Land management for recreation

We often talk about land management being necessary to protect our hill country for environmental and economic reasons however we don’t always discuss the recreational benefits. 

For example, less sediment in our rivers means they are more suitable for swimming and fishing. There are other benefits too - one SLUI farmer in the Ruapehu district has retired land to develop mountain bike tracks for everyone to enjoy.

Brent Greig of Ruatiti Station has a 5,000 hectare sheep and beef farm. The property has been part of the SLUI programme since 2010 and has undertaken a number of works since then.
 
Land management advisor Weston Brown says 2,000 hectares of the property is native bush and shares a lot of unfenced boundary line with DoC land.
 
“One of the biggest challenges was that the Station was never fenced properly. This made keeping stock and wild animals out of areas that they wanted to protect very difficult.”
 
SLUI funding which has subsided fencing is helping to solve this problem. Taking it a step further Brent decided to not only fence off areas, but also retire land so that their property could become part of the Mangapurua Cycleway.   
 
Station manager Raymond Lacy says they have other work they’d like to do under SLUI but the first priority is retiring the corridor between the main creek on their property and the Mangapurua Cycleway from the farm.
 
“We’d also like to encourage community involvement in the project by getting the local school to help plant out the retired areas once they’re completed. Following that we hope to establish trap lines for pest control in the retired areas.”