Land cover and use
Waitaha/Canterbury has areas of flat land that are used for agriculture, including 21 per cent of the highest quality soils in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Approximately 2.6 million hectares of the region's land was used for farming in 2019 - which was 19 per cent of the total area farmed in Aotearoa.
Land cover describes the types of vegetation and built or natural features that cover the land's surface. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1. Source: Waitaha/Canterbury 2022 Wellbeing Overview September 2022. Land cover in Waitaha is predominantly grassland. Exotic grassland makes up just under half (45 percent) of land cover in Waitaha.
Agricultural and horticultural land use
Agricultural and horticultural uses account for almost half (49.64 per cent) of the total land area in Waitaha. Sheep farming makes up 43.99 per cent of this as shown in the figure 2.
Because of the sizeable land mass that is used for these industries, Waitaha possesses 64 per cent of all irrigated land in Aotearoa.
Figure 2. Source: Our land 2021 New Zealand's Environmental Reporting Series Ministry for the Environment/Manatū Mō Te Taiao & Stats NZ/Tatauranga Aotearoa.
Agricultural land use in Waitaha 2019
Figure 3: Hexagon layers depict how many hectares are used for cropping as well as displaying the dominance of dairying or sheep, beef and deer land uses. This information was sourced by aggregating Agribase (2019) and the Land Cover Database (v5) data to 10 square kilometre hexagons. Each hexagon can be selected to show the percentage breakdowns within it.
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