What they might well be looking at is hectare after hectare of pine trees. Hopefully, by then someone will have come up with a cure for hay fever - because boy, are they going to need it.
Hawke's Bay Today ran a story in Tuesday's paper about the latest farm near Napier to be converted into forestry.
The Australian-owned Hellig Assets NZ Ltd was given the nod by the Overseas Investment Office to buy the 332ha sheep and beef farm and convert it to forestry.
Of course, it's not the first in the area. Federated Farmers president Jim Galloway expressed his concern in the article, adding that over the last three to five years, more and more farms were being converted into forestry, including some in Central Hawke's Bay, Wairoa and Tararua.
It's all about the carbon credits, and Galloway said: "At the moment, with the price of carbon credits, it is actually quite profitable to buy a farm and convert it to pines."
Some people might ask why farmers are willing to sell their land when they know what is going to happen to it.
From where I'm sitting, it seems like farmers have been hammered by political red tape for the past few years.
The weather hasn't helped, and the cost of just about everything associated with every single thing anyone does these days has skyrocketed. I don't blame them one bit.
However, as I have said before, you can't eat wood. Meat is already pricing itself off many people's plates. It's not going to stop there, though.
You need land to grow good nutritious food. Potatoes, pumpkins, kūmara, sweetcorn - they all take a lot of land to grow. Yes, you can grow vegetables in your backyard, and more and more people seem to be doing that.
But these days, most people don't have a quarter-acre section. They can't grow enough food in their backyard to sustain a family all year round.
We need our farmers, our orchardists, our berry growers, our market gardeners.
If all our fertile land is turned into forestry, the next move will be to import the majority of our food. No thanks.
And don't think it won't happen - look what's happened so far. Look what happened to our landfills when glass was replaced with plastic; when plastic basically took over the world.
In New Zealand, glass milk bottles ceased production in the mid-1990s. Imagine how many plastic milk bottles have landed in our waterways in the past 25 years.
Suddenly, someone said, "Oh, plastic is damaging our planet".
Is someone is going to say in 30 years' time, "Oh, we don't have enough food to feed our people"?
It's a scary thought, all right.
Linda Hall is assistant editor at Hawke's Bay Today.
