European Forestry Buyer Tops 19,000 Hectares With Fourth Hawke’s Bay Farm
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Kauri Forestry's 360-hectare Omakere purchase has cleared the Overseas Investment Office, taking the Swiss German partnership's New Zealand holdings beyond 19,000 hectares as Federated Farmers warns whole-farm conversion is hollowing out rural Hawke's Bay.
Rolling sheep and beef hill country in Central Hawke's Bay, the kind of farmland Kauri Forestry is converting to plantation pine. (Photo Credit: ID 191888645 © Andres Jacobi | Dreamstime.com)
A Swiss and German family-owned forestry partnership has converted its fourth Central Hawke’s Bay farm in 18 months, buying a 360-hectare sheep and beef block at Omakere to convert into a pine plantation. The Overseas Investment Office cleared the purchase on grounds of higher exports, fresh investment and reduced carbon emissions, and planting is scheduled across 2026 and 2027.
Kauri Forestry Limited Partnership, owned by a multi-generational family business spanning Switzerland and Germany, secured the block at 139 Clareinch Road for an undisclosed sum, a purchase first reported by Hawke’s Bay Today. The land has land use capability ratings of 7 and 6, near the lower end of New Zealand’s eight-tier scale that grades soil and slope for farming.
The acquisition follows three earlier conversions across the region in the past year, taking in a 1500-hectare farm at Elsthorpe, an 800-hectare property at Omakere and a 344-hectare block at Kairakau. Overseas Investment Office records now put Kauri Forestry’s holdings above 19,000 hectares across Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa, Northland and Marlborough, alongside two apple orchards at Clive and Ongaonga.
Craigmore Sustainables Group manages the assets on behalf of Kauri Forestry, and CEO Che Charteris described the offshore owners as largely passive. Day-to-day calls rested on the New Zealand manager rather than the family abroad, and “the decisions that are made are ours,” Charteris said.
Charteris backed splitting farms so flatter, more productive country stayed in pasture whilst steeper land moved to trees, and roughly 150 hectares of the flatter front block stayed in farming. The gullies on the forestry portion would be retired and replanted in natives, he said.
The pace of conversion has unsettled rural advocates, even after a law passed last year to shield productive farmland — chiefly LUC class 1 to 5, and to a lesser degree class 6 — from wholesale forestry change. Federated Farmers Hawke’s Bay president Anthea Yule is not convinced the new protections will slow the trend.
She warned that classes 6, 7 and 8 land carried most of the country’s breeding stock, and that whole-farm conversion drained districts of jobs, school enrolments and people. Stronger wool and livestock prices were easing the pressure without halting sales, and “the question now is whether those changes have gone far enough,” Yule said.
Another 480-hectare farm off Middleton Road at Waipukurau was sold last year to a Singapore-based buyer for forestry conversion, a sign the trend extends beyond any single investor. The Kerr family, which had owned the Omakere block, declined to comment on the sale.
The Overseas Investment Office recorded the Omakere land as a Pinus radiata commercial forest, the fourth Central Hawke’s Bay farm folded into a New Zealand estate now past 19,000 hectares.
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