Jane Smith talks to Jamie Mackay, the Country
Extract: Well, Jamie, look, I'm certainly rather be producing protein on the hills than pines. And interesting enough, I've been fascinated by the way by the campaign that Rural Australia are running at the moment called Keep the Sheep. I think you might look into that a wee bit more.
But you know, it's interesting. Obviously you're talking carbon farming, which is different to production forestry. But I was reading that white paper by Jenny Western Brown. I think you had her on your show and her colleagues, that wrote that white paper, and she mentioned, it's water quality on marginal land. And by the way, the next person that talks about class six and seven land, she can beef land as marginal land. I will probably stuff the caps with their white paper because that same land as low input, low impact. And also the guardians of all of that land containing two point six million hectares of native gullies, et cetera. But they talked about the quality of water. She didn't mention, funny enough, the quantity of water. And if you look at the headwaters of our Cacana River, the models show and actually most catchments forty to forty five at least reduction in water yields, in those catchments twenty odd years after those trees were planted.
So carbon farming or production forestry, that one happens to be carbon farming. So and of course they don't need to tell any of your listeners in the North Island, East Coast about sediment and slash of large scale pine plantations.
And just to be clear, I'm very supportive of integrated forestry [Agroforestry]. We have a number of forestry blocks in our farms, but large scale pine plantations are not, carbon forests. Forestry tends to resemble something more like a Hunger Games or a Mad Max movie rather than a sort of a country calendar view…