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From the President
The NZFFA website www.nzffa.org.nz
Websites have become a necessity for most successful businesses or organizations and the NZFFA is no exception. Increasingly people are looking for information online. On the other hand businesses are looking at what information to make available and how to make it both useful and relevant.
The NZFFA is no exception and over the last year has put a considerable effort into its website. This started with documenting the Farm Forestry Model, firstly as a series of case studies with financial assistance from the Sustainable Farming Fund. Some have already been published in Tree Grower, with more to come. The second part of the plan was to make the model and other relevant farm forestry information publicly available using the website and the internet.
The website has recently undergone a make over thanks to the efforts of Dean Satchell and Derek Gunn. This was made possible with funding from FIDA and I would like to thank John Eyre and MAF for this. Among the raft of changes has been the addition of a marketplace or a mechanism to trade goods and services applicable to farm forestry. This is a very easy-to-use facility and I would encourage anyone who wants to buy, sell or swap goods or services to use it. It is freely available to members and non-members alike.
Another major change has been the addition of the Farm Forestry Model - all of the case studies are now featured here along with a huge amount of information relevant to growing trees and farm forestry. It is still very much a work in progress, there are always formatting concerns and glitches. These issues aside if you have an opportunity, please have a look at the website and let us have any comment and feed back.
The Emissions Trading Scheme
On June 18 this year the government introduced a bill amending technical aspects of the timing of the Emissions Trading Scheme relating to forestry. While there are many aspects to this bill, the most significant for farm foresters was a change in the dates for firstly those with less than 50 hectares of pre-1990 forest to apply for an exemption and secondly the date for a free allocation of NZ Units.
We are now told that the yet to be announced dates will be sometime before 1 July 2010. The last minute nature of this announcement was disappointing as we had put considerable effort into publicising 30 June and 31 July dates. We have to wonder about the government's long-term commitment to an ETS.
It was encouraging to hear both the Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture & Forestry discuss the ETS at the recent Federated Farmers annual conference. The NZFFA will continue to take a very active role in promoting the ETS to members as and when more of the detail is clarified. MAF also has extensive information available on its web site www.maf.govt.nz and its 0800 CLIMATE hotline is also very good.
Agriculture's carbon footprint
Landcare Research estimates that at least a million hectares of current pastoral land is not sustainable under pasture, mainly on account of accelerated erosion, and as such needs afforestation in some form. Some is potentially commercial forest land and some needs to be retired into indigenous cover purely and simply to reduce downstream problems.
The figure that New Zealand agriculture needs to consider is that this million hectares could store enough carbon to offset 15 to 30 years of total agriculture emissions. Therefore agriculture can take some very constructive steps to offset greenhouse gas emissions while actually seeing gains on several fronts. These trees will not be displacing large numbers of stock as the land involved is carrying very little anyway. It will not be done over night so will need to be a long term programme, and God forbid that it is all radiata pine. It needs to be a variety of species, both production and protection, but first we need some recognition from agriculture that there is a very simple, multiple win solution within its grasp.
Patrick Milne,
President.
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