The Forest Owners Association Finds The Beef + Lamb NZ Report By Orme & Associates

The Forest Owners Association finds the Beef + Lamb NZ report by Orme & Associates. Beef + Lamb has positive news for carbon capture ambitions. FOA President, Grant Dodson, says the Report reveals a long delayed and significantly more modest expansion of 63,000 hectares of plantation forestry which is well overdue, and vital, if New Zealand is to reach its carbon reduction targets. Grant Dodson says it’s important to realise the national plantation forestry estate is still 70,000 hectares smaller than it was twenty years ago. He says land use is always changing and a lot of land was lost in the first decade of this century to dairy taking over a lot of sheep and beef properties as well. Grant Dodson can’t understand why Beef + Lamb is upset about trees – claiming forestry displaced 400,000 sheep in 2021 – 2022 whereas sheep flock numbers in the four decades since the early 1980s, were nearly three times that due to Dairy conversion. As a country we should welcome more trees to fight climate change and to diversify and increase farm revenues.