PRODUCTION POTENTIALS OF HILL COUNTRY IN THE NORTHERN SOUTH ISLAND
Hill country, defined as land over 15O slope, comprises 51% of the agricultural land resource and 44% of the grassland in the Northern South Island. This steeper land is assessed as carrying 20% of the current grazing stock numbers, with an estimated capacity to expand by 13 million stock units to support 31% of the region's livestock. The ability to achieve this potential will be influenced by the profitability of farming the land more intensively. At present the South Island hill and high country is farmed much more extensively than North Island hill country with net incomes of $9 and $1.5/ha respectively compared with $53 and $30/ha for hill and hard hill country in the North Island. Production output figures show similar trends. The challenge to research workers, advisers and farmers is to develop farming systems that will lead to a profitable expansion of production to the South Island hill and high country's potential. These systems will need to recognise the crucial importance of summer drought as a limiting factor to these production increases. Keywords: Hill country, slope, vegetation, production potentials, productivity, economic returns, costs, microsite pasture production, research requirements.