Ian Brennan wants to develop a sustainable eco system which can tolerate harvesting, writes Chris Gardner.
Ian Brennan on his Te Miro farm. Photo: Chris Gardner
Ian Brennan is proud to call himself a “tree pervert”.
Brennan has spent 18 years planting continuous cover native forestry on his Te Miro hill country farm after he witnessed the impact of soil erosion first hand.
“A big lump of earth came tumbling down past me,” he told fellow farmers at a field day held earlier on his Maungakawa Road property near Cambridge
“I thought, have we bought a lemon?”
Brennan swapped a 22-year career in software development for farming in December 2005.
“I just wanted my working life to be something I enjoyed,” he says.
Since then, Brennan has planted about 90,000 native trees in about 38 hectares on the 85 hectares farm he owns with his wife Equine Energetics owner Trisha Wren.
Field Day on the farm
Ian Brennan
His first thought, after seeing soil erosion in action, was to begin planting parts of the farm out in natives. He turned to kauri, kahikatea, rimu and totara. But where should he stop?
“I have just said anything that’s too steep to drive on can go back to forestry,” he says. “I will just farm what’s left.”
Farm, as in use what’s left for grazing a couple of hundred cattle.
“I went and bought some budget plants. Half of them died including kauri.”
There’s been plenty of trial and error, with Brennan constantly reviewing what species to plant where.
“I replaced the kauri with totara … if I was to start again I would just plant totara.
“If you just want to plant bush, a nursery crop is a good idea.”
It’s a solitary job. His days consist of either planting new trees or pruning the forest.
“I listen to podcasts all day, or I get into the groove.”
He enjoys The Great Simplification exploring “the systems science underpinning the human predicament” with Nate Hagens, 1980s music and Taylor Swift.
Of the 38 ha of mostly steep gullies planted on the farm, 33 have been planted since 2016.
“We hit our stride with planting at a time when Waikato Regional Council, Waikato River Authority and Trees That Count all had funding available but there was a dearth of landowners looking to plant permanent forests – especially native forest.
“We are planting entire gullies for catchment protection.”
The farm has six streams flowing into the Waikato catchment and one into Piako.
Ian Brennan discusses his planting project at a recent field day on his farm.
“Our point of difference is that we are planting all the main native timber species and managing them silvi culturally to create a high-quality timber resource for future generations.”
Totara dominates planting with splashes of rimu, kauri, kahikatea, puriri, tanekaha, matai, rewarewa and taraire. In recent years Brennan has used manuka and kanuka almost exclusively as nurse species to shade and protect the main crop.
“In the early years we used a wide variety of colonisers as nurse crop including tarata, kohuhu, karamu, lacebark, five finger, ribbonwood and wineberry. We found all of these species are too vigorous and quickly overtop the totara, stunting the tree and damaging the growing tips, making them sprout multiple leaders. This requires more silvicultural intervention, specifically form pruning to remove duplicate leaders in order to produce a single, straight log.”
Totara will be a timber resource for future generations without a nurse crop as he has found they require a lot of maintenance after five or six years.
“I find totara planted on its own, just like any other forestry species, is the best option. This is likely to be the case also with kauri and rewarewa. Puriri and tanekaha definitely benefit from being planted among an established nurse crop. The jury is still out on the other species with regard to using a nurse. If you simply want to plant a block of bush, then nurse crops are a potentially cost-effective way to get early canopy closure and thereby foreshorten the period during which you will need to walk through the planting and spray woody weeds like blackberry and inkweed,” he says.
“New Zealanders have got this idea that every native tree is sacred, but the forest is the eco-system.
“As far as I know, we are the first people in New Zealand that has a covenant that allows harvest of a percentage of the trees.”
But Brennan’s goal is to grow a crop that can be sustainably harvested.
“Nobody has all the answers,” he says. “There are no right answers to any of this. We are still in the experimental stage on a lot of things.”
Brennan relies on the hunter community to keep the fallow deer population down and forest damage to a minimum.
“My wife is a vegetarian, and I am a de facto vegetarian, and I have never been a hunter.”
Brennan is playing the long game.
He realises that he will never benefit from the harvest, neither will whoever he sells his farm to when the times comes.
“I don’t have to do it all,” he says.
“The forest will continue to grow for hundreds of years.
“The next person can do some, if they want to be a tree pervert like me.”
Ian Brennan discusses his planting project at a recent field day on his farm.
