Trees on a corporate-owned property west of Bethungra are being knocked down and burned with such ferocity that you could "see the smoke from space", according to a spokesman for local farmers concerned at the destruction.
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Ashley Hermes, owner of two mixed-farming properties 8km west of Bethungra on the Stockinbingal Road, is seeking urgent intervention by state and federal MPs to stop what he describes as "random destruction of an ecosystem".
His concerns are shared by several other local landholders, including dairy farmer Bruce Churchill and beef producer Carl Baldry.
Mr Hermes' properties, "Deakin" and "Gum Flat", are next door to a 7500-hectare property, Englefield Plains, bought in October last year by Viridis Ag, a division of the Macquarie banking group.
He says that for the past month, an excavator has been at work non-stop digging trees up by the roots, while a front end loader picks them up and stacks them for burning.
"The trees they're removing are 200-year-old gum trees and cyprus pines which have hollows, and there's a string of animals and birds that need hollows to breed and survive," Mr Hermes said.
"I can't imagine my grandchildren having to go to a zoo to see a kookaburra, but that's the way the mentality is headed, it's production at all costs.
"The inland rail is going through my property and has done a careful two-year wildlife study and actually re-routed the railway to avoid some blocks of timber.
"But the number of trees affected by the railway between Illabo and Stockinbingal pales into insignificance compared to what these lunatics have pushed over in the last month."
A spokesman for Viridis said the company was planning to plant 10 times the number of trees and shrubs it removed, and would be going beyond what was set out in the Local Land Services certificate it had been granted.
