Sheep and beef farmers across New Zealand sold 15,743 hectares into forestry last year on an initial count, down from almost 64,000 hectares in each of the peak years of 2021 and 2022, with 1,304 hectares changing hands in the first quarter of 2026. That is according to Kate Acland, Chair of Beef + Lamb New Zealand, whose organisation commissioned the Orme & Associates land-use analysis first reported by Farmers Weekly on Wednesday.
“It is unclear what level they will settle at long term,” the analysis says of sales under the restrictions that took effect last October, crediting the rules with a dampening effect on both the scale and the pace of conversions.
“We are concerned they do not go far enough,” Acland said of those restrictions, warning that 27,000 hectares a year could still convert under the settings now in force. Her organisation is not opposed to forestry and accepts a role for large-scale commercial planting, provided it does not come at the expense of rural communities or productive farmland.
Orme & Associates puts 85,719 hectares of the total into carbon forestry and has revised its 2024 count up by 11,482 hectares to 41,966, with confirmation running months behind settlement so the 2025 figure will climb as Overseas Investment Office approvals come through.
The Climate Change Response Amendment Act blocks exotic forests on Land Use Capability classes 1 to 6 from entering the Emissions Trading Scheme, restricting registration rather than planting. Farmers keep an allowance of 25 per cent of each property; a national 15,000 hectares of class 6 country is allocated by ballot each year; and classes 7 and 8 remain unrestricted, provided the forest meets scheme criteria.
Ballots for class 6 land ran for the first time this year, with the Ministry for Primary Industries taking entries from 19 June to 22 July and a second draw still to be scheduled.
Buyers were most active in North Auckland, South Auckland, Hawke’s Bay, Taranaki, Wellington, Otago, and Southland over the past three years, with class 6 country making up nearly 60 per cent of everything sold last year, down from nearly 71 per cent in 2024.
It comes as the overseas companies behind 130,168 hectares of those sales keep buying, with a Swiss-German partnership taking its fourth Central Hawke’s Bay farm in 18 months for conversion to pine. IKEA’s forest arm opened its 43,000-hectare estate to media in July, ruling out any fresh run of conversions.
Trees go in the ground a year or two after settlement, so the sales now falling away are the plantations that would have carried harvest volumes into the 2050s. The National Exotic Forest Description puts total planting, new and replanted, at 91,000 hectares in the year to December 2024.
