Rural delivery: Lifestylers change the face of farming

By CLIVE DALTON*

How serious are lifestyle farmers? What is a lifestyle farmer anyway? Are they caring for the land or playing at farming and wasting it?

These are questions regularly aired, as an increasing number of folk head out of town to claim their bit of Godzone.

New Zealand is said to have about 100,000 small blocks, and they are increasing - stimulating heat in the debate about our farmland and the environment, and how its custodians should care for it.

Commercial farms are getting bigger as owners purchase neighbouring properties. The small pockets left make ideal lifestyle blocks.

These small blocks can inflate the value of conventional farmland, especially in areas next to the latest small block development.

The traditional 100-acre, 100-cow farm that fed and educated a Kiwi family 30 years ago is viable no more.

If it's not a merger prospect, the ageing farmer can cut off a block around the house for retirement and subdivide the rest for the superannuation fund.

Granny and Grandpa and the old dog stay on the land where the family grew up with their immaculate garden, and they don't have to walk on hard pavements in town with traffic fumes.

Once upon a time, district councils discouraged the development of small blocks, and there were regulations that required such blocks to be economic units. But things changed when councils began to see the potential rates.

The increase in lifestyle blocks has had some very positive effects.

With more people moving back into the country, some local schools have had to expand and recruit more teachers. The local hall has been rescued from borer and starlings, and the matai floor vibrates again to human activity.

There are critics, of course.

My favourite is the old farmer who will regale you with some of the daft things he sees his lifestyler neighbours doing, and how they are wasting good land.

Yet he was the one who sold them the land in the first place, to create his tidy little super fund. He moans that they never ask his advice - no blooming wonder.

Vets have mixed feelings.

They don't like being called out at weekends (when most lifestyle farming is done) to do surgery in the paddock, as there are no yards.

But they also admit that the lifestyle business can be substantial, as do the stock and station agents who trade small number of stock for their lifestyle clients. Things are fairly tight in the industry these days so a sale is a sale no matter what size.

Then there's MAF. It administers the animal welfare law and its statistics show that 80 per cent of complaints arise from small block owners. Most of these are about starving stock that have run out of feed.

So it's worth considering who these lifestylers are.

There are usually two earners in the family, so they have some disposable income. They need it, as they soon find that a block is a sink for spare cash.

They are professional people who may be ignorant of farming matters, but their desire to seek information is amazing. Nearly all use the internet.

The evidence for this comes from Kay Swann and Kate Brennan, two lifestyle-block farmers near Cambridge who checked the web to help answer some of their basic questions and found none. So they created www.lifestyleblock.co.nz.

Last month the site recorded 24,773 visits for an average of 15 minutes each, with 136,262 pages of information examined.

There is no clearer evidence that lifestyle-block farmers are hungry for information if it is credible and readily available, and in a form they can get at easily.

* Dr Clive Dalton, a former scientist and Waikato Polytechnic tutor, is technical editor of lifestyleblock.co.nz.