The Council of Outdoor Recreation Associations of New Zealand says the sale of Lochinver Station is another example of the "open and unrestricted selling" of New Zealand's land.
Co-chairman Andi Cockroft said the selling "must stop", saying there appeared little or no controls over foreigners buying land.
"The Overseas Investment Office is a toothless tiger which rubber-stamps government encouraging foreigners to buy up at large," Mr Cockroft said.
The landmark Napier-Taupo Rd sheep and cattle operation looks set to be sold to Chinese interests, Conservative Party leader Colin Craig told an election campaign meeting in Hastings on Friday. The revelations were confirmed soon afterwards to the New Zealand Herald by Shanghai Pengxin, which through subsidiary Pure 100 Farm Ltd had signed a sale-and-purchase agreement for the 13,800ha station, valued at more than $70 million and 92km northwest of Napier.
Mr Cockroft said foreigners "almost always" put up locked gates and refused New Zealanders access to the outdoors. He was aware that in Marlborough's Waihopai Valley of Korean and Malaysian interests buying land and then erecting locked gates.
Usually, overseas investors disguised the foreign nature of the purchaser by forming a New Zealand company. He cited Pengxin using the name Pure 100 Farm Ltd, and of the Tiong dynasty which owned much New Zealand forestry and farmland under the "disguise" of Ernslaw One and Timbergrow.
Mr Cockroft praised "whistle blowers", political parties NZ First and the Conservatives for alerting New Zealanders.
Lochinver Station, with a capital valuation of $70.6 million, was put up for tender early this year by Stevenson Group.
Hawke's Bay-based former Federated Farmers national president Bruce Wills earlier said the sales overseas of such land is a "divisive issue", and policy during his three-year term at the head of the organisation was not to be for or against.