Nick France gazes out to a pond fringed entirely by flax to the left and then down to a flood plain cloaked by many new plantings.
The intergenerational farm is a 950ha sheep and beef property in the Mid Canterbury foothills and home to the family’s Okawa Hereford bull stud, dating back to 1954.
Okawa is an intensively run farm for a dryland property at 500m above sea level with a stocking rate of 10 stock units to the hectare, including mated hoggets. The flock of 5000 ewes shares grazing with 350 stud cows.
The couple try to finish all their young stock depending on the season and the balancing act is maintaining feed levels at critical times of the year.
Mr France and wife Penny have been running Okawa since the retirement of her parents David and Rosemary Morrow in 2014.
They have carried on a family legacy of native and exotic planting running through the generations with a wide selection of trees around the homeland and surrounding paddocks.
Mass flax plantings on swampy downs at the centre of the property are the latest effort by the couple and carries on the work of the farm’s former guardians.
A crystal clear pond is almost entirely obscured by a doughnut-ring of flax with their long flower stalks flowing in the wind.
Mr France said the generations running the farm were all good tree people and their daughters were continuing this legacy based on a practical ethos.
Managing the trees was key to their survival and having a good farming enterprise with trees was a long time commitment.
He said their own hard work beginning eight years ago had helped transform the wetlands.
"This was just a bit of a peat bog with cocksfooty rubbish all round it and our whole approach was do it right and not just do it, leave it and let it turn to cocksfoot rubbish again and be a weed hole.
"Maybe this is what it looked like I don’t know, but I think it looks all right either way."
Tussocks on a nearby hillock were planted for its dry soils and are accompanied by native species such as ribbonwoods, totara and hebes, toi tois and carex.
Once this was set up it was up to the Okawa team to sort the flaxes out.
"It was left to us boys for a whole winter to split flaxes up on our property.
"We just got the tractor and basically ripped out flax bushes in a wee square and it’s quite easy by hand to split them open and you end up with a V-shaped fern after cutting a wedge like a fantail.
"So we would do all of our morning chores in winter and we’d pull and cut before lunch and after lunch we would plant.
"My poor shepherds at the time would call this PD [preventive detention] work or whatever the prisoners do and now they come back and have a look and are just amazed by the result."
At one pond an island was left for birds to nest. Mallard ducks and other unwanted visitors are escorted off the property during shooting season so native birdlife has less competition.
Already, pukeko and spotless crake have called it home, while bellbirds line up in the mornings to dine on flax and other native morsels.
Aside from two "dirty" willows which have come back and some hemlock, they’ve managed to keep on top of the woody weed problem by dint of hard work.
For the first four years a lineup of four workers with knapsacks on their back marched through the area spraying grass and flat weeds in between plants each spring.
"It’s a lot of work and probably doesn’t look it, but that’s what pisses me off with greenies as they don’t realise how much work it takes.
"Flax is the dominant species in there now and that’s what we needed to do and we haven’t found a gorse bush yet."
In the far hills matagouri was their friend as it provided good shelter for lambing two tooths and wintering hereford cows.
Special attention is paid to the "number one" invasive weed at the moment, hemlock, which appears to have increased in a changing climate.
Okawa’s shepherds will spend the better part of a week removing the pest between matagouri bushes with no mercy equally shown to any hint of gorse or broom.
The wetlands project flows down to a flood plain, its confines tracking along limestone contours and adjoining creeks.
In the distance to the southeast are the original plantings of Mrs France’s parents — carried out in the 1980s well before it was in "vogue".
The plan is to join some of this gap between this and the latest project.
"Once again, if we do do it we want it to be a long-term thing for our great-great-grand kids."
Beyond there is the "island" where streams join, including the Limestone Creek, before heading out to the base of Okawa’s hill country.
Mr France said this area was a definite flood plain with grazing cattle and native wildlife working together nicely the past 50 years.
There was no way this could be planted with natives because of the force of floodwaters, he said.
"Cumecs-wise, I don’t know what the water would be, but we are talking twice my height for a couple of floods that came through and they took out all our fencing and would just devastate these plantings here.
"We have cows grazing happily there, not overly stocked, but at a reasonable level and this goes perfectly with [water quality] indicator species like freshwater mussel, brook char, galaxiids which are as healthy as anywhere.
"Quite often I will be going along the nicer stuff and there will be whitebait and spotless crake skip ahead of me as I put the wires out, happy as Larry."
On top of the light grazing by small mobs, stock are excluded over winter.
He said the results of monthly tests showing high-quality water reflected this harmony between good farming management and native species.
This wetland area is not the only planting work carried out on the farm with a blend of native and exotic trees strategically positioned and managed.
Below a seated venue for stud cattle sales are neat rows of shelter belts, triple planted in different species for the benefit of farming.
Mr France said he looked at the plantings with the lens of a commercial farmer, but it also made them feel good.
The plantings of both native and exotic species had come at a cost he would not like to calculate, but had brought great value to the farm.
"Particularly with our climate with the norwest wind and the southerlies that come through, being sheep farmers, the plantings are definitely done as not only an aesthetic and monetary thing, it’s definitely all about shelter as well. Probably, there is also a residual retaining of water in our pastures from the amount of shelter we have got."
The family legacy of planting started with Mrs France’s grandparents, Bill and Ailsa, and her parents, David and Rosemary Morrow, were the main thrust for much of the planting seen today.
"We are very lucky with the trees we’ve got and I would be really interested to see if they did a proper assessment of the farm which would be tens and tens of thousands of trees and plants and work out our carbon footprint.
"I know they’ve worked it out already based on how many trees for a cow, but it would be interesting to total it up. Even our shelter belts are pretty hefty big trees."
The shelter belts have a row of douglas fir destined to be milled for timber. They provide some of the financial footing for the other plantings with paper birch or autumn blaze maple providing a splash of colour in the autumn alongside the hedging conifer thuja on the outside. This blunts the force of sideways blizzards in September.
Thujas are planted on the norwest side and are a better tree than standard radiata pine because of Okawa’s heavy snow loading.
"We like to plant the right tree for the right place and we have done natives through wetlands areas and we have a couple of feature native shelter belt areas, but it’s more for feature than looking after livestock. Exotics are held in just as high a regard as a native, if not more."
On saying that, the Frances and their family before them have planted more natives than the average farmer.
Splitting the flax themselves made the wetland planting far more cost effective, but weed spraying would cost $2000 to $3000 a year, and managing the wetlands would likely take three weeks a year, he said.
Then there’s the environmental and biodiversity value.
MR France is recovering from six weeks at Burwood Spinal Unit in Christchurch after being treated for cauda equina syndrome.
A small fall set off a ruptured disc going into the spinal column. The syndrome, which affects one in 100,000 people, compresses nerve roots at the bottom of a spinal cord and requires emergency surgery.
Mr France said there would be some challenges ahead for him and his stay alongside patients worse than him at the spinal unit had been sobering.
Leaning on crutches, he shared planting insights to 60-plus farmers and industry people attending the Beef + Lamb NZ Central Canterbury Farming for Profit field day held with the Mid Canterbury Catchment Collective.
Invited speaker Emeritus Prof David Norton, a semi-retired ecologist, confessed he was surprised by the scale and quality of the wetland work.
To see the freshwater mussels, different galaxiids and the crake and bittern showed how much progress has been made.
"I only saw this for the first time this morning and think it’s incredible. This is a classic example of the importance of planning and you talk about the cost and the amount of time involved and presumably thinking about stock water when livestock was taken out of these streams here so that planning is really important for biodiversity. ... While I accept what you said about the floodwater further down the catchment, if we did this in every one of the feeder streams we possibly wouldn’t have 4m-deep floodwater down the catchment because it would slow the water movement of outer catchments. With more increasing severe storm events we do need to build that resilience in our catchments and this is brilliant for doing that."
He recommended photos of the plantings be taken in the same place to provide a visual record of progress.
