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Keep Lifestylers off best soils — researchers’ plea By Hugh de Lacy District councils should direct lifestyle block subdivisions away from the five per cent of New Zealand land classified as being of high productive value. That’s the opinion of John Dymond of Landcare Research who, in a paper co-authored with Robbie Andrew and submitted to the Royal Society of NZ, demonstrated that 10% of the land capable of horticulture or arable farming has already been lost to the nation because of lifestyle sub-divisions. Dymond told Canterbury Farming that steering lifestyle blocks away from highly productive land could be as simple as the Government giving a policy direction to district councils, and furnishing them with a map of the Class One and Two lands to be protected. The paper shows that the number of lifestyle blocks nationwide has reached 175,000, up from 100,000 13 years ago. They presently cover 873,000ha, including 17% of New Zealand’s 1.4 million hectares of high-value farmland, which itself comprises 10% of all land.
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February 2012
around 4ha nationwide — are not necessarily less productive than economic farms units on a hectare-by-hectare basis, but they usually are.
develop on Class One and Class Two land you have to make a very good case for it to be there rather than somewhere else’,” Dymond said.
And that matters to a national economy which derives a quarter of its income from soil-dependent industries.
Nor should rural subdivisions be confined to the four hectares that many district councils specify, since many if not most true lifestylers want only enough space to distance themselves from the neighbours, and the actual productive capacity of the land is largely irrelevant to them.
“It matters because subdivision of rural land into lifestyle blocks tends to be an irreversible process,” Dymond said. “Once it gets sub-divided into smaller lots, the value of the land becomes higher and higher. “To put it back into large farming blocks, the land is too expensive to purchase. “We need to think nationally about our total stocks of high-quality land: having 10% already locked up from agricultural production — do we want any more? “In another 20 years it could be 20%,” Dymond said. The amount of land presently in lifestyle blocks is “okay, but if it increases, what happens?”
In Canterbury, 34,671ha (10.8%) of the 284,868ha of high-quality land is taken up by lifestyle blocks.
Landcare already had maps of the nation’s stock of highquality land, and could provide them to district councils if central government were to implement a nation-wide policy of protecting them.
Dymond said that lifestyle blocks — roughly defined as those under 40ha, and averaging
“There should be a national policy statement saying something like: ‘If you are to
In addition to the quality land lost to lifestyle sub-divisions, Dymond’s and Andrew’s paper showed a further 25,000ha had disappeared under urban sub-divisions between 1990 and 2008. This comprised 29% of all the land turned into suburbs. In Marlborough, 50% of the land turned over to urban housing during that period was on high-quality soils. In Hawke’s Bay, another intensive horticulture and viticulture region, the figure was 49%. The paper conceded that ‘there are significant benefits to rural sub-division, such as re-invigoration of rural communities, increasing rural school rolls, building resilience through diversifying production methods, and the improved quality of life of those with lifestyle blocks’. But this raised the questions
of whether lifestyle blocks constituted loss of productive land, and whether such lands were adequately protected. The paper also noted the phenomenon of ‘reverse sensitivity’ — such as when newly-arrived lifestylers objected to existing farming practices — which could also have the long-term effect of reducing farm production. Dymond told Canterbury Farming that some district councils were becoming aware of high-value lands and the need to protect them from subdivision. One of these was the Palmerston North City Council whose new land-use policy specifically directed lifestyle sub-divisions away from Class One and Two lands. “I don’t think it’s a strict direction — they should make it stricter,” Dymond said. Federated Farmers national president Bruce Wills, a former banker and valuer, told Canterbury Farming that, in an
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ideal capitalist world, a person should be able to buy a piece of land of any size for any purpose, regardless of the land’s intrinsic worth. But even with New Zealand’s relatively low density of rural population, this was plainly impractical. “It’s a bit like the overseas ownership thing: there’ll always be some who say, ‘Let the market do its thing’, and there’s the other side that says, ‘We need a bit of structure and organisation around this issue’,” Wills said. A lack of foresight in rural sub-division around the Pukekohe and Pukekawa districts of the Waikato had seen big chunks of the local potato and onion industries driven out to the South Island. “The big thing that we need to be concerned about is that 873,000ha of productive agricultural land is now under housing — that’s half the total size of our dairy industry,” Wills said.