Pine nuts yes but just have a look under a pine tree/shelter/Forest, sort of barren with maybe a bit of fungus. It is the same under a walnut tree.

Spokesperson for the sheep and cattle industry, one Kate Acland, told Hosking the export of sheep meat is falling just when international prices are at historical highs. Schedules for Lamb are threatening NZ$10 per Kg to producers with even 11 dollars not impossible?

Last decade of last century it was a very good lamb to reach $10 a head, in fact at one stage around 1990 lambs were being sold in the Masterton Sale Yards at per-ten-head to give auctioneers figures to be credible, particularly for small, lighter condition offerings.

What is the driver when Lamb, Hogget and Mutton have quite limited appeal compared to Beef? It is the Market and with government subsidised ponzi schemes encouraging planting Pine Trees for so called Carbon credit market manipulation is attractive for investors.

I am reliably informed the thousand acre hillcountry property we sold in December 2000 is now a pine plantation over all but the arable river flats. Owned by a member of Austrian Nobility. Land that produced around 4000 lambs a year will after 30 years be abandoned to nature as the credits will have dried up and any hope of restoring to weed free grassland abandoned.

An absolute environmental and economic tragedy.

The trees, under current policy settings, will incur incredible costs well above any returns from harvest, and the trees will never be managed to produce timber anyway. It will become a sterile blot with not even bird life able to live beyond the fringes of the plantation.

The net result for Climate will not even move a needle on any instrument to measure the Alice in Wonderland theory involved. Lamb meat will approach $100 a Kg, similar to caviar.