Pines and politics: The frustrations behind Molesworth manager’s ‘shock’ exit
Thursday, 17 July 2025
The sudden departure of highly respected manager Jim Ward from his job at Molesworth Station has shocked his peers, who say he was a great advocate for the New Zealand high country. Tony Wall reports.
Frustrations around the Government’s future plans for Molesworth Station - including possibly planting it out in pines - appear to be a factor in the manager of the country’s biggest farm suddenly quitting.
Stuff revealed on Wednesday that Jim Ward and his wife Tracey had resigned from their jobs running Molesworth - a giant, Crown-owned, 180,000ha high country farm in the upper South Island - without notice after 24 years.
The station is owned by the Crown, managed by the Department of Conservation (DOC) and leased to Pāmu (Landcorp Farming).
On Tuesday, Ward told Stuff he’d been unable to get “any surety about what they want to do with the property”.
“We’ve been trying to get more money for [eradicating] wilding pine trees which are a huge issue for us.
“We’ve had quite a lot of money from the Government but we can’t get any more.”
He declined to comment further and could not be reached on Wednesday.
The Government is exploring public-private partnerships to plant pine trees on Crown land to help meet carbon reduction targets, and Molesworth has been identified as a key area for the planting.
Gary Taylor, chair of the Environmental Defence Society, described the idea as “greenwashing”.
“It’s a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. Molesworth needs to be managed for its ecological and landscape purposes first.
“It’s a very large ecological unit that needs careful management, and probably the best use for it is low intensity farming and managing pests and weeds, of which wilding pines is one.”
Taylor said millions of dollars had already been spent eradicating wilding pines in places such as Molesworth, and “it doesn’t make much sense to go about planting those same trees … in these iconic landscapes”.
“They take over existing indigenous landscapes and replace them with exotic monoculture.
“It’s not an appropriate response to climate change in any event because we need to actually reduce emissions, not try to plant our way out of that obligation.”
Meanwhile, Ward’s peers have reacted with shock to his departure. Ward has been chair of the Federated Farmers High Country Industry Group.
The vice chair, Matt Simpson, said he’d been trying to reach Ward to offer his support.
“It’s a hell of a shock. He’s a hell of a man, a great advocate for the high country and the big … issues like wilding pines.
“He’ll be such a huge loss to the high country community.
“I think there’s been a bit of frustration dealing with multiple agencies like DOC and Pāmu … that would be a difficult job in the first instance, without having to actually manage the station itself.”
Ian Anderson, Federated Farmers’ current high country group chair, said Ward “lived and breathed” Molesworth Station.
“He was there for a long time and took a great deal of pride in the outfit. I think he was bashing his head against a brick wall towards the end, all the politics of it.”
Anderson said the Government had been “vague” about whether it planned to plant pines at Molesworth, denying there were any immediate plans.
He said Molesworth had been brought into Crown ownership as part of the tenure review process to protect and restore land with high conservation value.
“It would be particularly galling if you lost a lot of your property because it had significant values that had to be protected, for it then to be planted in pine trees.”
DOC said it had no comment on the reasons for Ward’s resignation; that was a question for him.
Ewan Delany, DOC’s acting deputy director-general of policy and regulatory services, confirmed the Government wanted to explore opportunities to plant native or exotic trees on Crown land with “low farming and conservation value”.
“No decisions have yet been made on what opportunities might be pursued or in which locations,” he said.