pastoral farming

Despite one-third of New Zealand’s landmass being protected as public conservation land, the country still faces significant conservation challenges. Nearly 50% of the country’s landmass has been converted to pastoral farming, and biological invasions pose a sustained and growing threat to remaining biodiversity across all land tenures. Managing and protecting biodiversity on-farm provides vast opportunities to create nature-rich pastoral landscapes.

Pastoral farming is the dominant land use in New Zealand today and is under considerable domestic social and political pressure to reduce its environmental footprint. In this article, we explore options to enhance native biodiversity conservation within New Zealand pastoral systems. We argue that there is strong synergistic interdependence between biodiversity conservation and pastoral farming and suggest that it is possible to have win-win outcomes for both.