Small rural blocks can be economically productive and even lead to innovative new industries – which could be stiffled if councils make creating small rural lots more difficult, says Jim Bennett, a retired economics and geography teacher, living in Whakatane.

The kiwifruit, alpaca and deer industries owe their early beginnings in part to the willingness of councils to allow 10 acre blocks to be subdivided from larger farms – and it would be a backward step if this was no longer posisble, Jim believes.

His comments follow the article by Brent Trail of Surveying Services in the July issue of Coast & Country in which Brent warned that lifestyle blocks may become a rare commodity in the Waikato and Waipa districts, thanks to new district plans.
'Those plan changes are disturbing and should be topic for debate around the hustings as we approach the local body elections,” says Jim.
During the late 1970s, Professor Warren Moran at the University of Auckland Geography Department, undertook an extensive research project to identify the types of land-use and the productivity of the '10 acre blocks” on the Auckland urban fringe.
'To my knowledge, there has been no subsequent research in New Zealand, so it stands as the authoritive evidence.
'From the data gathered in that project, it was found that the average productivity of these properties, matched the productivity of 'North Island sheep farming”. In other words, it was just one step below the productivity of the most intensive pastoral farming type, which was then, as now, dairy farming. So much for the notion that the land was unproductive, or merely grazing horses for the Queen Street lawyers' daughters.
'The concern objectors to smaller properties [branded 'lifestyle blocks”] typically promulgate, is that productive farmland is being taken out of economic use.
Diversity
'The evidence which is quoted to support this, is always just anecdotal. The real research paints a different picture. It shows there are many economic and social benefits both to the local community and to the wider economy from maintaining a diversity of property size.
'The proposals by the Waikato councils seem intended to turn back the clock to the dark ages of the 1960s and 1970s when the Town and Country Planning Act was in force. Under that regime, sudividing a rural property into smaller units required the purchaser to prove the financial viability of the proposed land-use. This was the era of Muldoon's supplementary minimum prices; and reliance on the UK as the dominant market for our meat and dairy products – features we had to break free from.
'As a country we needed to diversify both our production mix and our markets. But many of the new forms of land-use required smaller parcels of land. Imagine the unnecessary cost of establishing horticultural blocks if such enterprises had had to start out with 40 hectares, the typical size then of many dairy farms. The very viability of those enterprises would have been jeopardised, and would be today, if required to set up on far more expensive land than they required.
'Under the T&CP Act, it was very difficult for proposers to provide hard fiancial data about the innovative types of land-use, hard enough to satisfy the stuck-in-a-rut council planners of that time. Being new meant that, by definition, there was no established track record. Yes, kiwifruit could be grown on a smaller property, but kiwifruit could only be grown around Te Puke. So it was believed.
New wave
'Fortunately, that era was blown away by the Resource Management Act and some councils caught the new wave. Look what progress the Western Bay of Plenty made as horticulture blossomed.”
In that Auckland situation, the owners were using the properties for both established activities such as market gardening, pip fruit orchards and vineyards, or were experimenting with entirely new subtropical crops and livestock like deer, goats and alpacas, many of which have since become commonplace in our more diverse rural landscape. Some of the innovative land-uses did not gain traction, but the owners had been prepared to take that risk, says Jim.
'Should that kind of economic behaviour be inhibited by requiring properties to be so large that innovation cannot be tested? Risk-taking of this kind can be cushioned if family income is only partly derived from the farm with the balance coming from off-farm sources.
'Those innovative farmers and orchardists on the Auckland fringe were among those who led the way, showing the country what different forms of land-use were possible. So the rural economy has successfully diversified in the last 30 years and rural communities have been revitalised by retaining and increasing their populations. 'Let's not turn the clock back. I urge ratepayers to submit to councils putting impediments in the way of smaller farms, [and show] that diversity is good.”
# Jim was a post-graduate student at Auckland University in 1979 and participated in the survey of the urban fringe properties. His own masters thesis in 1980 examined the process of land-use change, as illustrated by deer farming in the Tauranga County.