In a few days the rural community that owns the 90-year-old Waingaro saleyards will decide whether the first sheep sale of the year will be its last.
So much pine forest now bristles the Waikato coastal hillsides, and so many farmers have turned from sheep to beef, that the saleyards that regularly hosted sales of tens of thousands of sheep are in danger of turning from a valuable community resource to a little-used burden.
Such shifts in primary sector production have occurred throughout the country.
In the South Island, there will be a huge impact from Dairy Group's December lifting of a two-year moratorium on new dairy farms. During the time it has taken the company to establish a method for new suppliers to contribute to the cost of new processing facilities, the list of people wanting to dairy farm in the south has grown to around 150.
The number of people believing there is money to be made by dairy farming is all the more remarkable when it's considered that it takes at least $2.4 million to set up an average size dairy farm in Southland.
Across the country over seven years, an estimated 1340 sheep and beef farms have been converted to dairying. In the process 2.6 million sheep and beef stock units have been wiped off the map.
Over the same period, 330,000ha - 55,000ha every year since 1994 - have been added to land under exotic forest, at the cost of a further 1.5 million sheep and beef stock units.
But the countryside is not kneedeep in dairy farmers, nor is it impossible to find the Sunday roast for the trees because at the same time dairy farms have been amalgamating into larger, more efficient units, and sheep farmers have been getting better and better at producing more meat from each animal.
In 1999-2000, agricultural exports were worth $12.4 billion, a 35 per cent increase in real terms on 14 years earlier.
Over the same period, agriculture's contribution to gross domestic product rose by 26 per cent, from $72.3 billion to $91.4 billion, or from 14.2 per cent to 16.6 per cent of GDP.
In the sector, there is a deeply held conviction that it can deliver much more to the economy, and that primary industries long hailed as the most efficient in the world will be able to hold off strong challenges from other countries to maintain that prominence.
It will be done the way it always has been - by developing or adapting technology and adopting it at a rate faster than elsewhere.
One thing would make it all sweeter. The next time the Government has a business forum attended by hundreds, it could invite along more than one or two from agriculture.
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