Te Runanga o Ngati Whare based in the tiny forestry village of Minginui southeast of Rotorua has received the green light on funding to expand the tribe’s indigenous tree nursery with the goal of delivering a million trees a year by 2021.
The staff of nine is expected to grow to 90 over the coming 10 years with the goal to employ more locals in an area rife with unemployment.
The iwi has already invested over $1 million in the nursery that started in 2013 with the goal of providing trees to reforest felled pine stands in the Whirinaki forest.
That project, part of a Treaty of Waitangi settlement, involved regenerating 640ha of the forest’s 55,000ha and has put the iwi at the front of developing an industry in indigenous forestry regeneration.
Ngati Whare commercial division chairman Rick Braddock said iwi had to jump through a number of hoops to get the funding and faced some close scrutiny from Ministry for Primary Industries to ensure the operation hit key performance targets.
Iwi had originally sought $10m in development funds.
“This is a significant shot in the arm for Minginui and the funding makes the entire project very much a win:win for the environment, iwi and the economy.”
Spread over three years the funding will be applied to expanding the nursery’s capacity to supply not only natives for iwi land but for commercial and Government clients requiring plantings.
The ability to ramp up production has come thanks in part to a ground-breaking Scion technique that uses native plant cuttings rather than seeds to grow the likes of totara and rimu.
The funding fits alongside the Government’s other significant primary sector promise, to plant an extra 50,000ha of trees a year for the next 10 years.
While welcoming the national initiative, forestry experts including Forest Owners Association president Peter Clark have expressed concern about the availability of skilled manpower to meet the capacity demands the expansion brings.
Pine seedling company ArborGen had to have a robotic seedling planter developed by Waikato University to improve its planting rates when it was unable to secure more skilled workers at Tokoroa.
Clark admitted he had mixed feelings about the allocation of Government funds to a specific nursery business.
“Of all the constraints to increased forestry I would say seedlings would be the least. Private nurseries are able to respond quite quickly to demand and there are already nurseries there that can do natives.
“I would hate to see other nurseries put out of business through this.”
However, he acknowledged the funding was part of the regional development programme aimed at boosting opportunities in more depressed regions.
He also noted there are vast tracts of forestry land in NZ planted with pines that will ultimately need natives because of the land’s erosion-prone nature.
Braddock hopes the project will create more jobs.
“But ask me in a few more years when we need 90 people how we are going.”
Indigenous tree-planting on a commercial scale with seedlings sourced from the nursery could deliver not only a high-value forestry product but another source of carbon sequestration.
Scion work has already managed to develop a totara strain that will deliver commercially harvestable wood from a 50-year rotation and native plantings open another opportunity to grow other sustainable species for commercial timber and non-timber, for example, land protection and climate change mitigation benefits.
The Whirinaki forest is set to act as the mother ship for forest regeneration and new plantings further afield with its relatively abundant supply of totara, rimu, matai and kaihikatea.
Braddock, himself a beef farmer on Motutapu Island in the Hauraki Gulf, said he also hopes the significant riparian plantings on farms will provide a valuable source of extra income from farmers keen to have natives in those areas.
