03-05-2023, 08:00 PM
(03-05-2023, 06:38 PM)harm_less Wrote: It's unclear what spin the OP is trying to put on this but there is definitely nothing new about large acreages being retired from livestock farming and converted to forestry. During the mid 1990s I spent time working in the north Hawkes Bay hill country and investment forestry was causing damage to local communities and their support infrastructure by doing just that.
Their business model was to value a property for its forestry potential by carving off roadside flats for sale as lifestyle properties then exclude corridors below HT power lines (which they couldn't plant under) and evaluate the cost of harvest tracks and firefighting. ROI then dictated their development strategy. Interestingly it wasn't unusual to see 'plantings' in the further reaches of such investment blocks poorly implemented, and in some cases missing altogether, as investors very rarely made the effort to inspect their forestry from beyond their car parked on the roadside.
Leaving that fraud aspect out of the equation the primary risks to the rural areas being used was that the previous farmers' requirements of vehicles and machinery purchase and servicing, owners and employees' grocery, education, healthcare and social inputs all but disappear thereby leaving rural communities as ghost towns with rural support businesses left with no viable business opportunities. The availability of ongoing labour requirements also becomes a factor as forestry's ongoing thinning, pruning, infrastructure input and maintenance and harvesting requirements become reliant on those services being transported in .
Same as it ever was it would seem.
Or maybe their future plans include manufacturing plants here. When climate change renders Europe uninhabitable.