Frequently Asked Questions

How do I grow things?

MAF does not give direct advice on farming or growing. The unit that was involved in farm advice became Agriculture New Zealand, a State Owned Enterprise and was eventually privatised by being purchased by Wrightsons. However there is a network of professional farm advisors - see this Yellow Pages® site. When MAF lost its MAFtech division - see the timeline - much of the technical expertise went to Crown Research Institutes. The can contacted directly, and they also publish the successors to MAF's popular Aglinks - AgFacts (from AgResearch), Crop Facts (from Crop and Food Research) and HortFacts (from Hort+Research). You should also check Hort+Research's excellent HortNET, and the Sustainable Farming Fund area of this site, which has useful resources.

What do I have to do to get my pet into New Zealand?

Go to the animal import page, and enter the animal type in the left hand side box, select the country you are brining your animal from, and press search. If you require further information, contact details are give at the bottom of the animal import page.

illustration of animal import search form

How can I contact farmers who are expert in a certain breed?

See this page

How do I find out if I may import a certain Plant into New Zealand?

See plant imports page. You may also search the Plant Biosecurity Index. If you require further information, contact details are give at the bottom of the plant imports page.

How do I find out about employment in MAF?

See the employment in MAF page and also the Jobs at MAF website.

Who do I contact if I want to work on farms/forests in New Zealand?

If you are coming from overseas see this site about immigration requirements. For contacts relating to employment try Federated Farmers. Further information about a career in agriculture is available at KiwiCareers.

How do I find out what kind of food I can bring into New Zealand?

See the MAF Quarantine Importing Foodstuffs page.

Where do I find statistics about New Zealand agriculture and forestry?

See the MAF Statistics website

How can I identify this bug I have just found?

See the Identifying Creepie Crawlies page on the Protect New Zealand website.

Do you have a text-only version of this site?

Yes and no. The site is already based on text navigation, and works well in text-based browsers such as Lynx.

Does MAF support Access Keys?

See the MAF Access Key page.

Where do I find information about New Zealand agriculture surviving without subsidies?

Very common question, especially after the GATT negotiations that showed New Zealand's reforms of the early '80s were showing the way many countries had to negotiate. The best reference on MAFnet for this is Aspects of New Zealand's Experience in Agricultural Reform Since 1984.

Where can I find a list of exporters of New Zealand leathers?

See http://www.tanners.org.nz/

Where are timbers exporters listed?

You could investigate http://www.nzforest.co.nz/ for an excellent directory of forest resources.

Where is a list of meat producers?

See the members list in the Annual Report of the Meat Industry Association

What is the Privacy Policy for this website?

See the Privacy and Security page.

Am I allowed to bring in Bovril™?

Bovril is allowed entry under this Import Health Standard

Why is it that, when I find a document, all I can see is a list of headings?

Most MAF documents are long, and we have sliced them up into smaller pages. The headings you see are all hyperlinks, and clicking on one of the headings you see should take you to that page.

Why have you sliced many of your documents up into little pages?

Because little pages load faster individually that one large one would. There are also advantages in terms of search engines being able to be more precise, and the table of contents means that it is relatively efficiently finding parts of the document using MAF's hierarchical table of contents system.

How do I get to the next page of the document?

[Illustration - examples only]

At the bottom of many of our pages, and sometimes at the top as well, you should see some arrows and a Table of Contents button. The backward arrow takes you to the previous page, the forward arrow takes you to the next page, and the table of contents button takes you to - you guessed it - the table of contents. From that table of contents you can jump quickly to any page, or sub-heading on a page.

How do Iget a file of the entire document?

This question relates to one of the disadvantages of slicing up documents; saving each of those individual files is a pain! For most people it is not an issue - they simply want a part of the document for their research or project, and simply selecting and copying from the web page to paste into their document does the job. However if the entire file is required, most documents are also available as Acrobat files (see below) that usually satisfies the needs of those people requiring the complete file.

Why don't you use the Acrobat format?

We do - we have since day one of MAFnet. Acrobat documents have many, and increasing, advantages. There are used where layout is important for either aesthetic or legal reasons (for example displaying the DRAFT watermark), or where conversion to HTML - the language of the web - is difficult for one production reason or another. The main reasons we don't use Acrobat more are to do with attempting to limit the size of the site to something like reasonable dimensions, and there are some concerns in terms of equality of access for visually impaired user as screen readers don't read Acrobat documents without modification.

How far back do you intend to go with MAF heritage documents on MAFnet?

As far as we reasonably can, although those limits becoming more real. The difficulty is that the older documents are not available in electronic format, and Optical Character Recognition is still a less-than-exact exercise. This leads to problems with checking the web documents produced from paper-based material. The other practical problem is that new material is flooding in - the site grows at about 100 Mb per month. But with all those reservations, the intention is to put on as much of the heritage material as possible as it is in the interests of MAF to consolidate as much as possible of its intellectual capital in the one place, and exposed to search engines with the wonderful advantages they offer.

Why haven't I seen a MAF Farm Advisor for years?

That icon of the New Zealand countryside has become part of Agriculture New Zealand, a unit that was a State Owned Enterprise, and was eventually privatised by being purchased by Wrightsons.

How do I find a farm consultant?

See this Yellow Pages® site.

How can I contact farmers who are expert in a certain breed?

See this page

Whatever happened to MAFtech?

MAFtech, along with other scientific bodies such as the DSIR, was absorbed into the Crown Research Institutes.

Whatever happened to AgLinks?

Aglinks, a much-loved series of pamphlets containing easy-to-understand agriculture information, were absorbed by the Crown Research Institutes. Their successors are available as AgFacts from AgResearch, CropFacts from Crop & Food Research and HortLinks from Hort+Research.

AgFacts (from AgResearch)
Crop Facts (from Crop and Food Research)
HortFacts (from Hort+Research)

Whatever happened to MQM?

On 1 November 1998, MQM (MAF Quality Management) was split into two State Owned Enterprises, AgriQuality New Zealand and Asure New Zealand Ltd. Contact Details are available in the MAF Directory.

What is a Stock Unit?

A method of indicating the carrying capacity of pastoral lands for livestock. 1 sheep = 1 stock unit, 1 cow = 6 stock units, 1 yearling cattle beast = 3 stock units and 1 adult deer = 3 stock units.

But isn't MAF fisheries?

The Fisheries part of the old Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries become a separate Ministry of Fisheries on 1 July 1995. MAF has meant Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry since March 1998.

Where do I find out about fish?

Browse the Ministry of Fisheries site or email info@fish.govt.nz.

What do I do if I am on a line with lots of noise, like electric fence crackling?

This is a very difficult problem - see "Telecommunications: Use, Constraints and Potential in Rural Areas". Some advice is available here.

While MAF is not in the business of promoting commercial products, there are some attempts made by commercial organisations that you may wish to investigate:

One is a New Zealand only modem from Dynalink Modems; the Dynalink Rural Modem. Dynalink's information says "The Dynalink rural modem is designed to give good connections even under relatively "noisy" line conditions that rural users sometimes experience. The poor line conditions can be caused by a number of factors. Dynalink has built the rural modem specifically to counter these factors but, because of the unpredictability of line conditions, no absolute guarantee of connection can be claimed."

There is also a modem designed in Australia for difficult areas, developed in conjunction with Farmwide, a company owned by the State and Territory farming organisations of the Australian National Farmer's Federation (NFF). The product is called Woomera, and is made by Maestro Digital Communications.

Contact for Enquiries

MAF Information Services
Pastoral House
25 The Terrace
PO Box 2526
Wellington, NEW ZEALAND

Fax: +64 4 894 0721
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