Planting the seeds for a better tomorrow

BY JON MORGAN

Farm forester Dean Martin has no prejudices about trees - natives or deciduous, he doesn't care, as long as they do the job.

Young farm forester of the year Dean Martin shades his eyes and points up the gully to where a mob of sheep are sheltering from the Hawke's Bay sun under a grove of kanuka trees.

"Those trees have got to come out," he says, uttering words that would make ardent conservationists weep. "The sheep stay under the kanuka for too long, creating a bare patch and piling up the manure, which then gets washed down into streams and ponds."

His solution is to replace the kanuka with red alder, oak and plane trees. They will still provide shade, but with pruning it will be dappled to let sun in to keep grass growing and the sheep shifting throughout the day. In winter, they will lose their leaves and allow sunlight onto the pasture beneath.

"Natives aren't the only answer," he says. "This way, I get back pasture that has been taken out of production and keep nutrients on the farm rather than losing them in the waterways."

Mr Martin, 36, who works with parents Gerald and Sue on Glenlands, their 242-hectare hill country farm in the Esk Valley just out of Napier, doesn't go along with the prevailing view that native trees are always best. He has planted hundreds of trees every year since 1997. Most are natives, but included among them are oaks, planes, hazels, walnuts, eucalypts, cypresses, pines, a variety of fruit trees and the osage orange, the tree American Indians made their bows from.

The farm's biggest feature is a deep gorge carved out by the Mangakopikopiko Stream. The gorge and its side gullies still retain much of the original native bush but Cyclone Bola, which in March 1988 dropped 900 millimetres of water over 36 hours on the farm, demonstrated that much more needed to be done to prevent watercourses being scoured. His father began to plant pines and eucalypts, later adding lusitanica cypresses and blackwoods, but when the younger Martin came home from Lincoln University with an agricultural commerce degree he stepped up the pace.

He had his own reasons. "I worked on cropping farms in Canterbury to pay for my course fees and really missed the birds of home - tui, bellbirds, wood pigeons, waxeyes. So when I got back here I wanted to do all I could to encourage them."

He started by trying to reduce the possum population. He used up to 300 kilograms of brodifacoum poison in a 1ha native block, but made little inroad till the regional council introduced a community-wide scheme. This was later taken over by the Animal Health Board when some neighbouring cattle reacted to tuberculosis testing. He supplemented that with cyanide paste and now hardly ever sees a possum.

"All of a sudden, we've had lots of new growth in the bush, especially the whiteywood and five-finger, and bird numbers are growing again. I remember as a kid seeing flocks of 40-50 waxeyes in the poroporo before they dropped to ones and twos, but now it's back to 20 at a time."

He also nurtured and planted seedlings, in between work on other farms and for a builder, as well as a 14-month working holiday in Canada. He searched the farm and nearby properties for seeds and seedlings to transplant. Helped by neighbouring farm forester Alec Olsen, he found pockets of matai, totara, rewarewa, kahikatea, tawa and rimu. They have been planted in gullies and low production areas.

"It's just commonsense, really. In your management of the farm you recognise an area which the stock have been a bit harsh on or it's not growing pasture as it should. They're basically negative production areas that if you put fertiliser on you're not going to get the return out of, so you may as well grow some trees and hopefully someone will get to mill them in the future."

He also created wetlands, digging spring- fed ponds and planting the banks with fruit and nut trees and the water with sedges and rushes to provide food for ducks. He is a keen duckshooter and has planted walnuts, hazelnuts, oaks and Japanese snowbells for food. Flaxes, cabbage trees, coprosma, hebes and poroporo add to the diversity.

Fruit trees have also gone in, mainly for his own use - blueberries, feijoas, plums, crab apples, mandarins and loquats. "It's quite nice to dive in for a feed when you're moving stock around."

He shoots only drakes so the population growth will not be harmed and attracts a wide variety, including grey teals, shovelers, mallards, swans and dabchicks. The ponds are also a handy backup for stock water in times of drought.

Bush, gullies and wetlands take up as much as 50ha of the farm leaving 170-180ha for sheep and cattle and he and his father are keen to acquire more land. They graze 200 Landcorp dairy heifers on a May-to-May contract and winter 750 ewes. The heifers bring in a guaranteed income, so have priority, and the aim is to have as many sheep and lambs off the farm by Christmas.

The last three years of drought have been tough. They expect it to be dry in January and February, but the last two years followed low-rainfall springs and it was hard to build up a pre-Christmas feed bank.

They went into this summer with pasture growth a month behind after a bitterly cold October. Late frosts are another hazard.

Great care is taken to get the best out of the ryegrass pastures. The cattle winter on the north-facing slopes and the sheep on the south. At Christmas, there's a changeover to give the heifers the benefit of the south-facing grass, which hangs on against the encroaching dry for at least two weeks longer.

Mr Martin, who is married to Antoinette, a Hawke's Bay Hospital administrator, won the Michael Hay Memorial Award for a young farm forester at last year's Farm Forestry Conference in Gisborne. But he is not resting on his laurels. His shadehouse nursery is being constantly replenished with seedlings and he has plans to create more wetlands.

He envisages the slow-growing species he is planting now being milled a few at a time by future generations. This selective harvesting is why he opposes shutting native forests, such as the West Coast beeches, to milling.

"Around the world, studies show such forests can be managed. By taking out the old big trees you open up the canopy for light- sensitive species to grow. The result is a healthy, diverse forest."

But the view that natives should be protected at all cost seems to have taken hold. He tells of a visit of 25 Napier schoolchildren, aged 7-12, to the farm.

"I took them to a gorge area and showed them natives and pines. I asked them if they thought the natives should ever be milled. Only one, the son of a forester, put his hand up. I then explained that the natives cost 20 times as much as the pines to buy. 'You've told me I can't mill them, so why would I bother planting them?' I asked them. I wanted to show them the consequences of such a view."

However, to show he wasn't totally opposed to natives he sent each child home with a kauri seedling from his nursery.

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