2 days Ago By No Author
Te Hana dairy farmer Greg McCracken is trying to figure out what he wants to do once NZTA buys his property for the Warkworth to Te Hana motorway.Te Hana dairy farmer Greg McCracken’s land is one of 58 properties Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) still needs to acquire for the proposed Warkworth to Te Hana motorway.An NZTA spokesperson says there are also seven unconditional agreements that are yet to settle.
In total there are 88 properties required for the project, which differs from the 89 figure provided toMahurangi Matters in October last year, as one property is no longer required.And the total property spend to date is $39,615,474, NZTA says.McCracken is expecting an offer to come through from NZTA for the acquisition of his property in the next month or so.
While many landowners are feeling short-changed by what they’re being offered (MM, Oct 25), McCracken says his registered valuation is close to what the NZTA’s valuer came back with.“They weren’t too far off. I think it comes down to how the properties are being valued.
“If you’ve got one valuer who sees a property as a lifestyle block and one who values it as a small farm, then there can be quite a big price difference. That seems to be where the discrepancies are coming with a lot of the valuations.“Ours is just being valued as a dairy farm so there haven’t been any discrepancies.
But I’ve heard people say, maybe from the smaller blocks where the NZTA is only taking a few hectares, the valuations haven’t matched,” he says.McCracken’s farm is going to be almost unrecognisable once the motorway is completed – and it seems his life is going to look very different, too.The final stretch of the new road will run almost exactly through the centre of one of the two adjoining farms that make up his property and cut the other one off from an area of leased land used for milking.
“It means that what we’re left with is not really a viable dairy farm,” he says.Consequently, McCracken will require not one, but two underpasses to connect each side of his property, while his feed pads and silage stacks will need to be relocated to make way for the motorway.He is still considering how much of his land he wants to sell, with a minimum of 85 hectares required by NZTA.
McCracken says he thinks NZTA would love to buy the whole property, and that it would “take away a lot of headaches”.“But if that happened, what would I do next?“Therefore, do we look at trying to offload the whole lot, or do we hang onto enough for two smaller dairy farms?“Even if we only have 180 cows on each farm versus the 400 we have on each now, which is what we’re considering, but then we need all the infrastructure, so it’s pretty complicated. That might be in the short term until we decide what we’re going to do.
”McCracken says he’s still working out what the future looks like.“We have a farm consultant involved to try to work out how we can farm, what we can do, what’s practical, and what’s financially viable.“NZTA is basically just doing their reports at the moment.
Once those come through that will guide NZTA on what they’re going to do and possibly guide us as well.“I’m chasing everybody and nobody seems to be moving terribly quickly,” he adds..
