face a future of climate change?
Click here to have a listen on Spotify.