Maybe it is not so hard to visualise if you have travelled the main roads through South Canterbury; perhaps a bit harder looking down from the Crown Range over the house-pocked Wakatipu Basin.
But maybe there is room elsewhere in the district? Glendene Station farmer Richard Burdon wants an open discussion as part of the Queenstown Lakes District Council rural areas review, for which public feedback closes on June 18.
Mr Burdon is Otago-Southland president of Federated Farmers and farms in the high country between lakes Wanaka and Hawea.
Federated Farmers is working on a submission to the council for the review, but in this interview, Mr Burdon said he was expressing his personal opinion.
"The farming community needs to work out their 20-year vision ... I think you will see more intensive agriculture. You might see people growing potatoes or even dairy farms in 20 years' time. That's going to have some effect on the landscape.
"And then you will have the effect of the emissions trading scheme. Does that mean we will have to plant more trees?
"And if farming doesn't stack up [in the district] we might have to look at alternatives, like building lodges on our properties. We will need to have permission to do all of that," Mr Burdon said.
He would welcome a major overhaul of the rural area rules created more than 10 years ago in a climate of concern about urbanisation's incremental creep into rural areas.
Permitted farming activities, like burning native vegetation, became controlled activities.
In certain rural areas, building a farm shed had attracted opposition and needed discretionary consent.
Mr Burdon said farmers were frustrated and bogged down by restrictions.
Removing bureaucratic double-ups in administering indigenous vegetation burn-offs would help, as would allowing local authorities to recognise the outcomes of pastoral lease tenure reviews.
"I can see the council can be frustrated as well, if one process doesn't cover the other process. But farmers can have two or three different processes basically achieving the same thing, and one not recognising the other," he said.
Another concern was rates.
Mr Burdon said of about 1800 rural ratepayers in the Queenstown Lakes district who held more than 8ha, there would be fewer than 100 "real farmers".
Rural property valuations had sky-rocketed, pushing some people's rateable values up by 8.7%, he said.
"So the farming community is very wary of major capital projects ... It is a double-edged sword because the council has to do capital projects," he said.
Yet another concern was the cost associated with high landscape values, brought about by the district's other main industry: tourism.
For many people, the landscape was the most recognisable part of the district and played an important part in forming the community's identity.
Extra weighting on landscape value mades it even harder to get resource consents to do things to make a sustainable income, Mr Burdon said.
Farmers are struggling economically, he says, and to be sustainable, they have to lift production and find a complementary land-use activity.
That was why he felt it was an ideal time to get round the table with the council to do some "visionary planning".
"It's well overdue for a review."
