Our land resources
New Zealand’s productive landscape is built upon the diversity and capability of land. Each landscape combination of soil, climate and landform is uniquely different with each having its own production potentials, alternative uses, and individual management requirements for sustainable production.
Land Use Capability
Realising land potentials requires a knowledgeable understanding for the land resource to begin with.
National and international experience has shown that the classification of land according to it's capacity for long-term production, based on it's physical limitations and site-specific management needs, provides the most reliable basis on which to promote sustainable land management.
Land Use Capability (LUC) is a complete system for not only identifying and describing individual units of land, but also for assessing the capability of those units against a national classification reference. This is a robust and established system that has been used in New Zealand agriculture and resource management since 1952.
