INSIGHT
UPFRONT CARBON FARMING
Cashing in on the edge As “carbon farmers’ buy up New Zealand farm land, it’s time for existing operators to up their game on long-term land use. Phil Edmonds reports.
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f you’re not sizing up your ridges, verges and margins, you’re probably thinking about it. All the market signals are pointing to not much short of a free money bonanza to anyone holding tracts of land outside that which is in reliably productive pasture. Despite elevated fears among rural communities of irreversible land use change as a result, the Government has so far been reluctant to intervene. But what looks like the inevitable may not yet come to pass if farmers are handed responsibility for offsetting their own agricultural emissions, and if younger farmers start thinking
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about optimising their land use for the longerterm future. The basis of the emerging bonanza should now be familiar – that being the rising price of carbon emission units, as determined by the Government given its ultimate control of supply. Those who are in the position to sell units (such as owners of sequestered carbon) are winning, and given the Government’s desire to see tangible behaviour change from emitters, are predicted to continue winning as the price is orchestrated upwards. The current price is sitting at $49 per NZU (tonne of emissions). This has almost doubled
‘If for example a farmer wanted to put in a block of firewood eucalyptus and had to get a resource consent to do so, they are unlikely to be happy.’
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | September 2021
