Keeping a "foot on the throat" of wilding pines

From the Keen family’s front door, the hills tell a story, one of invasion, persistence, and a farmer who refuses to let wilding pines swallow his family’s legacy.

Jeff Keen remembers when the back block of the 870ha Tomogalak Gorge and neighbouring Cattle Flat Station in northern Southland were almost void of wilding pines. The slopes dotted with a few pine trees and patches of scrub, and so distinctive that, hunting as a teenager, he and his late brother used it as a rendezvous point. “Meet you at the pine trees,” they’d say.

Today, that memory carries a sting. What felt like a harmless landmark in the late 1980s became the gateway to an invasion in the early 2000s. Wind-borne wilding Pinus contorta seedlings spread fast, faster than anyone imagined, turning tussock faces into forests of pine.

For Jeff, who has farmed this land since his early 20s, the experience was personal, physical, and at times overwhelming. It was also the spark that ignited his long involvement with the Mid Dome Wilding Trees Charitable Trust. In 2025, after many years of attending community meetings and keeping up with the Trust’s work, Jeff was approached to join the board as a trustee.

“I’ve seen firsthand what wildings can do.” He watched a handful of trees explode into thousands.

That intimacy with the problem is what sets Jeff apart. He doesn’t speak about wildings as an abstract biosecurity issue. For him, they are an adversary he has fought with chainsaws, sweat, student volunteers and years of persistence. He’s walked every inch of the 200 hectare hill block of his farm that was once heavily seeded with wildings. He knows what it feels like to stand in the middle of a hillside disappearing under the wrong kind of forest and wonder if you should just give up and walk away.

“Then we realised, we do want to beat these. We don't want that to return to forest land. I'd seen what wilding pines could do, and how they affected the landscape, and how quickly they spread.”

Around the time of the Mid Dome Trust formation in 2006 was when Tomogalak Gorge was experiencing its biggest infestation of wilding Pinus contorta.

With the Trust’s help, contractors removed the tallest seeders on the farm. The Keen family, alongside Southern Institute of Technology environmental management students took care of the rest, pulling out tens of thousands of seedlings during annual working bees the farm hosted for nearly a decade.

It was exhausting work. Demoralising, sometimes. But it worked.

“We realised we were going to beat this,” Jeff says.

Today, most of those hills are regenerating into native forest. The tussock remains. The wildings are held at bay, though Jeff still finds the occasional straggler, a reminder that vigilance never ends. The wind doesn’t care about boundary fences, and neither do wilding seeds.

While the wilding contorta issue may be beatable at Tomogalak Gorge and Mid Dome, there’s a sinister new threat emerging in its place – Douglas fir.

It is the second most common commercial timber species, but can spread rapidly over large distances because of its lighter seeds, early maturing trees and ability to germinate in the shade.

The Mid Dome Trust was initially put in place to help combat legacy species contorta and Pinus mugo issues in the area, but has now found itself in a battle against the new enemy. One which, Jeff says, it isn’t equipped to face without significant funding.

“All our work is going to be undone. It’s beatable, but we certainly need the funding and the legislation put in place to stop the planting of Douglas fir in wilding-prone areas.”

Jeff likes to joke that if he and his wife Linzi had met while they were both at Lincoln University in the 1980s, they would have hated each other. Back then, he was on the production focused track: superphosphate, pasture, productivity. Linzi was the environmentalist, an outdoors loving ex hippie, as she describes herself.

Instead, they met later and now the farm, and their philosophies, are an elegant merging of both worldviews.

With 150 Angus breeding cows and nearly 3,000 breeding ewes – the Perendale and the self-shedding Wiltshire – the Keens run an easy care sheep and beef system, stay clear of high input models, and fence waterways with pride.

Their pockets of native plantings grow each year, most nurtured from seedlings Linzi sources from their own nursery. Everything is done because it feels right: ethically, environmentally, and for the future they want to leave behind.

They talk often about that future as they hope their 13 year old son, Syd, will feel connected to the land but never pressured by it. The farm, they say, should be a home first, a business second. Maybe one day it won’t be a farm at all, Linzi muses. Maybe it’ll be a park, a bike trail network, a training farm, or a community space.

"We realised we were going to beat this."

Jeff’s work on both Tomogalak Gorge and the Mid Dome Trust isn’t duty, it’s conviction he holds from experience. He knows what happens when action comes too late. He knows the cost of inaction, not on a spreadsheet but in the soil under his boots.

“It’s beatable but only if we keep the foot on the throat.”

For Jeff, the wilding pine story isn’t just about trees. It’s about responsibility: personal, community, governmental and intergenerational. It’s about leaving something behind that resembles the way the land once was. And for a man who grew up meeting his brother at a small patch of pine trees that feels like the most natural thing in the world.

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Keeping a "foot on the throat" of wilding pines

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