Fun Facts about New Zealand

New Zealand is roughly two-thirds the size of California and they share a lot of similarities in terrain. However, the population of California is nearly 37 million and New Zealand has just over 4 million people (that’s about the population of Houston or Atlanta). New Zealand has about 7-8 locations that are large enough to call cities. The largest city by far is Auckland, which has approximately 1.3 million residents – that wouldn’t even rank among the top three cities in Texas. The next two biggest cities are the capital, Wellington, and Christchurch which both almost have about 400,000 folks.

So what do they do with all that extra land? There are plenty of National Parks, Forests, and other amazing scenery so tourism plays a large part of NZ’s economy, but agriculture is the largest contributor. As most of you know, NZ is quite famous for its sheep population, which outnumbers its human population by more than 10 to 1 (It used to be 20:1 in the early ‘80s). Throughout our travels, we’ve expected to see a few large fields crammed with thousands and thousands of sheep. However, there are mostly flocks of about 300 scattered all over the country. It’s hard not to see sheep roaming the surrounding hills while driving down the highways and back roads. They are literally everywhere.

Dairy, beef, and logging are other large industries in NZ. Someone told me that logging was very popular years ago and many farmers planted forests on their land. Lately, thanks to Fonterra (a dairy cooperative that controls about 30% of the world’s dairy exports) the dairy industry is highly profitable and many farmers are cutting down their forests to create more grazing land. Despite the recent economic struggles, Fonterra was able to distribute its biggest profit share to date.