Farming

Good old New Zealand sheep farming. New Zealand has around 40 million sheep – 10 for every person – and apparently is the worlds largest exporter of sheep meat and cross bread wool. Although this has recently been overtaken by diary produce as the countries most important agricultural industry and money maker.

For me much of the countryside I’ve seen looks shorn, it looks like there’s something missing. Europeans only really started settling in New Zealand after 1840 and in a short space of time the remaining bush and forest was cleared and logged, making way for agricultural land. Unfortunately New Zealand had (and still has in small pockets) one of the world’s most unique natural habitats. As one of the earliest land masses to break away from the other continents its fauna was largely pre-mammalian. Instead of mammals and marsupials, birds and insects took their place and evolved in very unique ways to fill all of the different niches in the ecosystem. The flora is also unique having again evolved in isolation, and contains very ancient species such as the Kauri tree which can live for over a 1,000 years and grows to huge proportions. Human contact, first Polynesian and then European, destroyed most of this through the clearing, burning and logging of forests, hunting and the introduction of animals such as rats, stouts, weasels and possums that decimated the indigenous animal and plant life.

Although at least now it feels a bit more like home.