A wood-supply catchment approach
In Marlborough our vision is for a sustainable hardwood industry to be centred on a small-to-medium sized processing operation based at Kaituna, near Blenheim.
For an economically viable, sustainable processing operation, an estimated 5,000 hectares of durable eucalypts will need to be planted over the next 30 years, to generate an average annual harvest of 50,000 tonnes of resource for the mill*. This equates to around 170ha/yr for the next 30 years.
There are over 74,000 hectares of farmland in Land Use Capability (LUC) classes 5-7 within a 40km radius of Kaituna (excluding the recently designated Afforestation Flow Sensitive Areas, where new plantations are restricted), plus a further almost 65,000 hectares of forestry plantations.
5,000 hectares of new durable hardwood planting represents around 3.4% of this total land area.